by Peter Dawson
“Yace,” he drawled, “there are times when I wonder why I stay on here lookin’ after a bull-headed old fool like you. Them times I wonder what I ever saw in you in the first place. By Satan, I don’t know, now that I think of it.”
He had wanted to hurt Yace. But now a strange tranquility seemed to be settling over the old rancher’s face, and he breathed: “He’ll shake ’em, if it was him. They won’t lay a hand on him. But why didn’t he come to me for help?”
“To you? After the glad-handin’ you gave him at the depot tonight?” Blaze laughed. He didn’t know what to think. First Yace hinted one thing, the next moment another.
Yace’s expression sobered. He shook his head. “No tellin’ why I did that,” he said in a surprising admission.
Blaze was puzzled, sore. He had an impulse to tell Yace about the mark over the shelf, about Joe’s being headed for Hoelseker’s abandoned Broad Arrow cabin high along the Troublesome, but he checked it. There was no trusting Yace’s hair-trigger moods. A minute ago he had been halfway convinced of his son’s guilt; now he was trying to persuade himself that he would have helped Joe had he had the chance, that he didn’t believe him guilty. No, Blaze decided, he wasn’t going to let Yace in on this, wasn’t going to trust him with the safety of a man’s life. And he knew it amounted to exactly that. Joe Bonnyman was in a tight spot. So he drawled: “Well, you goin’ to let Lyans ride up Porcupine this mornin’ and deputize your crew to hunt Joe down?”
Yace’s lips drew out to a hard thin line. “No, by Jehoshaphat,” he said curtly, and stomped out the door bawling Lyans’s name.
Blaze followed more leisurely, letting the wind push him along. As he crossed the barn lot, he turned down toward the cook shack, seeing Clark’s shape briefly outlined in the lighted door there. He would take Clark aside and tell him where Joe was headed. It eased his troubled run of thinking when he saw Clark. He had almost forgotten that he wasn’t Joe’s only friend.
A Warning
The storm unleashed its full fury as the darkness gave way to the first hint of dawn’s opaque dead-gray light. The wind, strong in the before-dawn hours, took on the proportions of a howling gale. And snow came with it, snow so fine that it sifted in around the tightly drawn tarps of the chuck wagons that fed the crews working the roundups, so hard that it made raw the faces of the luckless cowpunchers who had night-herded the bunches of miserable, bawling cattle, holding them in what scant shelter they could find.
The Sierra & Western tracks at the foot of Crooked Gulch were drifted eight feet under so that the through express, due in Junction at six, had to back the twenty miles to Lodgepole to wait out the blow. Anchor’s water mason scraped the frost from his shack window and could see enough through the easing gloom to wonder if the brimming pond’s new spillway would be able to handle the overflow when the melt came. For a melt would come, this being early November.
In Lodgepole, Jim Swift, the day hostler, made his solitary way along the darkened street toward the feed barn, the moan of the wind against the galleried false fronts of the stores heightening his unnaturally lonesome feeling that was little relieved by the knowledge that the town would be astir in another forty minutes. Breasting the narrow alleyway between The Antlers and Sayler’s Bakery. He heard a horse stomping and guessed that some rider, caught by the storm, had left the animal there to save a 30¢ board bill at the livery. Shortly he was glad to step in out of the wind’s bite through the walk entrance of the barn’s tightly closed doors. He set at once about pitching hay down from the loft.
The horse Swift had heard stomping in the passageway alongside the hotel was Sam Thrall’s. Joe Bonnyman had briefly glimpsed the hostler approaching through the fog of snow and had thanked a momentary lull in the wind’s intensity that had let him soundlessly enter the lobby of The Antlers. Once in there, his chilled body soaking in the room’s comparative warmth, he had hesitated to set about the thing that had brought him here.
Out there at Anchor an hour ago, Joe had had a bad few minutes, circling the posse men Lyans had put out to look for him in an attempt to spot either Blaze or Clark and have a word with them. He’d missed his chance with Blaze, not recognizing him until he was too close to the cook shack, and after that had put distance between himself and the house. Common sense had told him that the thing to do was to ride for the Broad Arrow cabin and wait for Blaze, for certainly Blaze already knew where to find him. But that might mean a day, possibly two, of prolonged curiosity as to why the posse was hunting him. Blaze might not be able to get away. Joe couldn’t wait that long.
In that moment he had thought of Ruth Merrill, remembering Clark’s mention of her staying in town overnight. And, as the thought struck him, he was putting the black over toward the Lodgepole trail, judging that he had better than an hour until daylight.
Now he was held tense by acute nervousness, not so much before the threat of discovery as before the prospect of seeing Ruth Merrill again. She would be asleep in one of the rooms upstairs. The thought of seeing her again threw him into a near panic of anticipation.
He cat-footed across to the counter, hearing Roy Keech’s snores issuing from the cubbyhole room under the stairway. The counter creaked loudly as he leaned on it, reaching across for the register on the desk behind. He breathed shallowly, and his hand dropped to the handle of his Colt as he waited out a brief interval, listening for a break in the clerk’s heavy breathing. Then, reassured, he opened the register and scanned it by the feeble light of the turned-down lamp over the counter. Shortly he found Ruth’s name with the number 14 after it.
Halfway up the stairs, he paused as the sound of Keech’s breathing suddenly let off. Then, quickly, he climbed up out of the far margin of light into the total obscurity of the upper landing. He judged that room Number 14 lay back along the hall rather than toward the street, and started toward there. He stopped when his groping hand felt the third break in the flanking partition. He struck a match, snuffing it out at once. He stood before the door numbered 14.
He rapped twice, lightly, and waited. No sound from inside the room came to him. He tapped again, just as softly, but half a dozen times. Then he heard the creaking of a bedspring, the slur of a light step on the floor. A faint glow of lamplight showed from under the door. Then, before he was quite aware that anyone was close, the door swung open abruptly.
A tall graceful girl stood holding the lamp. Her wavy chestnut hair fell about her shoulders, a light robe was gathered tightly at her slender waist. She looked frightened as the lamplight fell across his high shape and she took a step back away from him.
Joe misread her move and thought she was about to scream. Stepping swiftly over to her, he put a hand across her mouth, the other tightly about her waist so that she couldn’t draw away from him. He said urgently, low-voiced: “Don’t yell. I thought I had Ruth Merrill’s room. Just let me get out o’ here.”
The alarm died out of her eyes. He said—“Goin’ to be good?”—and, when she nodded, he took the hand from her mouth.
“I remember you now,” she said in a whisper. “You’re Joe Bonnyman.”
Still he wasn’t sure of her. He nodded. “Correct. Ruth’s registered for this room. How come she isn’t here?”
“She is, asleep,” the girl said, and looked down pointedly at his arm without trying to draw away from it.
Joe was keenly aware of her closeness, of the way her willowy body yielded to the pressure of his arm. Yet he couldn’t afford to let her go until he knew exactly how far to trust her. “You’re a friend of Ruth’s?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m Jean Vanover.”
“You won’t yelp if I let you go?”
“I might.” Her look was faintly provocative. When she caught the color mounting to his face, the trace of smile touched her eyes, and she said: “No. I’ll be good. You needn’t keep your arm there. Now what about Ruth?”
“I want to talk to her.” His arm came away.
“She’s had a pretty bad time of
it. She needs her sleep.” Jean looked over toward the bed, only a faint gray shadow in the lamp’s edge of light.
“There’s something I’ve got to know,” Joe said. “I think she can tell me.”
They still stood close to the door, practically in it, and Joe should have attached some significance to her glance going momentarily beyond him and out along the hallway. But he didn’t, for he was impatient to have her answer.
“Couldn’t I tell you whatever it is?” she asked.
“You might.” He hesitated only a moment before coming out with it. “There’s a posse out after me. Why?”
Her wonderment was quite genuine. “You don’t know?”
“Should I?”
“Better than anyone else, if what they’re saying is true.”
Again her glance strayed beyond him, and now her hazel eyes showed quick alarm. Wariness flooded through him, and he started to turn and look down the hall. She stopped him with: “They’re saying you killed him. You should know.”
Her words startled him, as he afterward knew she intended they should. He didn’t turn around. “Killed who?” he asked tonelessly.
“Ed Merrill.” Her look didn’t leave his as shock rode through him in a wave that engulfed his vigilance of a moment ago. Then she was saying in a low, tense voice: “There’s a gun on your back. I wouldn’t move if I were you.”
Getaway
Joe had hardly time to take in Jean Vanover’s warning when he heard Roy Keech’s voice close behind him saying: “Watch it, Bonnyman. You might get a busted spine.”
Lifting his hands out and upward, slowly, to shoulder height, Joe felt the weight of his Colt leave his holster. Then there had been a reason for the sound of Keech’s breathing letting off so abruptly as Joe climbed the stairs. Just as there had been a reason for this girl’s strange behavior, her glances past him up the hall that he had failed to read. She had held him here by her evasive talk while Keech made good his surprise.
Joe forgot the indictment she had laid against him in the face of his sudden anger. A girl and a man who would ordinarily have been utterly incapable of this act had taken him as easily as they might have a gullible child.
He stood with hands lifted, not moving, the harsh edge of his glance striking the girl. “Thanks,” he drawled. He nodded toward the bed, the foot of which was now outlined by the faint first light of dawn at the window. “You can tell Ruth how much of a help you were.”
Her face flushed under the acid sting of his words. He had the satisfaction of seeing her angry and ashamed as he turned away.
“Is the county still feedin’ its prisoners the food it used to, Roy?” he drawled.
“You’ll eat well enough,” answered Keech.
Joe noticed that his voice trembled. Remembering what he did of Roy Keech, the man’s almost puppy-like manner of wishing to please, his ineffectualness, drove home completely his feeling of frustration as he headed down the stairs. He felt no anger toward Keech, only an edge of nervousness at the knowledge that the man held a gun on him. He had a healthy respect for a gun in the hand of a man who didn’t know much about using it, and Keech didn’t.
Scanning the carpeted stairs ahead, Joe saw the runner bulging loosely away from the two bottom steps, remembering how they had shifted under his weight on the way up. At the bottom of the stairs he paused and turned slowly to face the clerk.
“You might as well tell me what this’s all about, Roy,” he said casually. “Where was Merrill found?”
Keech had stopped five steps above, his head at ceiling level. He said in that same trembling voice: “You can’t get away with anything with me, Joe!”
“No one’s tryin’ to.” Joe lifted his hands outward. “You’ve got my iron. All I want is information . . . and a smoke while you give it to me.” Again slowly, so that his gesture wouldn’t be mistaken, he pulled his poncho aside and took a sack of tobacco from a pocket of his vest.
Keech stiffened until Joe had completed his move, then visibly relaxed. The clerk even lowered his gun as he bridled: “What information? You know how you gave it to Merrill as well as I do.”
“Yeah. Shot him in the back, didn’t I?”
“Like blazes you did! You clubbed him over the head with the butt of a gun!” Keech was watching his prisoner’s hands as they sifted tobacco out onto a wheat-straw paper.
“Now that’s interestin’,” drawled Joe. “Where’d it happen?”
“In the alley behind the Land Office. You know as well as . . .” Keech broke off as Joe clumsily dropped the sack of tobacco close in to the bottom step of the stairs.
Joe grinned sheepishly. “Shakin’ like a leaf,” he declared, and stooped over to retrieve his tobacco.
“You ought to be shakin’,” Keech began. “Anyone who’d . . .”
He got no further. For, instead of reaching for the tobacco sack, both of Joe’s hands had closed on the loose end of the stair runner. He lunged erect, throwing all his weight against the long piece of carpeting. The tacks holding it pulled away easily. Before Keech could lift his gun, his footing was gone out from under him. He was falling frontward, hands outstretched to break his fall.
At the last moment he knew what was coming and cried out shrilly. The slam of Joe’s fist striking the side of his jaw cut off his cry. He struck heavily, his chest across the edge of the bottom step, rolling onto his back. Joe had relieved him of both guns before he completed that roll.
Thrusting his own weapon into his holster, the other through the belt of his pants, Joe looked upward along the stairs, checking the impulse to go up there and confront Jean Vanover. Thus thinking of her, it surprised him a little when he saw her standing there, a lithe, erect shape only faintly visible against the darkness of the stair head.
A good-natured grin slashed his face as he drawled: “Better luck next time.” When she made no answer, he said tauntingly: “Now whose face is red?”
“Poor Keech.” Her low voice came down to him. “You needn’t have hit him so hard.”
“You should be screamin’,” Joe told her.
He could barely make out that she shook her head. “No. It seems I made a mistake. You’d better go now. Someone’s coming down the hall.”
He pivoted around and headed toward the door as he heard the muffled tread of stockinged feet echoing down from that upper hallway. Going along between the buildings to Thrall’s black, he wondered at the change in Jean Vanover. What had made her decide she’d made a mistake? Then he ceased wondering under the urgency of leaving this town as quickly as he could.
He was able to make out shadowy shapes through the swirling snow as he rode out of the head of the passageway, turning away from the hotel and up street. Knowing he was safe until someone in the hotel gave the alarm, he put down the impulse to kick the black into a run.
Through the grayness Joe saw a man trudging down the awninged walk, collar turned high about his ears, head down, hands in pockets. He held the horse in a slow trot, lifting a hand to the man as be passed. He smiled thinly as the man answered his wave. Farther along, he took the dogleg in the street and came abreast the big cottonwoods fronting the yards of the first houses; not all the leaves had left the trees yet, mute testimony to this storm’s unseasonableness. He let the horse have its head and felt the animal’s strong lunge into a run. Once again he found himself envying Thrall, the owner of the horse. The black had traveled some thirty miles tonight, and still had a lot left.
Joe rode hard and fast for an hour. When he judged he was half a mile or so short of Sommers’s place, at the edge of the mesa, he left the trail angling directly north toward the shrouded hills. By that time the upcurling brim of his Stetston was filled flat by blown snow, and the wind howled with the same fierce intensity. But now it was warmer and lighter, and an occasional easing of the pall around him would give him a brief walled-in glimpse of a short reach of country. During one of those let-ups he got his exact bearing from a half mile distant spur of timber that he re
cognized. He swung off toward it, knowing that to follow its farther edge would shortly put him on the Troublesome.
He was faintly irritated by the knowledge that he was riding his own range, or land that had once been his, but was now Middle Arizona’s. This brought alive again the sting of last night’s welcome, of seeing Yace and of the fight with Ed Merrill. Merrill dead! For the first time Joe took in the full significance of the thing of which he stood accused. He could feel little regret over the man’s fate. But his curiosity was alive now as to how they had come to fasten the murder on him. He had fought Merrill last night, yes, but what evidence had put Lyans and every able-bodied townsman out on the hunt for him? Only suspicion? No, he knew it couldn’t be that. Bill Lyans wasn’t a man to jump at conclusions; moreover, Joe remembered Bill as having been more tolerant toward him than the others five years ago. So it followed that the deputy must have some evidence that pointed directly to him, evidence that would have started inquiries. Clark had been in town and would have mentioned his leaving by the late freight. A wire to Junction would have brought the answer that he wasn’t on the freight.
It fitted neatly, all the circumstantial evidence that last night had built against him—his fight with Merrill making him naturally suspect, the unknown evidence that had put Lyans on his trail, his leaving the freight. Now two more details would strengthen suspicion against him—his having gun-whipped Thrall and stolen the horse, and his encounter with Keech at the hotel. In another hour or two the word of his having been to Lodgepole would be out, and the hunt would he intensified.
He was lucky. The storm would hamper the posse while aiding him. He even stood a good chance of leaving the country if he chose, for rarely could he see more than 100 yards, and it would be a simple matter to avoid the trails that would surely be blocked by Lyans’s posse men. But Joe put down that thought forcibly, and for a weightier reason than the one prompting him to leave the train last night. If he left now, with this murder on his head, he would spend the rest of his life as an outlaw. Merrill’s family had influence. They would hound him for years.
