Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (13 page)

Andy moved toward it with his mouth set in
disapproval. He stopped close to the door and knocked on it with
two knuckles, trying to keep the sound low enough that no one but
the room’s occupant would hear. He waited. There was no response,
which seemed to indicate his caution had kept it too low even for
that, so he tried again, just a hint louder. As before, no
answer.

Frowning, Andy put his ear to the door. He
listened, his eyes moving back and forth in concentration. There
was not the least sound from within the room, not the least whisper
of movement; nothing that would indicate a human presence except
the burning light. He put his hand to the doorknob and tried it,
and it turned easily. Andy pushed the door inward a few inches, but
still there was no response from within the room, so he opened it
still further and put his head in.

The lamp was burning unattended on the
night-table. In its full light the young stranger lay back across
the bed, one arm outflung and one leg draped over the edge,
apparently sunk in a deep sleep. He seemed to have dropped at once
and lay where he had fallen, for he still wore his coat and had not
even bothered to take off his boots. The saddlebags lay at the foot
of the bed and his hat on the floor beside it. Andy Brown, mindful
of the reason that had brought him to the room, stepped in and
closed the door behind him. He came a few steps toward the bed. The
boy did not move; he seemed entirely insensible to all sounds. Andy
came closer and leaned over him, wrinkling his nose apprehensively,
for the unpleasant idea of a sick or dead occupant in the reserved
room made him a little sick himself at the thought of the double
unpleasantness it would entail for him. He was relieved at once on
the latter score, for close up he could hear the other boy’s soft,
heavy breathing. But he certainly did not look well, Andy thought.
His face was almost colorless, with gray shadows under the hollows
of his closed eyes.

Andy put a hand on his arm and shook him a
little. He had to do this twice more before the boy showed any sign
of life. At Andy’s third try he slowly opened clouded, heavy eyes
without moving any other part of his body.

“Say, you’re showing a light,” said Andy.
The boy stared up at him uncomprehendingly. Andy spoke again: “The
light from this lamp’s showing out in the hall. Somebody sees that
light and mentions there was someone in this room, I’m in
trouble.”

A belated consciousness seemed to force its
way to the surface of the other boy’s mind, and the dazed look in
his eyes changed swiftly to suspicion. He stiffened as if to rise
and his head lifted slightly, but he could not that quickly collect
the strength.

“How’d you get in here?” he demanded.

Andy, somewhat taken aback, gestured
uncertainly behind him. “The door.”

The boy stared at him with hostility that
was clearly only a mask for alarm. “It wasn’t locked?”

“No.”

The boy let his head drop back onto the bed.
“Not locked,” he said aloud, though evidently to himself. “After
all this—and I forget to lock the door—!”

He shut his eyes and drew a deep breath.
Andy Brown peered down into his face with some concern.

“Say, you don’t look so good,” he said.
“What’s the matter with you—sick?”

The other boy made a negative motion with
his head on the pillow. “No—just missed eating a few times.” He
opened his eyes and looked at Andy for a few seconds, as if he were
trying to process an idea in his mind. “Listen…you think you could
get me a drink? I just need something to brace me up, that’s
all.”

Andy considered this. “I guess I could,” he
said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He paused on his way out to push one of the
braided rag rugs on the floor over in front of the door where it
would block most of the offending light streaming underneath, then
closed the door carefully behind him and went down the stairs with
the utmost caution. The hotel was still silent. Andy went down into
the barroom, and edged his way cautiously behind the bar into the
glimmering, unfamiliar world of the bartender’s stock in trade,
which looked like some strange scientist’s laboratory in the dark.
He found a bottle of brandy already half empty, so the difference
would not be noticed, and poured a small amount into a glass. This
he prudently and liberally diluted with water, and then carried it
out and upstairs to the reserved room.

The young stranger was propped up on one
elbow when Andy entered. He sat up to take the glass, and drank it
slowly, pausing every now and then. When he finished there was a
little more color in his face, and he seemed to have regained some
self-possession. He returned the empty glass a little awkwardly,
his eyes meeting Andy’s only briefly with a somewhat furtive
expression.

“Thanks,” he said. He added after a second,
“I appreciate it.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” said Andy Brown with
a half-smile—and added rather dryly as he turned to leave the room,
“Even though I may be compounding a felony by doing it…”

He heard a slight movement behind him, and
then as his hand touched the doorknob, a distinct
click
made
him halt. “Hold it,” said the other boy’s voice, low but swift.

Andy turned around, slowly, to behold him
sitting up straight in the middle of the bed, a gun in his hand
directed at the clerk. His face was tense, his eyes wary.

“Just what do you mean by that?” he
said.

Andy, his attention somewhat divided between
the hostile yet dreading expression in the boy’s eyes and the
weapon in his hand, observed that the muzzle of the gun trembled a
little.

He did not feel exactly frightened, yet
neither did he feel inclined to move, so he essayed to speak
without moving more than he could help, holding his head a little
stiffly. “Well,” he said, “it doesn’t take too much effort to
figure that you’re running from something.”

“Why?” said the boy, his eyes not leaving
Andy’s face.

“Well, for one thing, because your name is
John Smith—or more likely because it isn’t.” Andy felt safe enough
to make an explanatory gesture with the hand that held the empty
glass. “You’ve been traveling without eating for a while, you’re
kind of touchy about unlocked doors, and—er—you point guns at
people. And you had some really good reason for wanting this
room.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Andy shrugged. “There’s not much I can do,”
he said. “Matter of fact there’s really nothing either of us can
do. You know I can’t split on you without losing my job over
letting you in here. I know you can’t shoot me; you’d bring half
the population of the State in at the door if you did that. But I’d
like to know what I’m going to be prosecuted for when they catch
you, if you don’t mind.”

The boy let the gun down slowly, and his
expression slid into the same dreary misery he had shown earlier.
“Nothing—I haven’t committed any crime.”

“Well, then, gee whiz, what are you getting
so worked up over?” said Andy frankly.

The boy had settled back slowly on his
elbow, his fingers still loosely around the butt of the gun that
lay beside him on the quilt. He flashed Andy a dark look, some
latent streak of temper coming to the surface. “I guess you’d be
pretty worked up too, if your own father had set a sheriff after
you!”

As Andy’s own father was a mild, middle-aged
bookkeeper who would have been confounded at the notion of setting
a sheriff after anybody, his son may perhaps be forgiven for
responding to this sensational statement with only a lift of the
eyebrows.

“What is your name, anyway?” he asked, after
a moment’s thought.

The boy measured him as if calculating the
risks of admission, then shifted his eyes away and spoke abruptly,
as though giving up any effort at concealment. “Owen Moore.”

Andy, after a few seconds’ reflection,
shrugged. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“I guess word hasn’t gotten this far yet,”
Owen muttered with bitter sarcasm.

He put the gun aside on the night-table and
rolled back onto the pillow. He stared at the ceiling for a second,
and then glanced down at Andy. “Think you could get me another
drink?”

“I don’t think you
need
it this
time,” said Andy shrewdly. (Owen’s opinion of this remark was
unintelligible.) “How about something to eat? That’ll make you feel
some better anyway.”

“I guess so,” said Owen without enthusiasm.
He let out a breath that could almost have been called a sigh, had
it not exhibited that same guarded restraint that lurked in his
every move. Andy eyed him for a second, his nose wrinkling up in
mildly puzzled curiosity, and then he turned to go. “All right.
I’ll see if I can find something.”

He went downstairs, became aware of the
empty brandy glass still in his hand as he reached the lobby, and
temporarily concealed it behind the desk. Then he picked his way
through the dark hotel dining-room, edging carefully through the
obstacle-course of tables and upturned chairs, and made a foray
into the even darker recesses of the kitchen. After poking about
blindly and cautiously for a few minutes, he found some stew, cold,
with a sheen of congealed grease on top, and half a loaf of
slightly stale bread. Andy sawed an end off this very gingerly,
reflecting that one never knew how much noise it took to cut a
slice of bread until one tried it in the middle of the night. Laden
with these spoils he returned upstairs.

Owen Moore took the food with a short word
of thanks and ate it ravenously, sitting on the side of the bed,
without comment on its quality—Andy judged correctly that he hardly
tasted it. He seemed abstracted while he ate, staring hard at the
wall opposite, and when he had finished he handed the scraped and
empty plate off to Andy without even looking at him.

Then he glanced up. “Is there some paper and
a pen around here that I can use?”

Andy gestured with an elbow. “Ought to be
some in the table drawer over there.”

Owen looked and nodded briefly. “Can you
mail a letter for me?—How about a stamp?”

“I can get you one from the desk downstairs,
I think.”

“I’ll pay you for it,” said Owen with a
return of that sharp, almost defiant edge to his voice. Andy looked
at him, and started to open his mouth, but thought better of
it.

“I’ll just go wash the dishes,” he said,
feeling something of the incongruity of the words with the
situation, “and then I’ll bring you the stamp. Should be an
envelope in the drawer there too, I guess.”

Andy went down and washed the dishes,
feeling that engaging in these mildly illicit activities in the
darkened hotel corridors was at least an enlivening change from his
usual quiet vigil in the lobby. He contrived to return plate, fork
and the glass he had remembered to retrieve from behind the desk to
their proper places without much noise, and then he got a stamp
from the desk and went upstairs once more. He wondered if anyone in
the hotel
was
awake, what they thought of this continual
parade of stealthy footsteps past their door.

Owen Moore was seated at the table by the
wall when Andy came in, writing rapidly. His face was nearly
expressionless, but the way his lips set and tightened and the
force with which his hand drove the pen gave some idea of the tone
of the letter. His tousled hair fell over his forehead almost into
his eyes. Andy sat down in the chair in the corner and rested one
foot across his knee, and watched him. Owen had filled two sheets
of paper already, and was midway through a third, the vicious
scratches and stabs of the pen noisy in the silence of the room. He
drove the pen so hard at last that the nib broke, forcing him to
pause in exasperation.

The mishap seemed to break his momentum
somewhat. He looked in the drawer for another nib, pulled the
broken one out and fitted the new one in. He glanced at Andy Brown
more than once while doing this—a glance that seemed defensive,
though Andy had said nothing.

Owen wrote the last few lines with a more
normal stroke, blotted the paper and then folded the whole letter
and put it in an envelope. Then he slid around in his chair, put
one hand on his knee, and gave Andy that defensive look again.

“What are you looking at me like that for?”
he said.

Andy lifted his shoulders innocently. “I’m
not saying anything,” he said. “I can’t help wondering, of course.
You wouldn’t expect me to keep from wondering.”

Owen stood up abruptly and turned away. He
flung himself down again on the bed, lying on his back with one leg
bent, and stared at the lamplight on the ceiling.

Andy said, “If you didn’t commit any crime,
why’d your father set a sheriff after you?”

The answer came back with a quickness which
betrayed how much the boy needed to talk. “He thinks I did. That’s
all he knew.”

“Well, if you can prove you’re innocent, why
couldn’t you go and—”

Owen clicked his teeth shut. “No. Because I
wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

He sat up, propped on both elbows. “You want
to hear about it? I’ll tell you.”

It was more of a challenge than an
invitation, but Andy conveyed his willingness to listen by lifting
his eyebrows inquiringly and looking as attentive as possible.

Owen did not begin for a minute. He shifted
onto his side, scraped with his thumbnail at an ink stain on his
other index finger, and stared at a rug on the floor. “I don’t know
why it is,” he began; “maybe it doesn’t matter—my father and I
haven’t gotten along for a long time. Not since—my mother died, six
months ago. We’ve been at each other’s throats all the time.
Nothing I do is right, and he just seems set on aggravating me
whenever he can.” He scraped harder at the finger and his hand
slipped with a jerk. “I’d asked him for some money to buy a horse,
a few weeks ago. He said he’d think about it. Well, the other night
we had a fight; what it was about doesn’t matter. Just the usual.
He wound up by saying I wouldn’t get a penny from him till I
started acting right. It wasn’t about the horse; he just threw it
in.”