Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (12 page)

It only lasted a few minutes. The cloud
rushed by, the wind and rain receded almost as fast as they had
come, leaving the file of soaked horses clinging to their sanctuary
on the ledge, sodden and subdued, but safe. Bob and Lainey Russell
stood on the ledge, wet through and still holding close together,
and looked down into the churning brown river booming in the canyon
where they had been only moments before. And for the first time in
the great adventure of her marriage Lainey let her head fall
against her husband’s shoulder and burst into tears.

Several days later, Gerald McCarthy heard
some reports about the cloudburst in the foothills from stockyard
visitors who had come from that direction. No one knew yet if any
lives had been lost, but a dead buckskin horse wearing a V-5 brand
and tangled in the remnants of a pack harness had been found in the
muddy debris at the bottom of a canyon that had been washed down by
the storm. Gerald said nothing about it, but his temper grew
thunderous for several days, and he fired his latest cook without
even having had time to find fault with her cooking. There were
plenty of people in Alton who knew Bob Russell’s pair of
pack-horses, the buckskin and the dun with the V-5 brand, and they
were well aware that Gerald knew those horses too.

Then on that Thursday Old Digger came
hurrying into the stockyards bursting with news. Some men had been
arrested in a town forty miles away for killing two men back in the
hills and stealing half a dozen horses from them. Some friends of
the murdered men had recognized the horses when the thieves brought
them down into town. They had a dozen other probably stolen horses
with them too, a mix of branded and unbranded stock, and one of
them was a dun horse with a V-5 brand, slightly gimpy on the off
foreleg.

What had really happened, of course, was
that the dun had been stolen out of Quint’s corral just a few days
after Bob Russell sold him. But Gerald could not know this, and the
unsettling riddle of the pack-horses wound into a more and more
vexing knot in his mind. How the two horses had ended up fifty
miles apart, with a disaster at either end, was a conundrum that
meant a bad answer either way. Gerald hired no new cook at all, and
spent more of his time immured in the shack; he stalked the
stockyards like a hulking, vengeful ghost, and the most insouciant
of the cowboys found excuses to shoulder round corners when they
saw him coming.

On Saturday Gerald went into town, and dealt
with his usual rounds of business at the bank and stores. When he
got back, he left his team standing and stumped off through the
corrals in search of Joe, his brow ominous as it had been all week.
He rounded a corner by the horse pens and came face to face with
Bob Russell—who, looking a little tired and weather-worn, had just
shut the gate on a string of bedraggled mustangs that were still
doing their best to kick up a rumpus in the corral. Gerald fell
back a step and stared; his face turned red and then nearly
purple.

“You—you con
founded
young fool!” he
thundered at him. “You was figured to be dead!”

Bob had rather hoped his father-in-law would
have mellowed a little with absence, but this didn’t sound
promising.

Before he could answer Gerald got his breath
and demanded, “Where’s Lainey?”

“Up at the house. She—”

Gerald did not wait to hear, but swung round
and stomped off toward the shack looking like he would explode
whatever got in his path. But before he had gotten halfway Lainey
came running from the shack to meet him calling “Pa! Oh, Pa!” and
jumped and flung her arms around his neck like a little girl, and
whatever bluster he had been ready to launch was cut rather
short.

After that none of Gerald’s grumbling was
very convincing, though he still had to do it to save face. The
Russells had supper at the shack that night—Lainey had already
whipped it back into its old orderly state—and Gerald sat
afterwards and listened to their eager explanations of their plans
for building a house and raising saddle horses, letting out an
occasional short forceful snuffing sound through his big nose that
was the closest to approval he would let himself get.

“Well,” he said grudgingly, “it’s better’n’
traipsing through the hills chasing wild ones for a living. There’s
no future in that.”

“Of course there is!” said Lainey, a
spirited defender of her husband’s profession at any provocation.
“There’s
ours
, right in those broncs in the corral. You said
yourself last spring that those horses Bob brought in were the best
you’d seen in Alton in three years.”

Gerald coughed. “I don’t recollect saying
that or not,” he said, “but I still say roughing it with a pack
outfit ain’t no proper way for married folks to live. I hope you
ain’t plannin’ on doing any more o’
that
before you settle
down.”

“Oh, I’m not. Anyway by next summer I’ll
have a baby to look after, and so—”

Old Digger happened to be passing by the
shack just then, and he stopped to listen and then hurried on to
the cattle pens to tell the men there that old Gerald was
quarreling with his son-in-law again. Which goes to show that not
even students of human nature can be right all the time.

The clock on the wall struck ten times, a
series of thin, reedy notes that followed each other wonderingly
about the empty hotel lobby and then dwindled away into nothing.
The stillness that followed seemed an anti-climax, as if the clock
had spoken out of turn and been embarrassed into apologetic
silence.

Andy Brown, the night clerk, glanced briefly
up at the clock, then returned his full attention to the book in
his hands. The hotel was as quiet as only a very full hotel can be,
with the consciousness of sleeping people around every corner and
behind every door. Nearly every hotel in town was in similar case,
for it was the night before the fourth of July; though there was
still light and activity in the barrooms of the larger
establishments. In this one, however, which lay in a quieter
section of town, only a single lamp burning in the lobby shed a
round yellow pool of light over the front desk behind which the
young clerk sat reading. One of the double doors to the street
stood half open, and outside it was dark.

Ten minutes had passed since the striking of
the clock, though Andy Brown, absorbed in his book, had noticed
none of them, when there came a faint tread in the street, followed
by the more distinct sound of a booted foot on the floorboards of
the porch. As the door creaked, and footsteps crossed the floor to
the desk, Andy sat forward in his chair and began to turn his head,
his eyes staying on the page until the last possible instant.
Reluctantly he pulled them away and stood up, one finger between
the pages of the book, to meet the newcomer, who had stopped and
leaned one elbow on the desk as though too tired to stand on his
own.

He was young, probably no more than Andy’s
recently attained twenty, with unruly, dark-gold hair curling on
his forehead beneath a hat worn somewhat askew. There was a
slackness about his shoulders and a hollow, disheartened look in
his eyes that for some reason caught the young clerk’s notice,
although tired travelers were certainly nothing new on the night
shift.

“Room for the night?” said the boy
dully.

Andy shook his head regretfully. “Sorry.
We’re full up.”

“You
can’t
be full,” said the other,
with disbelief.

Andy shrugged. “It’s always this way on the
Fourth, with the rodeo and all. You might try the Whitmore over on
Bell Street; they might have a room left, but—”

“I’ve been there already; they’re full.” The
boy put a hand to his eyes and rubbed them wearily, then blinked
twice as though trying to keep himself awake. “Look, there’s got to
be someplace you can put me—I don’t care what it is, a closet,
attic or what. Any place.”

“But there isn’t any. All the rooms are
full. Some are already doubled up, and there’s ladies in others.
There’s not a corner empty except the reserved room, and of course
that’s out—”

The other boy straightened slightly. “A
reserved room—with nobody in it? You mean they didn’t show?”

“No, no. That’s Mr. Wynant’s room. He’s part
owner. He always reserves it in advance when he comes in from
Denver. It’s strictly against rules to put anybody in there if he’s
expected.”

“He isn’t there now.”

“No, but he’ll be here tomorrow afternoon.
Mr. Donovan would skin me alive if I put anybody else in that
room—and then fire me,” Andy added practically. “Why don’t you go
down to one of the liveries, or the wagon yard—you can find a place
to camp out there. Lots of fellows doing that already, I’ll
bet.”

“No,” said the young stranger abruptly. “No,
I can’t do that.” He shook his head again several times, not,
seemingly, to add emphasis to his denial, but for some reason known
only to himself. He leaned further forward, his arm on the edge of
the desk. “Listen, just let me stay in that empty room tonight and
I’ll be out of here first thing in the morning. I won’t cause any
trouble. I’ll pay you double, if you want. Just—”

“Look here, don’t try to bribe me,” said
Andy, becoming stiff with the dignity of a very young official.

“No, no, I didn’t mean that. I don’t know
what I mean. I’ve just
got
to have a room for tonight. Just
let me stay and I’ll—well, I can’t give you anything. I’m just
asking for a favor—please.” The last word came in a lower, limp
voice, without any effort at persuasion, which somehow made the
appeal more affecting.

Andy scrutinized him with an uncertain
expression, one eyebrow bent in a puzzled manner. The other boy’s
dejection had touched on an unexpected reserve of pity in him. The
look in his eyes was not merely physical exhaustion. And the
hopeless, mute importuning in them was something Andy could answer,
if he would. Andy stood undecided. He had told the truth; he would
indeed lose his job (a very good job) if his trafficking with the
reserved room was discovered. But it did not have to be, he
reasoned. In a moral sense, surely no one could object to his
giving a weary traveler a place to rest, so long as the hotel
accounts were kept square.

“Well,” he said, still doubtful, but clearly
relenting.

He took a piece of paper from a drawer, got
out a pen, and pushed them both across the top of the desk. “Put
your name on there,” he said, “and you can give me the money, I
guess, and I’ll work it into the accounts.”

“How?” said the other boy, glancing up from
the paper, a sidelong, deliberating glance.

Andy flipped open the hotel register and
turned it around to look at it. “There’s usually somebody leaving
on the midnight train,” he reflected. “As soon as someone checks
out, I’ll make believe you came in then and put you into their room
till tomorrow morning. In the book, that is.”

“You do this regular?” said the other with a
kind of dull interest.

“No, this is my first time. But it shouldn’t
be hard,” said Andy equably.

The boy finished writing his name and let
the pen fall on the paper, from whence it proceeded to roll slowly
away across the desk. He rubbed his hand across his forehead and
the bridge of his nose and remained with his head bent for a few
seconds, his eyes hidden by his hand. Andy took down the key to the
reserved room, held it in the palm of his hand for a second, and
then turned around and resolutely handed it over. “Upstairs and to
your left.”

The other nodded without looking at him, his
eyes half closing with weariness. He bent over and picked up a pair
of saddlebags from the floor, and started toward the darkened
staircase to the right of the desk.

Andy returned the pen to the inkstand, and
drew the piece of paper toward him. He turned it around to look at
the signature, wondering how difficult it would be to copy. The
name was scrawled unevenly in a round, youthful-looking
hand—
John Smith
.

The expression of the young clerk’s eyebrows
became rather curious. He looked toward the staircase, which stood
empty and silent once more, and again at the paper in his hand. He
considered for a moment, biting thoughtfully at one side of his
lower lip, and then he put the paper away into one of the
innumerable small drawers of the desk and shut it up safely. Then
he glanced up at the clock, picked up his book again, and sat down
and opened it.

For the space of about twenty pages the
lobby was silent, excepting the ticking of the clock, and the
slight rustle of paper at intervals as Andy turned over a page, a
calmly absorbed expression on his face.

He had just turned another when a faint
breath of cool air invaded the region of the desk, which did not
come from the street door, but had wandered down the dark tunnel of
the staircase. Andy lifted his head and listened. A small,
irregular muffled knocking sound was coming from somewhere above.
Andy laid aside his book and got up. The hall window at the head of
the first flight of stairs had a loose catch, and was in the habit
of coming open and letting in an unwanted night draft, while the
swinging window bumped gently against the wall. He had been
required to go up and shut it several times during his shifts.

He went up the stairs to the open window,
dark with long white curtains stirring on either side of it like
undulating ghosts. Andy shut the window, giving the faulty catch a
little twist and rattle in hopes of making it stay put, and turned
around to go back down.

As he turned something in the hall to his
left arrested him. A thin yellow line showed under one of the
doors, a puddle of dim light picking out the pattern of the carpet
in front of it. It was the door of the reserved room.