Authors: Luke Short
Amy was silent a long while and then she said, “I see.” There was something in the way she spoke, a kind of aloofness and a faint disappointment, that puzzled Jim.
Then she put out her hand and said, “Good luck, Jim. Come back.”
He took her hand. It was slim and warm and firm, and then it slipped out of his hand, and she was gone into the night. Jim had a brief, baffled moment of knowing that something was wrong. “Come back,” she’d said. He put that away from his mind and turned toward his horses.
Once there, he did not mount. He stood there in the dark, turning over in his mind what he had to do.
Then he stepped into his saddle, left the pack horse and cut back toward the corral.
He dismounted by the lantern and went into the corral. Carol was at the pasture gate, holding it open. Jim could hear the distant rumble of the horseherd approaching, could hear Elser’s sharp, hazing whistle.
Jim went on through the corral, and as Carol watched him approach her face grew tense. Once at the gate, Jim gently disengaged her hand from the bar and swung the gate shut. The horses were so close now that he didn’t speak but waited there. The lead horses saw the gate closed and swung off to the right, the others following. Elser’s whistle stopped suddenly, and he rode up to Jim and Carol.
The light from the far lantern barely lighted Carol’s face. Jim’s was shadowed by his Stetson, and Elser looked from one to the other, puzzled.
“Anything wrong?” he asked.
Carol tried to speak imperiously. “I don’t know, Ted. He pulled the gate out of my hands and shut it.”
They both looked at Jim now. He said quietly, “She doesn’t ride today or for the next two days, Elser. Don’t give her a horse.”
“Why not?”
“Ask her,” Jim said briefly.
Both men looked at Carol, waiting for her to speak. Jim wasn’t going to say that by keeping Carol home today he was insuring himself against Riling and his crew overtaking him before his job was done. He was going to let Carol do any talking that was done.
A blazing anger mounted in Carol’s eyes now. She came over to Jim, facing him. “I don’t think you’re hired by Blockhouse, are you?”
“No.”
“So you haven’t even a puncher’s authority around here?”
“No.”
Carol’s anger lashed out at him. “How dare you tell me if I can ride or not. Get away from that gate!”
“No.”
She lashed out at Jim, slapping him across the face with the palm of her hand. Jim didn’t move, didn’t speak. Elser was held motionless by the scene.
“Will you get away from that gate?” Carol raged.
Jim said softly, “No. I could tell you why I won’t, but maybe you wouldn’t want to hear it.”
Carol stared at him. The anger slowly washed out of her face, and in its place was alarm, and behind that, fear. She said uncertainly, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know,” Jim said quietly.
She held his gaze for seconds, then wheeled and ran off into the darkness toward the house.
Elser watched her go, and then his sober glance shuttled to Jim. “So you know too.”
Jim’s head came up. Slowly he tramped over to Elser. “How did you know?”
“I followed her to Riling’s.”
Jim’s voice held a hint of anger as he asked, “Then why do you let her ride?”
“If a man’s own daughter isn’t loyal, I’m no man to tell him so,” Elser said quietly.
Jim fought down his impulse to anger, but there was a bitter soberness in his speech as he said, “I don’t give a damn who you tell, Elser. But you keep her off a horse for three days or I’ll have a bullet in my back before sundown.”
“All right.”
“I mean that,” Jim said harshly. “I’ll take my chances with a man, but with a sweet redheaded beauty cutting my throat, I’ve got to know.”
“Careful what you name her,” Elser said quickly, quietly. Plain warning was in his voice.
Jim’s eyes narrowed and he murmured, “So that’s the way it is?”
“That’s the way it is,” Elser replied. “Any comments?”
Jim smiled faintly. “None I haven’t made already—and none I didn’t mean.”
Elser nodded. “She won’t ride for three days. That’s a promise.”
Jim believed him. He went back to his horse, picked up the pack horse at the bunkhouse and rode out into the dark morning toward the Three Braves.
A fair wagon road from Sun Dust to the agency cut across the upper part of Massacre Basin and slanted a little south for the pass in the Three Braves. Jim picked it up sometime after daylight. The dawn broke cold with a low scud of clouds blotting out the peaks, and Jim knew snow was not far off. It gave an urgency to his business and made him quietly impatient. By noon he was in the steep canyons below the pass, and a fine snow was sifting down and disappearing immediately.
Soon after midday Jim left the road and cut up a small canyon whose slopes of red rock were stained purple in places with the snow water. He left the road where he forded the canyon’s stream and he kept to the stream for a mile or so, his eyes watching for a likely place. He found it soon, a pocket in the canyon slope where wind had eroded out a cave of sorts. Dismounting, he stowed the load from his
pack horse in the shelter of this rock overhang, then turned and retraced his steps, leading the pack horse in the stream. His provisions were deposited now, and he could travel faster.
Once on the road again, he drove the pack horse ahead of him as he had been doing, so that nobody but a sharp tracker following him could spot his cache by the absence of the pack horse’s tracks. Three miles beyond he circled the pack horse and drove him back down the road.
He had planned last night to camp this side of the pass but he knew now that he couldn’t chance a deep snow in the night cutting him off from the other slope. He hunched down in the Mackinaw he had borrowed from Lufton and let the dismal afternoon thread on as he climbed. Before dark he came to the old snow, which was almost ice and had been rutted deeply with the broad tires of the wagons freighting to the agency. The steep slopes up to the peaks were blotted out by whirling snow, and a cold wind funneled down the canyon he was winding through. A scattering of aspen and an occasional pine interrupted the dismal gray of the landscape when the walls broke away for a high meadow.
He remembered the last time he had crossed these mountains, avoiding the pass and skulking into the country like something hunted. When the time came for him to leave he might go out the same way, but it would be with the satisfaction that he had made up for many things in the past.
Darkness came on him in the pass, and with it a steady-flowing, bitter wind from the west. Presently the trees grew denser, and he knew he was over the
pass and on the other slope of a country that was new to him.
He camped late that night in the pines, grained his horse and threw his blankets under the wide spread of a tall spruce that the wet snow had not reached.
His supper eaten, he wrapped a blanket around him and sat cross legged before the fire, again returning to his plans. His lean face held a kind of sober peace; occasionally a faint smile would light his eyes and shape his face anew, and he would rise then and poke the fire and sometimes lose himself in contemplation of it.
The snow would make a difference, depending on how much of it there was, he knew. A heavy snow would shut him off from the other slope and drive him down out of the high country to avoid leaving a wide-open trail. He wanted badly to make it back to the other slope, the Massacre slope. Besides having his food cached there, he felt more familiar with it. There was another important reason too. On that slope there would be few Indians. On this, once the alarm was raised, the Indians would be on his trail, not for the judgment they would place on his crime but for the sheer fun of finding him. Beyond this he couldn’t plan, and he turned in his blankets and was asleep before his fire was coals.
He was traveling before sunrise again next morning. The clouds had lifted from the peaks, revealing them in their new white, but the sky was still overcast. It was a raw day, and Jim knew this wasn’t the end of the snow and he hurried. In midmorning, slanting into the lower country, he saw his first Ute
lodge. A little later he met a Ute buck on the road, his squaw riding some fifteen paces behind him. The Ute hailed him and talked with great dignity for some moments and then asked him for tobacco. Jim left him his sack and rode on, considering the gift a form of toll.
The country, still high, leveled off into a piñon plateau now, and Jim rode it through the long morning and into the afternoon. He saw many meat camps with their drying racks and their poles and an occasional lodge, and once a band of horses crossed the road ahead of him, their tails leveled out and heads high. An Indian boy who was so small he had probably needed a stump to mount his horse was chasing them, lying flat on his horse’s neck and riding bareback. At sight of Jim he pulled his horse into the trees and vanished.
In late afternoon the country shelved off in a broad, bare valley bisected by a sizable stream, and here lay the agency.
It sprawled on a grassy shoulder of land free of trees and bare as a stone save for the ragged willows fringing the stream.
The wagon road formed the only street, and in tumultuous disarray on either side of it were the skin-and-canvas lodges of the Utes. A hundred dogs skulked about the camp, which was littered as far as the eye reached with the bleached bones of game and beef. Wide-eyed children dressed in a mixture of ill-fitting store clothes and buckskin watched Jim’s entry and did not greet him. Campfires burned in front of most of the tepees, the smoke riding the heavy air barely above the camp. Sprinkled through this army of lodges was an occasional log cabin, ill
constructed, roofed with brush or sod, windowless and doorless and its yard littered with refuse. Pole corrals lay among the lodges, and off to the west beyond the camp were log storehouses and a bigger corral where the beef issues took place.
At the far end of the camp, on the brow of the hill, was a long log building comprising the store and quarters of a white trader. Beyond it, close to the far slope of the valley, was the stone house of the agency and office. A picket fence, badly needing paint and repair, enclosed the yard where a garden had died without anybody’s caring or noticing. The barns and corrals were separated from it by an orchard of new trees which Jim guessed the former agent had planted.
He tied his horse at the hitch rail by the gate and went up to the house. It was L shaped, the front angle comprising the office, on whose door was painted the legend “Agent.”
Jim knocked and, waiting for an answer, looked around the yard. It was as littered as the Indian camp below. The last wind had wedged an open newspaper against the fence, where it was aging unheeded into a rich brown. Bottles, Jim noted dryly, comprised most of the litter.
“Come in, come in!” A voice shouted impatiently from inside.
Jim palmed the knob and stepped inside. The office was gloomy in the fading afternoon light, and he could see nobody at the moment. Then he spotted Pindalest standing in the doorway that let onto the living quarters of the house.
The agent was in shirt sleeves, his galluses trailing down behind him, his sparse hair mussed, his
boots off. He stared stupidly at Jim for a moment, small mouth pursed in sleepy truculence.
Then recognition came, and he said, “Why, hello, Garry. Jim Garry, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. How are you, Mr. Pindalest?” Jim asked affably.
Pindalest shuffled over, and they shook hands.
“Sit down, man, sit down,” Pindalest invited. “Been riding all day and was just having a nap. Here, fire up the stove. It’s cold in here. I’ll be back in a minute.” He started back for the other room and said over his shoulder, “Might light the lamp too.”
Jim went about these simple chores carefully, rehearsing what was to come. He was in luck that Pindalest recognized him, for what he was about to say would carry more weight now. He threw a chunk of wood in the Franklin stove and raised the draft, though to him it was hot in here now. He lighted the lamp and looked around him. Pindalest’s roll-top desk in the corner was littered with papers. The spittoon needed cleaning, and the whole room a thorough sweeping. It had an air of shiftless disinterest about it that semed to go with petty officialdom, Jim thought.
His judgment of Pindalest at Sun Dust had been accurate enough, even without Riling’s contemptuous dismissal of him, but he had no intention of underestimating his man. When Pindalest came in carrying a tray with a pitcher of water, two glasses and a bottle of whisky on it Jim was sitting patiently, almost broodingly, hands folded, like any puncher on an errand to his superiors.
“Here, pour your own,” Pindalest said. “Make mine light, very light.”
Jim poured the drinks, and Pindalest sank into the swivel chair by his desk. It creaked ominously under his soft bulk, and he tilted it back against the wall.
Pindalest was obviously anxious to hear Jim’s news, but he was playing his role of affable host first. He had tidied himself somewhat and put on his boots and smoothed down his hair. Drinking the raw whisky and welcoming its fire, Jim thought suddenly that he had seen this face a thousand times behind bank wickets, in stores, in railroad stations. It was a face of small greeds, transparent and shrewd.
Pindalest gave him time to put his glass down and then he asked with affected unconcern, “Well, how goes it with you and Riling?”
“Fine, Mr. Pindalest, fine,” Jim murmured. “I’ve got the news you’ve been waiting to hear.”
Pindalest shed all pretense of unconcern. He leaned over as far as his paunch would allow and said excitedly, “What is it, Jim? Has Lufton given up?”
Jim nodded. “That’s about the way it shakes down. Riling had a parley with him after I pointed out to Lufton that he had to sell. He pounded sand there for a while, but he came around.”
Pindalest settled back slowly into his chair, a broad smile on his narrow face. The naked greed in his eyes was not pleasant to see, but Jim’s face was expressionless.
“Bravo,” Pindalest said. “Bravo.” And then, quickly, “Does Lufton suspect anything?”