by T. T. Flynn
“The other day I went one way. Dave Waggoman went another. And that night Dave didn’t return, either.”
“Not Uncle Alec, too.” This was fear, Barbara thought helplessly—this chill feeling as she watched Lockhart’s chin indicate the table, listened to Lockhart’s new, cold-eyed intentness.
“Waggoman knows the way home. Would this mess be here if the foreman expected him back any minute?”
Then Barbara shivered.
She watched Lockhart prowl the kitchen. All his easy indolence and smiling irony had vanished. His dark, weather-scoured face looked hard and harsh. He looked, Barbara thought with new awareness of him, older now and dominating. A man used to commanding. She obeyed without question when he lifted the lamp from the table and said briefly, “Show me your uncle’s bedroom.”
In the plain quiet bedroom, he put the lamp on a walnut bureau and from the foot post of the brass bed lifted a soiled blue shirt. He rolled it tightly and rammed it in a hip pocket.
“Why that?” Barbara had to ask as he picked up the lamp again.
“An idea,” was Lockhart’s vague explanation. In the kitchen as he put the lamp down, he said, “I think it’s useless to wait. But if you care to—”
Barbara looked out the same back window. Vic Hansbro was waiting alone by the fire. He looked huge, formidable. “What will happen if we try to leave?” Barbara murmured. When she turned, Lockhart’s smile was ironic again.
“Nothing will happen while you’re along,” he said with the same irony. “You’ll be needed to inherit Barb.”
Barbara had the disturbed feeling he meant more than the surface words. It could wait; she wanted now only to get away from this brooding, filthy kitchen. Lockhart followed her down the back steps and gave her a quick, easy lift to the saddle with his good hand while Hansbro was striding to them.
Grinning again and affable, Hansbro spoke to her. “Ma’am, you ain’t waitin’ long.”
Barbara said “No” evenly, and Will Lockhart’s clipped voice said, “Tell Waggoman we were here. It’s important he talk with Miss Kirby.”
“Sure will,” Hansbro promised genially.
Barbara did not look back. She had the tight feeling Hansbro was scowling after them. She felt like shivering again. Something monstrous, darkly evil seemed to be prowling all of Barb.
Miles away they pulled down to a walk and Barbara spoke her miserable thought. “It might take days to find him. Tom Quigby came to Coronado and started immediately to Roxton Springs for the sheriff. He won’t be back until tomorrow.”
Lockhart’s voice was thoughtful in the starlight. “Kate Canaday has been bragging how her dogs can hold any trail, especially Old Roy, the leader. Waggoman was on a horse—but there might be a chance—”
“So you brought that shirt?”
Lockhart’s chuckle sounded dry. “A nice dirty shirt full of Waggoman’s scent, if Kate cares to try her dogs.”
Without hesitation, Barbara said, “Kate will try.”
Chapter Twenty-three
A light spring wagon loaded with tarps, blankets, and supplies had reached Half-Moon after dark. The crew were sleeping in bedrolls near where their bunk house had stood.
The solitary figure of Kate Canaday, wrapped in a gaudy new blanket, Indian-style, was slowly pacing near the debris of her home when Will and Barbara rode in.
Kate listened intently to Will’s terse account. She did not hesitate. “I got three dogs that might track Alec.” In the pallid light of a rising moon—a half-moon, Will suddenly noticed—Kate bulked big and shadowy inside the green-and-purple blanket. Behind her the red, fitful glow of scattered embers pinpointed the black rubble of her home as Kate said quietly, “Just like Dave went, ain’t it? We better get started.”
“You sleep,” Will urged. “I’ll take the dogs and a man or so.”
Kate’s gaze lacked any expression that he could see. But her decision had blunt finality. “I’m goin’, mister.”
Will shook three men awake.
Herb Palmas, a chunky man of grinning humor, stood up yawning, groaning disgustedly. “The damn’ old wolf got my guns an’ burnt my bed. Now I got to hunt him.”
Brodie Keenan and Long Joe were no happier. But they went to saddle horses. Near midnight the search started, and Barbara was stubbornly accompanying Kate.
A half mile out, Kate, with the gaudy blanket still over her shoulders, dismounted in the ranch road and held Waggoman’s shirt to the three dogs. A moment later, whining eagerly, the dogs began casting for scent.
Will was hoping Waggoman had turned off this road and had touched brush with his body, leaving scent that would hover stronger to night. They advanced slowly, the dogs weaving over the road and out through the brush.
A long time later, it seemed to Will’s impatience, one dog bayed loudly in brush off to the right. The other dogs raced there, and the excited clamor surged away.
Kate spurred off the road after them. Will followed, bucking brush up a rising slope. The clamoring dogs were heading toward higher country. Kate was recklessly following.
Will burst through the brush after her, branches slapping his body, raking his face. He heard Barbara and the men thrashing behind, and he knew this upgrade gallop would have to ease off.
When Kate pulled her winded horse to a walk, she had lost her broad-brimmed gray hat. The blanket was across her saddle and knees now, and Kate was breathing hard.
“They’re headin’ for the Yellow Rocks,” Kate panted, listening.
Will took the lead here at a slower pace. The dogs, he suspected, were running on hot scent of cougar or bear—running hard, baying, yelping, up into the dark pine stands—and on higher, where the wan moon flooded open meadows with ghostly light— And always far ahead the bugling clamor echoed and faded off higher cliffs and forest and sky.
And then long after midnight they lost the dogs.
“Should have roped ’em,” Kate grumbled.
They advanced blindly now into higher country, pausing often to listen. And finally they heard far, faint barking.
“Sounds above Chinaman Creek, on Barb land,” Kate decided.
In the first graying of false dawn they were crossing high meadows under South Peak. Here the faint echoing yelps were plainly ahead. Kate said, “We should have gone over Saddleback. The trail down to Chinaman Creek ain’t a purty.”
And the trail was all Kate promised, a narrow, treacherous pitch down the sheer side of a canyon wall, crumbling outer edges hanging over shadow-clotted depths. Will advanced first, slowly, listening to the frustrated barking of the dogs funnel and echo up the narrow canyon below.
A turn of the trail finally revealed the parklike valley of Chinaman Creek into which they were descending. The creek water gleamed down there in the moonlight.
Will’s carefully advancing horse rounded another sharp bend and halted. The dogs were just ahead, barking vigorously. Bald rock backed them. Empty space dropped away from the trail’s edge. And here Will was finally convinced that Alec Waggoman must have come this way—this far—
Over a shoulder, Will called, “It ends here.” And behind him, Kate’s reply was strained and tired. “We can ride to the bottom an’ turn back in the canyon an’ see what it was.”
The dogs trotted quietly ahead now. Dawn was steel gray in the east when they entered the narrow canyon, and presently found Alec Waggoman.
Horse and man had plunged off the trail and fallen to an old talus slope matted with brush. The horse had rolled to the bottom. Waggoman lay higher in a thick tangle of the brush.
Kate, gasping for breath, reached the body seconds after Will. Alec Waggoman lay crumpled and hatless, white hair disheveled and his face bent away from the creeping dawn. Barbara and the three men, breathing hard, reached the spot as Kate bent over Waggoman’s face.
Kate’s murmur barely reached Will.
“It was yellow then, an’ flying in the wind—” Her rough hand was smoothing the white hair off Waggoman’s
temple. Under her breath, absently, Kate recalled, “Always laughing—”
Will’s glance at the men turned them awkwardly back. Barbara turned, too, and as Will stepped to help her down the rough slope, he saw that Kate’s hand had closed on Waggoman’s slack fingers.
“So it was that way?” Will muttered, wonderingly.
They halted at the bottom. Barbara looked back, and her mouth softened. Her faint smile was understanding, tender, a little sad.
“Jubal says they were young and big and shouting with laughter,” Barbara said under her breath. “They did everything together. They rode, danced, played together. She helped him work his first few cattle. They talked and planned of the great ranch they’d build together.”
Barbara’s thoughts held her, smiling faintly.
“One can see how it must have been,” Will said quietly.
“Jubal says she wasn’t pretty, even then,” Barbara remembered. “But she was big and laughing and vital—And she loved him like storm in the sunshine—”
Watching Barbara’s face, Will mused, “Riches for any man.”
Barbara’s look touched him and sobered. “Or any woman,” said Barbara slowly, and her silence was pensive.
“And then?” Will asked.
Barbara turned up small palms in a gesture of futility. “A pampered little beauty ended it. She came visiting from Chicago with trunks of the latest French clothes. She had traveled on the Continent. She was exquisite and flirtatious. She was everything Kate was not. And she had never met a man like Alec Waggoman. Or he a woman like her. Before anyone suspected what was happening, he carried her suddenly to Roxton Springs and married her.”
“And they lived happily?”
“Miserably,” Barbara said slowly. “She disliked the frontier. Soon she resented Alec. She nagged, complained, and after Dave was born she lived to pamper him. Alec drew into a shell and lost himself in building Barb. He never spoke unkindly of her, never complained. Too proud, Jubal used to tell me, to admit he’d made a mistake.”
“And Kate lived near them, hurting and hating,” mused Will.
Barbara glanced up the brush-choked, talus slope again. “Is that hate?” her quiet voice asked.
“No,” Will admitted. He hesitated. “Now you own Barb. You, at least, will be happily married.” He had not meant to speak this edged, hard irony which drew Barbara’s quick look.
They stared at one another. A great, startled uncertainty pooled darkly in Barbara’s greenish-blue eyes—and then Kate’s great shaken cry came between them.
“Alec ain’t dead!”
At Barb ranch, the cook beat his iron triangle for breakfast, as usual. A little later from the head of the long crowded table in the cookshack, Vic Hans-bro surveyed the bloodshot eyes and glum hangovers of the crew. His promise was sarcastic.
“You had the whisky last night. Now you’ll sweat it out lookin’ for the Old Man. He didn’t come in.” No one spoke and Hansbro said, “He headed back on Half-Moon. No tellin’ what happened.”
That stirred their lethargy, and Hansbro gave brusque orders. “Charley, you ride to town an’ look. The rest of you scatter over Half-Moon. Watch for buzzards. Alec might’ve got what Dave did.”
“If they shot the Old Man, what’ll they do to us?” was Fitz’s sarcastic question.
Hansbro growled, “That’ll help you sweat. Don’t start trouble. All we want is Alec. I’ll wait here for him.”
When the men had ridden off, Hansbro carried a quart of whisky from the house pantry to Waggoman’s office. He grunted with satisfaction as his bulk settled in Waggoman’s creaking swivel chair. He was grinning with relish as he lighted a cigar from Waggoman’s box in the scarred old roll-top desk.
Two hours later Hansbro corked the half-empty bottle with a swat of a broad palm. He was not drunk as he stood up and wandered outside. In a contented mellow glow, he continued to relish the great satisfying thought that Vic Hansbro was now boss.
The Kirby girl might not like it. But Frank Darrah would rule that roost. Hansbro grinned at the thought and strolled to the cookshack for a tin cup of black coffee.
He carried the cup to the office steps where Alec Waggoman had often sat gazing into the immensity of distance that was all Barb. Now, in a way, it was all Vic Hansbro’s. He was hunched on the top step musing contentedly when Fitz rode a foaming horse into the ranch yard and swung off.
“Half-Moon found him at daybreak!” Fitz called.
A sweep of Hansbro’s big hand tumbled the empty tin cup off the step. He came to his feet with believable anger. “I knew damn’ well they probably killed him!”
Fitz canted his head, gazing up with a thin grin. “He ain’t dead. Doc Seldon is tendin’ him at Half-Moon. Folks are headin’ there from town to see what we burned, an’ how the Old Man is. I met Jubal Kirby drivin’ there. He told me.”
Hansbro asked stupidly, “Alec ain’t dead?”
“Nope.”
“He’s at Half-Moon, talkin’ with folks from town?”
“Yep.”
“Get the men back here!” Hansbro ordered thickly. Fitz was staring curiously and Hansbro yelled, “Get ’em, dammit!”
Fitz turned to his horse. Hansbro hesitated and wheeled back into the office. His hand was shaking as he grabbed the bottle off the desk. Alec hadn’t died in that plunge off the Chinaman Creek trail. And now Alec was telling what had happened—Hansbro shuddered as a great gulp of whisky burned down his throat. What would happen now, Hansbro knew despairingly, would be brutal, ruthless, and merciless—
This was the morning also that Colonel Lake, at Fort Roxton, bent his tufted, graying brows above a message just laid on his desk.
Confidential, unofficial: Captain William Lockhart stationed Fort Laramie. Now on extended furlough. Whereabouts not known.
Lake swore softly. That stiff young prig, Lieutenant Evans, might have been right after all. The Lockhart arrested in Roxton Springs could be Lockhart of Laramie. An unofficial visit to Coronado and Half-Moon was in order, Lake decided. He was grim about it. Officers, furloughed or not, did not knife men where Michael Lake commanded.
Herb Palmas had made the wild ride from Chinaman Creek to the doctor in Coronado.
Long Joe had quirted his horse down dangerous short cuts to Half-Moon.
Four lunging horses—with saddle ropes helping when needed—had snaked the light spring wagon recklessly to that high valley of Chinaman Creek. On open bedrolls piled in the wagon bed, they had brought Alec Waggoman down to Half-Moon a little before Doctor Matt Seldon’s hard-whipped buggy team raced in.
Beneath a tarp stretched from the wagon sideboards to supporting poles, Seldon worked on Alec Waggoman’s broken ribs and fractured arm. There was concussion.
Finally Seldon stepped out into the sunlight, turning down his sleeves. The crew were uncertain in the background. Will had been watching, waiting while Kate and Barbara helped Seldon when they could.
It was Kate’s silent question that Seldon answered. “I can’t say. That concussion—”
“He won’t die,” Kate muttered, as if dogged stubbornness could prevail. And now Will could understand why Seldon’s reply was wondrously gentle to the big, tired, weatherbeaten woman. “Something is helping him, Kate.”
Will glanced to the piled bedrolls under the shading tarp. Alec Waggoman lay quietly, eyes closed. A kind of majestic serenity had settled on the craggy face, as if this border of life where Waggoman paused now held its own new peace.
Will pushed finger tips through the over-night stubble on his dark face. The thought that had been nagging him came out. “Waggoman’s horse hadn’t been shot. Or Waggoman himself. How did he happen to go off that trail?”
“I think I should speak of it now,” Seldon decided reluctantly. “Alec has been losing his sight. Cataracts. He was half blind.”
Dryly Will asked, “Did the horse have cataracts, too? The horse was carrying him.”
Seldon’s blue, puckered eyes studied
Will. “What are you suggesting, Lockhart?”
“Hansbro says he went to town yesterday, after Waggoman turned back alone. Did you see Hans-bro in town?”
Seldon shook his head. “But that doesn’t indicate Hansbro wasn’t there.”
Barbara had been standing quietly at Will’s right, listening. All the way down the mountain she had withdrawn into her thoughts. Barbara’s pallor now was noticeable as she spoke to Seldon.
“After you dressed Will Lockhart’s hand the other evening, Doctor Matt, whom did you discuss it with?”
Seldon was surprised. “No one, Barbara. I never talk about patients.”
“Are you certain? Not a word to—to anyone?”
“Not a word,” Seldon said firmly.
The slight quaver in Barbara’s voice betrayed a quick misery behind her pallor. Questions that were crowding Will’s own mind stayed unspoken as he looked at her.
And it was Kate Canaday, blunt and shrewd, who asked the one question Will had to know.
“That evening, Barbara, did anyone speak to you about Lockhart’s trouble with Dave Waggoman?”
Barbara’s swallow moved the tanned smoothness of her throat. Her head shook silently, denying or refusing, and she turned away, walking slowly toward the stripped posts of the corrals.
Will gazed at her back. The jauntiness of Barbara’s small, square shoulders was listless now. Her eyes were on the ground. Her one visitor at home that evening, Will remembered well, had been Frank Darrah. Was it possible Darrah had mentioned Dave’s rage on Chinaman Creek and use of a gun?
Kate broke the moment of uncomfortable silence. She sounded portentous, grim. She said the things Will was thinking.
“Someone mentioned that trouble to Barbara that evening. Nothing else would have made her ask Matt such a question. And Dave Waggoman was the only other person near town who could have let it out that quick. No one’s admitted meeting Dave before he was killed. But if someone did meet Dave, and let slip to Barbara later that he knew about the trouble—ain’t we close now to the man who musta killed Dave?”
Will warned, “You’re only guessing.”
