“You alive, Dawes?” Jepson called.
Lee made no answer. Jepson had not come into the front room. He was a man, Lee thought, of no great physical courage, but he had reached a point from which there could be no retreat. Now, having reached this place, he would be possessed by the kind of last-ditch daring that comes to a man when he has no choice but to go on.
“You’re smart, Dawes!” Jepson called. “You didn’t tackle this job like we thought you would.”
The little man’s voice was drawn wire-thin. He was silent again, and time ran on. Lee, shoulders pressed against the wall, could hear no sound but his own breathing.
“Damn you, Dawes!” Jepson screamed. “Where are you?”
It was time now, Lee thought. He answered: “Waiting for you to come in, Jepson.”
Lee stepped swiftly away from his position along the wall. As he moved, Jepson began shooting, raking the room with a wild, reckless fire. Lee dropped flat, lank body pressed against the floor. A bullet sliced through his coat, opening a bloody gash along his back. There had been six shots spread the length of the room. Lee came to his feet, and went flat again, for Jepson had another gun. He was firing more wildly than before, as if panic were pulling his trigger finger, one shot coming hard upon the heels of the one before.
Jepson had placed his shots at about the spot where Lee had stood when he had spoken. Lee circled quickly now, holding to the inside wall, and, when he thought Jepson had fired the last shell, he drove through the doorway, his own gun speaking.
It was the cigar that gave Jepson’s position away, the glow of it a small red dot in the kitchen’s blackness. Lee’s first shot missed, the second fetched a long-drawn, gurgling sigh from Jepson. Lee held his fire then, sliding away from the door, and there was silence when Jepson’s labored breathing stopped.
Presently, after the minutes had told Lee the danger was gone, he lighted a match. In the small flare he saw Jepson’s high-boned face, round eyes staring upward in death’s blankness. And he seemed to Lee in that moment to be a strangely inoffensive and futile little man.
Lee stumbled out of the house, breathing his lungs full of fresh air, feeling the release from the evil that had gripped this place. He called from the porch: “You all right, Highpockets?”
“Right as rain,” the tall man answered. “You hurt?”
“A scratch along my back is all.”
“Jepson?”
“Dead. I guess he’d smoked a cigar so long he forgot about having one in his mouth. Come here and give me a hand with Mike.”
But Mike Quinn was not dead. He stared up at Lee in the light of the match Lee had struck, pale lips holding a small smile. “I came around in time to hear what you said,” he whispered. “Funny Jepson going like that. Guess he wasn’t so smart. He figured on making it look like you and me had plugged each other. Still thought he’d get the railroads to fighting. Reckon he died thinking it. Claimed he still believed in the people’s railroad, but he was going to get you and me out of the way first. Said nothing he planned would work as long as you were alive. You had him worried, Lee.”
Lee was on his knees beside Quinn, relief rushing through him, muscles weak with released tension. “How bad you hit, fella?”
“Not bad enough to die. I’m not going to die till I see that sign on Wall Street in Bend that says ‘Dawes and Quinn, General Contractors.’ I’ve got to live that long for Michael O’Brien.”
Highpockets had found a lamp and lighted it. Lee, searching quickly, found a bullet hole high in Quinn’s chest, another in his left shoulder. He asked: “What were you doing out here?”
“Coming after you.” The small grin was on Quinn’s lips again. “Got a message you were in trouble, but, hell, I should have stayed in town. You aren’t worth coming out here after.”
“Crank up your car, Highpockets!” Lee called. “I’ll get this ornery, no-good pardner of mine into your back seat. I’m afraid he’s going to live.”
* * * * *
Railroad Day in Bend. The Oregon Trunk had won. Its rails had reached Madras on February 15, 1911, with the Deschutes Railway still fifteen miles away. The Oregon Trunk swept on south with Bend as its goal. In September, Carl Gray, President of the OTL, announced that an agreement had been signed with the Harriman road for joint trackage between Metolius and Bend. Each road was to pay half the cost of maintenance. Joint terminals and warehouses at Bend were provided for, and Gray added that there would be no more railroad building in central Oregon for some time.
Now on this day, October 5, 1911, the job was done. The click of wheels on rails, the hiss of steam, the chug of power spinning out into movement, the long scream of a locomotive’s whistle as it shrilled across a wide land—all were proof that a dream long held in human hearts had been realized.
Mayor Coe had proclaimed the day a holiday. Two thousand people gathered along the track to stare at the notables on the platform: Mayor Coe, bearded Jim Hill, his son, Louis Hill, Bryanesque Bill Hanley from Harney County, and others.
Lee Dawes stood at the edge of the crowd, Hanna on one side of him, Mike Quinn and Deborah, with Michael O’Brien Quinn in her arms, on the other. Lee watched Bill Hanley lay the depot cornerstone, watched Jim Hill drive the golden spike into position, but he had only half an eye for this scene. He was remembering the night more than two years ago when he had first seen Shaniko and the raw, primitive quality of its life. It had been the old West, a West that would vanish now, to be remembered only at old settlers’ conventions or in the comfortable warmth of a living room on a winter night when a new and young generation prodded a grandparent’s memory.
Jim Hill had returned to the platform, and now he started his speech.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are here today to celebrate the event of a new trail in central Oregon. This country, the entire Northwest, owes something to those who came before. They owe a great deal to the pioneers who took their lives in their hands, both the man and the woman, because it would have been a lonesome place for a man if the woman had not been willing to come.”
Lee grinned as Hanna looked up at him. He winked at her, and whispered: “He’s sure telling the truth.” He put his arm around her, and Quinn, seeing it, needled him in the ribs with an elbow.
“Behave,” Quinn muttered. “You’re listening to a great man.”
But the events of these last two years crowded into Lee’s mind and closed his ears to Hill’s words. The people’s railroad had been defeated in the election, but Hanna argued stubbornly that it had accomplished its purpose, that Bend would not be celebrating Railroad Day if the proposal had not stirred Hill and Harriman into action. Lee argued as stubbornly that it was not true, that Hill and Harriman would have built, regardless of the people’s line.
It was pleasant, this arguing with his wife Hanna, for he found capacities in her he had never dreamed a woman could have. It was the end of fury for Lee Dawes. There had been the wildness in him that had driven him from one job to another. That wildness would never be entirely gone—serenity and a day-by-day even tenor of living would never be for Lee Dawes—but there was a permanence, a direction to his life now, and it had been Hanna who had given it to him.
This was a bright land, a far-reaching land of junipers and pine and sage. There was a skyward tilt of the Cascades to westward, the high desert to the east, and there was a promise the land held for those who, like Lee and Mike Quinn, had come to exchange their work for the treasure it held.
Lee’s arm tightened around Hanna. Again her eyes lifted to meet his, and for that moment Jim Hill and the two thousand people around them ceased to exist. It was a world for just two people in love. This was the way he wanted it. This was the way it would always be.
About the Author
Wayne D. Overholser won three Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and has a long list of fine Western titles to his credit. He was born in Pomeroy, Washington, and attended the University of Montana, the University of Oregon, a
nd the University of Southern California before becoming a public schoolteacher and principal in various Oregon communities. He began writing for Western pulp magazines in 1936 and within a couple of years was a regular contributor to Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine and Fiction House’s Lariat Story Magazine. Buckaroo’s Code (1947) was his first Western novel and remains one of his best. In the 1950s and 1960s, having retired from academic work to concentrate on writing, he would publish as many as four books a year under his own name or a pseudonym, most prominently as Joseph Wayne. The Violent Land (1954), The Lone Deputy (1957), The Bitter Night (1961), and Riders of the Sundowns (1997) are among the finest of the Overholser titles. The Sweet and Bitter Land (1950), Bunch Grass (1955), and Land of Promises (1962) are among the best Joseph Wayne titles, and Law Man (1953) is a most rewarding novel under the Lee Leighton pseudonym. Overholser’s Western novels, whatever the byline, are based on a solid knowledge of the history and customs of the 19th-century West, particularly when set in his two favorite Western states, Oregon and Colorado. Many of his novels are first-person narratives, a technique that tends to bring an added dimension of vividness to the frontier experiences of his narrators and frequently, as in Cast a Long Shadow (1957), the female characters one encounters are among the most memorable. He wrote his numerous novels with a consistent skill and an uncommon sensitivity to the depths of human character. Almost invariably, his stories weave a spell of their own with their scenes and images of social and economic forces often in conflict and the diverse ways of life and personalities that made the American Western frontier so unique a time and place in human history.
Shadow on the Land Page 20
