Authors: Luke Short
Amy watched him for some seconds, and then she looked around her. There by the door was Ted Elser’s saddled horse. Amy ran to him, untied the reins and swung up on him, adjusting her full skirt as she pulled him around and took out after Jim.
He was beyond the corrals, headed in the direction of the Massacre, when she came up beside him and reined her horse into a walk.
“I told you I’d follow you,” she said.
Jim glanced at her, his eyes without humor. “You’ve got a long ride,” he said. “I’m headed for Texas.”
“All right,” Amy said.
They didn’t speak, and yet within ten minutes both of them knew that this was a battle of wills between two stubborn people. It was late afternoon now; the sun heeled far over the Three Braves, and a chill was creeping into the air. Jim ignored Amy, and she ignored him. Not once in the four miles to the river, where they arrived at dusk, did she speak.
Jim put his horse down into the bottom lands and picked out a camp among the trees close to the river. He took his horse down and watered him, and Amy took hers. He staked out his horse below camp in a patch of coarse bunch grass; Amy followed him and staked out Elser’s horse.
Jim lugged both their saddles back to camp and began to collect wood, and Amy went out in the
opposite direction and did likewise. Jim built a fire and then unlashed his bedroll from behind his saddle. He had a small coffeepot and a sack of coffee and a can of tomatoes there. Amy quietly took the coffeepot and went down to the river and filled it and came back and put it on the fire. It was full dark now.
Jim noticed when she came back to the fire that she stood close to it, hugging her arms against her breasts. He took his coat from his saddle roll and held it out to her.
“Wait,” she said. She went over to Elser’s saddle and unlashed the saddle roll. There, rolled up in a slicker, was Elser’s coat. She rolled up six inches of the sleeves and shrugged into it, smiling a little at the picture she made.
Jim squatted by the fire, watching the coffee. He appreciated the absurdity of this scene and understood that Amy’s point was strengthened the longer it continued. But a stubborn pride in him would not allow him to speak first.
He lifted out his sack of tobacco and papers and was fingering the mouth of the sack open when he remembered and put the tobacco back in his shirt pocket. Amy saw it and came over and held out her hand. “I can roll one for you, Jim.”
Jim gave her the tobacco, and she rolled the cigarette he’d been longing for all this day, and he thanked her politely. His fingers were so swollen and raw and stiff that he had been unable to build anything he could smoke.
Amy watched him light up and drag the smoke deep into his lungs. She was sitting a little ways from him, her face pensive, watching the fire.
Jim said, “What about blankets?”
Amy raised her head and smiled faintly. “I’ve slept without them before.”
The coffee water boiled now, and Amy deftly hauled the pot off the fire and put in the coffee. Jim’s clasp knife served to open the can of tomatoes, after which he handed her the knife.
“We’ll take turns,” she said. “I’ll eat a tomato and you drink your coffee out of the pot.”
They ate that way, using Jim’s knife as a fork and drinking from opposite sides of the coffeepot, straining the grounds through their teeth. It was the crudest kind of way to satisfy hunger, Jim knew, but he made no apology, and Amy made no complaint.
Afterward she rolled another cigarette for him and they watched the fire, both silent. The strain of it was wearing off now, and Jim was quietly amused and a little angry too. There was a tough streak in this girl, a stubbornness that matched his own. The whole thing was farcical now, but Jim had no intention of giving in.
He watched her covertly as she stared at the fire. There was a fleeting sadness in her face, and Jim studied it. Amy was staring at the fire, content with that small hypnosis that warm food eaten in front of a blazing fire at night brings to everyone. She had the finest eyes he’d ever seen, Jim thought suddenly; the eyebrows were sunburned lighter than her skin, and they had a high arch that gave her eyes a strange sadness. Her face was in utter repose, serene. Jim discovered that during the times he’d seen her the word serene was what he had thought of. But that didn’t make sense, he knew, because he had never seen her unless she was angry or frightened. Except
when he parted from her in Sun Dust. It was that image of her standing by the arch of Settlemeir’s stable that had come to his mind last night in the dark on the porch of Commissary’s hotel. And now he pondered the strangeness of this, that he should have been leaving a country and thinking of a girl who held him in contempt. He knew truly that this girl was why he had returned.
He moved his shoulders as if unconsciously trying to shrug off the thought. A resentment welled up in him, and he flipped the cigarette into the fire. This must end, and now.
He said quietly, “Maybe we better quit this.”
Amy roused and glanced at him. “You’ll come back with me and give Dad a chance to apologize?”
“No. But you’d better go. They’ll be looking for you, and when they find you I’ll be in trouble again.”
Amy shook her head. “I won’t go until you go with me.”
Jim stared speculatively at her and said, “I think you will.”
He came to his feet, and Amy rose too. There was a faint threat in his tone that made her uneasy.
“I’ll give you one more chance,” Jim said quietly.
“No.”
He stepped over to her and took her in his arms and kissed her roughly. She submitted without moving a hand in protest. Jim felt the sweet warmth of her lips, smelled her hair, and then he stepped away from her. He felt a strange excitement in himself, a kind of shock. For one moment the truth was naked in his eyes, a kind of bewilderment.
Then he said harshly, with more brutality than he
had intended, “You’ll go now unless you want more of that.”
Amy said placidly, “I don’t want more of it, Jim. But I won’t go.”
Jim stood there, a high, flat figure in the bright firelight, and there was bafflement on his face. His glance held hers for three seconds, and then he turned away. He sat down again, arms folded on his knees, and scowled at the fire. Occasionally he looked up at her and each time found her watching him.
Presently he said without looking at her, “You meant it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Enough to let a man do that,” Jim murmured. “Yes, you meant it. I’m sorry about that—that kiss.”
Amy was smiling gently, though Jim didn’t see her. She came over and sat beside him.
“You’re a proud man, aren’t you, Jim?” She spoke in a low voice, and Jim could hear no trace of irony in it. “I think I understand you better than you know.”
Jim stared doggedly at the fire, but his heart was oddly hammering.
“You’ve been in hard luck and you’ve made mistakes. Your pride has made you hate those mistakes, but it’s kept you from admitting them, except to yourself. That day at the river when we met, when you shot at me. I had no right to do it, and you had no right to shoot back. Both of us were wrong, weren’t we?”
Jim nodded.
Amy went on. “This mess with Riling. I don’t know what went before, Jim, and I don’t care. But you didn’t like it. You’ve never liked your part in it.
That afternoon in Sun Dust with those two killers, you made your choice, and it wasn’t Riling’s way. I saw it on your face when Dad was talking to you. I saw the decision forced and I saw what you chose, and you acted on it.”
She picked up a handful of leaves and idly felt them, and Jim was quiet, almost holding his breath.
“This afternoon you did the thing you had to do, the thing that would wipe out all the past that’s been hurting you. And Dad threw it back in your face. He thought you were proposing to kill Pindalest.”
Still Jim didn’t speak.
“I didn’t think so, Jim,” Amy said. “I knew, you see. I knew you did it because you felt it would wipe out all the rest—the part that’s gone before and that you don’t like. Is—am I right, Jim?”
Jim nodded mutely, staring somberly into the fire.
“You’re a proud man, Jim—but this is the wrong kind of pride now. If you ride on back to Texas you’re lost. Forever.”
She was silent, and Jim didn’t move. Presently Amy rose, and Jim looked up at her.
“Shall we go?” Amy said.
“Yes,” Jim said. He rose and went out into the darkness for the horses, and in Amy’s eyes were unashamed tears.
Jim rose long before daylight. Taking his boots and blanket and coat, he went outside the bunkhouse. The morning was cold, and he slipped into his coat, keening the air and almost smelling winter coming. When he sat down to pull on his boots every muscle creaked with stiffness, but he knew that would go.
He heard a movement behind him and murmured, “Who’s that?”
“Elser. Thought I’d give you a hand.”
They washed up at the bench outside the door, breaking a thin film of ice on the water in the bucket. The cold shocked Jim awake, and he found that he was wolf-hungry. A light in the cookshack told Jim breakfast was not far off. He rolled his blankets and then he and Elser headed across for the veranda in the darkness. Against one corner of the porch were stacked Jim’s pack and grub that had been made up for him last night. There was a lamp lighted in the house kitchen, and Jim knew it would be Amy. She had promised last night after the talk with Lufton to see him off in the morning.
He and Elser picked up the gear and headed for the barn. Elser got a lantern and hung it on the corral pole, and the three horses inside, their breaths steaming in the cold morning air and their eyes bright and dark, whickered softly. There was a paper-thin sheet of ice on the watering trough, too, Jim noticed, and it reminded him again that it was the passage of time he was bucking now.
His own bay, Elser’s horse and a short-legged sorrel mare that was Jim’s pack horse were the only horses in the corral; Jim’s two had been kept in and grained last night while the other horses were turned out to pasture.
Jim saddled his gelding and then helped Elser put the pack on the sorrel. Elser’s presence here told Jim that he had been accepted provisionally by the Blockhouse crew. In his quiet and unsmiling way Elser was letting him know that if the boss had passed
him he was home. Jim found himself beginning to like Elser; he liked the way he worked with horses and the thorough, methodical way he distributed the pack and secured the diamond hitch and afterward tested it. He was unhurried and mild-spoken, without a trace of the stubborn fight he had shown Jim yesterday.
They led the horses out of the corral and tied them to the hitch rack at the corner of the bunkhouse and went into the cookshack.
The long table looked even longer with all the places set and empty. The Chinese cook brought them their breakfast, and the two of them ate in silence. Jim was ravenous; he had not really eaten in thirty-six hours, and it might be another thirty-six before he ate again.
Finished, he rolled a smoke and went back over the plans to discover what he’d missed. Last night Lufton, Amy, Carol and Cap Willis had planned this with him, plotting each move with care. None had pretended it would be easy to hide a man for weeks in this country. When the discovery was finally made Jim could count on their searching for him. The odds were heavily against him, for the men who would hunt him knew every canyon and ridge of the Three Braves, and he did not. It was this ignorance that Cap Willis had tried to dispel last night. Alternate hide-outs were chosen and directions to them given, and then Cap had explained the rough geography of the range. It was this last that Jim had listened to most carefully, for he knew that when his luck played out this would be all important. His luck, he knew, would be short, for he had not forgotten Carol Lufton’s note that night in Sun Dust. If she
had betrayed her father once to Riling she would betray his plans again—and Jim with them.
The sound of footsteps outside the cookshack made him turn his head, and then Amy and Carol entered.
Carol was dressed in her riding habit. Amy was wearing a dark blue belted wrapper and slippers, and her pale hair was gathered at her neck in a knot. Carol gave him an indifferent good morning and went around the table to Elser.
Amy came up and said, “With this start, Jim, you’ll be over the pass before dark.”
Jim nodded, but he didn’t hear her. Instead he heard Carol say, “Ted, I think I’ll ride this morning. Will you get me Monte?” She’d paused and said, “I’ll ride alone, too, please.” It had been spoken in a low voice intended only for Elser, but Jim heard. Elser nodded and went out, and Carol wandered into the kitchen.
Jim went outside with Amy. It was still hours till daylight, and the blackness seemed more profound than before, the silence deeper. His horses moved restlessly at the corner of the bunkhouse. Above their stirring he heard the faint sound of someone running behind the bunkhouse. That, he knew bleakly, would be Carol heading for the corral and then for Riling.
He heard Amy say, “Jim, I’ve been talking to you.”
Jim pulled himself up. “I was thinking about this,” Jim said.
Amy turned to him in the cold dark. “Jim, tell me the truth. What are your chances of getting away with it?”
“Good—with luck.”
“Dad doesn’t think so.”
“No, I don’t suppose he does,” Jim answered.
“When you’re not a young man any more you quit countin’ on luck. He’s quit.”
Amy shivered. “I wish it wasn’t like this, Jim. I wish you weren’t going to do it.”
“Do you?” Jim murmured.
“Not really,” Amy said quickly. “Only, you’re so alone. We can’t help you—nobody can.”
“I don’t need help,” Jim said quietly.
Amy murmured, “No, I don’t think you do, Jim. You want to do it yourself, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you will. I know you will.”
“There’s something I want to say to you,” Jim said stiffly. “Last night there at the river, I was pretty rough. I was trying to drive you home, Amy. If it hadn’t been for that I’d never have done it.”