Blood on the Moon (8 page)

When she returned to the kitchen she was wearing a blue dress with a white collar, fichu style, that seemed to turn her skin a deep golden tan. John Lufton was slowly pacing the floor when she came in. He stopped and almost glared at her.

“You didn’t tell me that damned Garry shot at you,” he said accusingly.

Carol was still at the table, and Amy looked at her reprovingly. “There wasn’t much to tell, Dad. Nothing happened.”

Lufton started to speak and then checked himself, but he was cursing under his breath as he took his hat and went out. Amy and Carol followed him. At the barns Lufton ordered Elser to hitch up the
team, and Amy went over to watch him. She liked to watch Ted Elser work with horses, liked the slow, soothing way he swore at them, as if it were a caress.

Carol stayed with her father, who was now joined by Cap Willis. Her father was scowling darkly. Twice he was about to say something to Willis and twice changed his mind. The third time he spoke, and with decision.

“Cap, we’re going to cross those other two herds tonight.”

“Tonight?” Willis echoed blankly.

Lufton nodded decisively. “Carol here saw Riling and his crew this morning, and they were heading south in a body. It looks to me like they’ll make a try tonight at the herd we crossed if they can find it. All right, let them make it. Nobody will bother ’em. But while they’re trying to round up that herd and push it across we’ll be crossing the other two. How does it sound?”

“Risky.”

“Suits me. Now get along and tell the boys.”

Carol couldn’t think: the fear that had disolved this morning at sight of peaceful Ripple Ford was back again, only stronger. Tate had counted on the Blockhouse crew being pulled away from those two herds. If they weren’t there would be the fight that Carol had been dreading. She’d have to get word to Tate to stop the raid.

On the way to Sun Dust Amy took over the team while Lufton hunched sleepily in the seat. He noted Amy’s handling of the horses with a quiet pride and approval. Her hands were brown, strong. “She should have been my son,” he thought and then knew that
wasn’t right. But she was close to him, like a son. And yet, to him, she was more of a woman than Carol. John Lufton had a high opinion of women, set by his wife who was dead these ten years. Their occasional vanities and featherheadedness amused him when he noticed it, and he did because he had raised two daughters. He looked beyond those things, however, searching for something in them that was in his wife. In Carol he had not found it. It was all surface emotion and weakness with her, and he forgave her, as a man will a beautiful woman, simply because she is beautiful. With Amy, however, it was different. He had watched her and shaped her when he could, giving her a free rein to make her own blunders. But even as a child she judged those blunders, grave and troubled and stubborn, something Carol never did. The things he liked most about her were odd: she put a man’s value on words; they counted, like money, and they were sound as money. She loved work for work’s sake, not for reward. Another man’s trait, he supposed. The streak of humor in her was his own—gay and tolerant and sometimes sardonic. That was the salt. It was his ego, and he knew it, that made him think it would take a rare man, a simple man, to understand her and love her. If he did he would have the world, as John Lufton once had the world. The rest of it, her clean-lined face with its wide, grave mouth, her honest eyes, the sunburned, streaked hair that a man always wanted to touch, the young, slim, quick body—all that was frosting, and nice frosting too.

Amy felt his scrutiny and glanced obliquely at him and gave him a low smile. “I know. I look like Mother, don’t I?”

“Did I say so?”

“I can tell,” Amy said gently. “I hope I do.”

Lufton grunted. “You can tell too damned much.” He smiled too.

Sun Dust was in its midafternoon drowse as they drove in. The shadeless street simmered in the overhead sun; a hawk, wings motionless, coasted out over the rim, peering at the town below, and then wheeled north, uninterested.

John Lufton glanced at the sheriff’s office. The door was open and Les Manker was in, so he could get his business over with. He was going to tell Manker of what he’d done, what he would do, and warn him that if he was against him, then he could expect the same treatment Riling was going to get.

First, though, he would leave Amy at the hotel, which always kept a room open for him and his family’s use when they were in town. No use to trouble Amy with this business further.

“I’m going to get a new hat,” Amy announced. “I feel like one.”

Lufton said, “I never felt like that, myself,” and idly observed the street. On the hotel porch he saw a man sitting with his feet on the rail.

Something in the attitude of the man jogged his memory as the team drew abreast of the Basin House. Then he recognized him.

It was Jim Garry.

Lufton knew it was time, and he reached over and pulled the reins. He stepped down into the street, saying without turning, “Drive on to Settlemeir’s.”

His boots scuffed up faint risings of dust as he walked. His attention was narrowly on the man in the chair. When he hit the plank walk he crossed it
and came up to the railing by the post and said mildly, “I thought I told you to ride on through.”

Jim Garry came slowly out of his chair. His face had been relaxed, somber; now wariness came to it, now the eyes grew oddly chill.

“So you did,” he murmured.

“Your time’s up,” Lufton said. “Get your horse.”

“I reckon I’ll stay.”

John Lufton was aware of two things at once. One was that a man about to walk past him suddenly stopped, sized up what was happening, turned and retreated. The other was that Amy had left the team in the street and was coming up behind him.

He said without turning, and he said it sharply, “Get out of here, Amy!”

“No.”

Jim Garry had seen Amy leave the buckboard. Beyond her, beyond the stopped team, he saw Riordan and Shotten come to sudden attention. Then they moved, Shotten upstreet, Riordan down, both heading for the middle of the street.

He heard Lufton say angrily, “Amy, leave us. Go into the hotel!”

“I won’t do it.”

Shotten had crossed the road now at a long lope and was on the plank walk upstreet. Riordan had stopped in the middle of the road. Jim Garry knew with rising panic that this was wild luck for these two, that this was the chance they had dreamed of and that they assumed he was in on it. He knew with cold and terrible certainty that Lufton was a dead man if he turned.

Jim said quietly to Lufton, “Don’t move, Lufton, or you’ll never move again.”

He took the one step to the porch break, putting himself in the open, and he looked at Shotten. “You drift,” he said.

Shotten was standing in the middle of the walk, hands at his side, ready. A look of puzzlement fled across his face, and he said thinly, “Get that girl out of there.”

Jim stepped down to the walk and headed toward him slowly, putting himself between Shotten and Lufton. “I said drift,” he repeated.

“What are we waitin’ for?” Shotten asked hotly. “There he is!”

Jim was closer now, and Shotten backed up a step. He couldn’t size it up with that slow brain of his, and now he protested wildly.

“But Riling wants it! He said so!”

Jim was six feet from Shotten now, and he lunged. He slashed savagely at Shotten’s face and missed and followed through with his elbow that caught Shotten in the mouth. The man staggered back, and now Jim drove a smashing blow in his face that knocked him sprawling on his back. He leaped on him as Shotten clawed blindly for his gun. Jim landed on his chest with his knees, driving the wind from him in one coughing grunt. Jim grabbed his vest lapels and twisted them in his big hands and came off Shotten, dragging him to his feet. And when Shotten’s knees took the weight a little Jim hit him again in the face. He hit him with a long, looping overhand smash that caught Shotten on the shelf of the jaw and turned his head abruptly and tore him out of Jim’s grasp. The tie rail caught Shotten across the small of the back. He arched his back, and then the tie rail split with a sound like a gunshot, and Shotten
fell through to the dust of the road. He lay senseless, not moving.

Jim looked up at Riordan, wondering why he had waited, Riordan stood in the middle of the road, small and wicked and cocked to move. From the corner of his eye Jim saw that the girl had backed away from Lufton, putting herself between her father and Riordan, and there she stood, facing Riordan.

Jim said, “Riordan, that’s your horse in front of the saloon. Get on him.”

He started to walk now. He came through the break in the tie rail toward the middle of the street, and when he was beyond the prone Shotten he paused, facing Riordan across fifty feet of dusty street.

He said, “Crawl to him, Riordan. In the dust.”

The sick man’s face was shadowed now. He’d been puzzled up to this point, held motionless by what Garry had done.

And now, like the sudden change of the wind, it was on him. He was faced with it and he knew it, and a quick and dismal flash of temper mounted to his eyes. It had gone wrong, and Garry had braced him.

He had his moment of judgment, which was what Jim wanted and which he allowed him in the silent street.

Then he said, “Make up your mind, Riordan.”

“I never crawled for any man,” Riordan said softly.

“Any time you want it, start it,” Jim said gently.

Time stopped. Riordan heard the sick blood pounding in his ears. He kept remembering that last shot in the door at Big Nels’s place, and then his decision froze. He could haul it up to that point, but not past it. For one wild and reckless part of a
second he thought he had it. Then he knew he was beaten. Nothing was left but the rage and the fear, and the fear was stronger.

“I won’t wait,” Jim prodded gently. He stood there in the middle of the sunny street, tall and still and barely patient now.

Riordan cursed wildly. Then he fell to his hands and knees and crawled on all fours through the thick, hot dust toward his horse. He reached the tie rail and almost decided to make his stand there in the shelter of his horse. But his nerve was gone, drowned in anger. He yanked the reins loose and vaulted to the saddle and roweled his horse savagely. He lay flat against his horse’s neck for a half block and then sat erect and quirted the horse with full-armed slashes.

Afterward Jim walked over to where Lufton was standing and watching him.

He said, “You won’t be that lucky next time, Lufton.”

John Lufton’s face was drained of blood, and his eyes were blacker than night. “I don’t get it, Garry,” he said slowly. “I don’t get it at all. Why did you do it?”

“A man can change his mind, can’t he?” Jim asked mildly. His glance shuttled to Amy, who had been watching him with un unblinking, breathless concentration. He touched his hat then and wheeled and went across to Settlemeir’s, skirting Shotten on the way.

When he rode out through the long gangway ten minutes later Amy Lufton was standing by the arch on the plank walk, and he reined up beside her. She regarded him a silent moment and with a child’s grave and troubled expression.

“You’re riding on, aren’t you?”

Jim nodded.

“I’m glad,” Amy said. “Not for us, but for you. I want to thank you for this, and I want to apologize, too, for what I said to you.”

“No,” Jim said bleakly. “You were right. Don’t let a man’s whim fool you.”

“I haven’t.”

Jim looked at her sharply, feeling the blood crawl up into his face. Then his glance fell away, and he touched his hat again and rode out, turning upstreet toward the dug road and the rim.

Both Amy and her father watched him until he was out of sight, and they did not know what to say.

After her father and Amy drove out Carol went back to the house, but it was only for appearance’s sake. From her bedroom window she watched the corrals until she saw Cap Willis finish saddling up and ride out, and then she went out to the corrals again.

Ted Elser was closing the door of the wagon shed, and he came over to her.

Carol tried to make her voice sound indifferent. “I think I’ll take Monte out, Ted. Maybe he’s not as bad as I think he is.”

Ted nodded slowly and took his rope off the corral post. He roped the big black and saddled him there in the corral, but he did not lead him out. Finished with Monte, he turned his head toward the horses remaining in the corral. They had finished their milling and were bunched to one side, watching him with a wary suspicion.

Ted whistled, and a big long-legged grulla horse laid back his ears and slowly broke away from the bunch. He followed Ted over to where Ted’s saddle and bridle were on the rail and waited docilely while he was saddled.

Carol, watching Ted, had a sudden suspicion, and she asked, “Are you riding, Ted?”

He looked up at her, mild surprise in his plain face. “With you, Miss Carol.”

“I’m afraid I’d rather ride alone,” Carol said.

Ted shook his head. “It’s orders, Miss Carol, straight from the boss.”

Carol was panicked. She must, must get word to Tate someway to call off the night raid. But she couldn’t do it if Ted Elser was with her. She looked at his browned, honest face, and for a moment she hated him. A choking anger was in her, and she said viciously, “I don’t care what your orders are, Ted. I’m riding out of here alone!”

“No ma’am,” Ted said gently, doggedly. “I’m ridin’ with you.”

It was the same even-tempered, stubborn, ironwilled way he spoke to the horses, Carol thought, and she hated him passionately. But behind her anger she knew this wasn’t getting her job done. If she couldn’t make him obey her—and she couldn’t because John Lufton was the Blockhouse boss—then she must win him over.

She smiled. It was a warm, sweet smile that Ted Elser had never seen before. “Ted, just between us, let’s forget this. I won’t tell Dad. Cap’s gone, and only the cook’s around. Nobody will know.”

“No ma’am,” Ted said stubbornly. He didn’t even pause to consider it, and Carol knew it was a hopeless thing to try to persuade him.

“But it’s only to Nellie Cavan’s, Ted!” she cried.

Nellie Cavan was the schoolteacher; her house was a half mile from the Roan Creek school, some three miles on the road to Sun Dust.

But again Ted shook his head. “If they’ll shoot at Miss Amy they’ll shoot at you. Besides, it’s orders.”

Carol knew despair for a moment and tried to keep it from showing in her face. Suddenly she thought of something. “But I’m going to stay all night.”

Ted considered. “Then I’d better take the buggy, hadn’t I?”

“Oh no,” Carol answered quickly. “I’ll just put my things in a saddlebag. Do you still want to go?”

“It’s orders,” Ted reiterated.

“Thank you,” Carol said acidly. “It’s a comfort to be so well protected you haven’t any privacy.”

She went back to the house for her things, and Ted led the horses over to the porch. He waited there, sober and unhappy, scuffing leaves with his boot toe and watching the door. When Carol came out with her packed saddlebag Ted stepped over to her horse and offered to help her up. He was refused coldly.

That next half-hour was one of the most uncomfortable Ted Elser had ever spent. He was a man with an inclination to solitude. His work here at the Blockhouse had been humble and lonely enough, and he was less concerned with what went on at the house than any of the other hands. But the times Carol came out to the corral to accept her horse and passed the time of day with him were the times he lived for. He could remember them all, everything about them, down to the slightest detail of Carol’s dress. He had never seen a woman so beautiful, so regal and, when she wanted to be, so gracious. His love for her was something he could no more help than the color of his hair. The times she smiled at him were treasured; the times she frowned were pondered and examined and always explained, always with tolerance for her and blame for himself. Until he admitted bleakly that she didn’t know he was alive and didn’t care. Like today, like now.

Carol neither looked at him nor spoke to him during
that ride. He watched her with the hunger of a lost man in his eyes, and he was sorry to see Cavan’s place. It was a stone shack under a lone cottonwood tree on the lip of the long slope that led down into Roan Creek Valley. A homesteader had abandoned it, and the county had taken it over for the schoolteacher.

When they rode into the yard Ted saw that Nellie Cavan’s corral was empty. Carol saw it, too, but said nothing. She rode over to it, turned her horse inside and strode toward the house.

Ted followed her afoot and didn’t speak until Carol had reached the door.

“You want me to wait, Miss Carol?”

Carol turned on him, irony in her voice. “I think I’ll be able to lock the doors and hold them off until help comes from town.”

Ted looked down at his feet, not wholly satisfied. “I could wait.”

Carol stamped her foot. “But why must you be so stupid! Let me alone! Go home!”

Ted touched his hat and walked back to his horse. On his way he heard the door slam viciously. His face was hot with a deep humiliation, and he stepped into the saddle and started back toward the Blockhouse. But an uneasiness was upon him. Lufton had told him never to let Carol or Amy out of his sight away from the Blockhouse. Lufton wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t believed they were in danger. And here he was, riding back and leaving Carol alone in a strange house.

Over the ridge he pulled up and considered, but his mind was already made up. Women were reckless, unthinking, willful. Because they were was no
reason for him to shirk his orders. He kept behind the ridge until it petered out among the growth along Roan Creek. Once in the shelter of the trees, he made his way upstream and dismounted, turning his horse out on picket. He squatted down in the growth of the far bank, where he could see the schoolteacher’s house, and brought out a sack of tobacco, prepared for a long, lonely wait.

He was still rolling it when he looked up, and his fingers were motionless. Carol had left the house and was half walking, half running toward the corral. Ted watched her lead her horse out, mount and put her horse south, crossing the road and disappearing into the scrub cedar hills beyond.

He dropped the half-made cigarette and rose. It was what he had not allowed himself to suspect: Carol never had any intention of visiting Nellie Cavan.

Ted went back to his horse, already knowing what he must do. He cut her sign at the road and swung in behind her, his pace leisurely. He was both worried and curious, but the memory of Carol’s anger kept him from overtaking her. He could watch her in his own fashion without her knowing it.

Carol’s trail cut across these hills and finally dropped down and picked up a wagon road through the Orphan Valley that Ted knew led eventually to Chet Avery’s homestead. That didn’t make sense, since Chet Avery’s wife was no friend of Blockhouse. Ted lost her trail once where the road crossed a shale upthrust of a mile’s hard going. He came back and found it, but it took him an hour, and now he was convinced that Carol wanted to cover her trail. She had abandoned the road now and was headed
west, following the shale until it petered out, and then she pointed southwest. There was nothing that way except a nester’s place, for the land began to tilt away into the Long Reach Desert beyond, through which the first nesters had entered.

He came to a stretch of malpais and saw where Carol had picked up a trail that crossed it and wound into the canyon country that was almost the south edge of the Basin’s proper grazing country. He went more cautiously now, for they were close to one of these nester outfits. Finally he came to the lip of a canyon and paused, thrusting back into memory. The trail beyond was a series of switchbacks that led down to the canyon floor, where there was a house, he recalled.

Ted dismounted and approached the canyon edge cautiously. The whole wedge of the canyon opened out onto the amber grass beyond, but close, almost below him, was the log shack. Carol’s horse was in the yard, and she was sitting on the porch. Ted Elser groped in his memory for a long moment, trying to place this shack, and then he had it. It was Bice Fales’s place—or used to be, that is. It was Tate Riling’s now.

He sat down, cross legged, and sifted gravel through his fingers, his mind seeking a way to interpret this. It just didn’t make sense—Carol Lufton, daughter of the Blockhouse owner, camped on the porch of her father’s bitterest enemy. He refused to try to fathom it finally; he watched and listened, and the sun heeled over as he waited.

Carol’s patience had long since worn thin; he could tell. She was pacing the yard now, looking up every so often at the trail above. Finally, toward sundown, she mounted her horse. Ted drew back a little,
waiting to move until she hit the lower switchbacks on the trail up. But she didn’t take the trail; she left the canyon and lined out west.

Ted came down the trail, not liking this. Over west was the crossed herd, where trouble would be. It was no safe country for anyone connected with Blockhouse. Besides that, it was getting dark. It wasn’t impossible that a half-dozen men had seen her entry into this country. Ted Elser had a bad few minutes then as he lost sight of Carol ahead of him across the flats in the twilight.

Finally he came to his decision and didn’t like it, but he stuck to it. He touched spurs to his horse and lined out in a long lope after Carol. It was almost dark when he saw her pull up, hearing a horseman behind her, and wait.

He put his horse into a walk and came up to her, watching her face in the dusk and unable to see it.

“Is it—Ted?” she asked.

“We better turn back, Miss Carol,” Ted said.

Carol sat utterly motionless in the saddle; he could get no clue to her temper.

“How long have you been following me?” she asked. Her voice was unsure, frightened.

“All afternoon.”

“Then—you saw me at Riling’s place.”

“Yes’m.”

Carol tried to laugh and failed, and Elser weighed its meaning and was curious.

“What do you think of it?” Carol asked slowly.

Ted shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. “That’s your business, I reckon.”

Carol didn’t speak, and Elser waited out his time and then said doggedly, “I think we better ride back.”

Carol didn’t object, didn’t speak. Docilely she pulled her horse around, and they started back for the canyon. They reached it and made the long climb up the switchbacks and at dark crossed through the malpais. Still Carol hadn’t spoken. There was something wrong, Elser knew, and he kept silent and wondered.

The pressure on Carol broke finally. She reached out and seized the bridle of Ted’s horse in the dark and hauled him up savagely.

“This can’t go on,” Carol said in a tight voice. “I’ve got to know.”

Ted didn’t answer her, didn’t help her.

Carol said impatiently, swiftly, “Ted, you’re in love with me, aren’t you?”

The shock in his face wasn’t visible to Carol, nor the slow readjustment as he tried to stop his hands trembling. He said in a reluctant, miserable voice, “Yes.”

“You’d do anything in the world to save me from hurt, wouldn’t you?” Carol went on brutally. “I know you would because you’ve done it today. It’s in your eyes, in the way you talk. Isn’t that true?”

Ted nodded now, unable to speak.

Carol moved her horse closer to him and reached out and laid a hand on his. “I thank you for that, Ted. I need your help terribly.” She paused and she could feel the muscles in his hand iron-hard and trembling beneath her own.

“I want you to forget this afternoon,” Carol said, her voice hard. “I don’t care what you think, but I don’t want anyone ever to know. No one, Ted—
no one!
Do you love me enough to promise that?”

“More,” Ted said. He said it in a dry, ironic voice
that surprised Carol. Coming from this stubborn, dull man, it was a revelation. She had always supposed him incapable of irony, of understanding.

“Then I have your word, your promise?” she asked.

“Till death do us part,” Ted murmured. He moved away from her then, waiting for her to move. She had won his promise, Carol knew, but in an obscure way she knew she had lost something else. And strangely enough this troubled her as she touched spurs to her horse and they rode on into the chill night.

Cap Willis reached the north herd across the Massacre before dark, gave his orders to the five men there without dismounting and then pushed on to Ferg Daniels’ herd, arriving late.

A night herder took him into camp and stirred up the fire, then left, and the crew came out of blankets. As soon as Willis told them they’d move tonight the horse wrangler drifted off in the dark and the rest of the crew pulled on boots. The fire was built up, and Cap Willis squatted beside it, conferring with Ferg Daniels as to the best route for the drive. The herd was bedded down in a shallow valley that fingered off among the pines to the south and west and was on the short plateau that lay between the mountains and the river flats.

Cap Willis knew this country as he knew the lines of his face, and tonight, for the first time in weeks, he felt as if he was counting for something. Up to now Lufton had figured, and rightly so, that his lowliest punchers could ride the brush and gather his herds. Cap had been kept at Blockhouse because
it was in the Basin that Lufton figured the trouble would start. It hadn’t, and Cap had been a general without any army. Tonight he was in command again, and it suited him. He was an abrupt man, sure of himself, shrewd in the ways of his work. At times he had the deceptive appearance of a cow-town banker gone to belly; his quick and authoritative manner of speech and the saddle of thin hair that he plastered across his skull heightened the impression. But his ability to size up cattle—count, weight, condition, age, asking and selling price—had been acquired in a half a hundred trail camps and towns where a man was never far from violence. He was a formidable barroom brawler who went about it in businesslike unconcern, and to him this fight had the earmarks of a barroom brawl.