Part 3 (1/2)

”He's still out?”

”Cold. They carried him across to a room at The Antlers.”

Lyans's smile pa.s.sed unnoticed in the darkness. By rights he should have been angry about being dragged out of a hot midweek bath to officiate at the outcome of a brawl. He wasn't. Half an hour ago he had hurried home to give his wife the news of the settlement made at the Middle Arizona ranchers' meeting.

Her relief had been as keen as his, for the past few weeks had been a waking nightmare to both of them, with the threatened violence between the cattle company and the Mesa Grande outfits a constant worry. As deputy sheriff, responsible for law enforcement in this remote corner of the county, Bill Lyans considered himself a lucky man at the way things had turned out. Now he could concentrate on his job at Olson's feed mill, meanwhile dealing with such petty duties as arose, like this trouble between Merrill and young Bonnyman.

”He'll probably hop that late freight,” Baker said as they came abreast of the first darkened stores.

Lyans had been thinking of something else. ”Who?” he asked, half absently.

”Joe Bonnyman.”

”Here's hopin'.” Lyans breathed the words prayerfully, knowing Joe Bonnyman's capacity for making trouble. He considered his natural liking for Yace Bonnyman's wild son as something alien in his make-up, like his taste for whiskey, and now conscientiously tried to bridle his regret at not having seen Joe or had a drink with him during his brief return to Lodgepole. He was sure that Baker's hunch on Joe's leaving was correct.

Ed Merrill was lying on the bed of an upstairs room, head and shoulders propped on pillows. Doc Nesbit was offering him a bottle of smelling salts, which he pushed roughly aside as Baker and the lawman entered. Ruth Merrill was there, holding a lamp Nesbit had needed in applying antiseptic to the cuts and bruises on her brother's face. When Lyans stepped in, she returned the lamp to the table and moved quietly into the background, antic.i.p.ating an immediate outburst from Ed.

That outburst didn't come. Ed's look turned sullen at sight of the deputy. He seemed about to say something, then evidently changed his mind.

Seeing that Merrill wasn't going to speak, Lyans queried: ”Everything all right, Doc?”

”He needs rest. No bones broken.” The medico came up off the bed and began packing his black kit bag.

Lyans looked at Merrill and waited, giving the man a second opportunity to speak. But again Merrill chose to retire behind the sh.e.l.l of his sullenness.

”Goin' to bring charges?” Lyans asked at length.

Merrill shook his head.

The deputy lifted his shoulders in a meager gesture of dismissal. Then, seeing the doctor heading for the door and Baker already gone, he felt that his presence here was unwanted, and said: ”I'll walk along with you, Doc.”

The steps of the two men had receded down the corridor toward the stair head before Ed said querulously: ”A sawbones and the law! Where's the coroner? They act like I'd been murdered.” The perfect oval of Ruth Merrill's face took on a smile. ”You nearly were,” she said, a dry edge to her voice. Abruptly her look changed, robbing her of some of her composure. ”What did you say to Joe?”

Ed glowered up at her a moment before answering. ”Told him to stay away from you.”

She nodded. ”And what else?”

”Did there have to be anything else?”

”Yes. If you remember, staying away from me is an old story to Joe. You must have said something else.”

Merrill swore softly, adding the weight of a mocking laugh to his words. ”Dog-gone it, you're a little flirt! First you wouldn't have anything to do with Joe because he wanted you. Now you've . . .”

The girl's face flamed hotly in anger. All at once she stepped up to the bed, drew back her hand, and slapped her brother hard across his cut and swollen mouth. There was no pity in her as he groaned in pain. She stepped quickly out of the way as his hand s.n.a.t.c.hed out, trying for a hold on her skirt. At the door, turning to give him a last loathing look, she said scathingly: ”You're still the same spoiled brat that rubbed burrs in that tame little Shetland's saddle blanket to make him buck. I wish I could hope Joe was staying to finish what he started.”

The dark look that came to Ed Merrill's face didn't pa.s.s until minutes after she had closed the door and gone to her room. At this moment, he was a man half insane with rage and shame, rage at his sister's reminder of a bullying childhood, shame at having suffered another defeat at the hands of a lifelong enemy. Never before tonight had he been really afraid of Joe Bonnyman. But now, remembering the ease with which Joe had licked him, the studied viciousness of those last blows driving him back through the window, he was afraid, and that fear fed the flames of his impotent hate.

Although he didn't will it, Ed's mind incessantly brought up pictures of the past, mostly of his relations with Joe Bonnyman. In the next couple of hours that he should have spent asleep, he took a better look at himself than ever before in his life, and what he saw didn't please him. He was plagued by the certainty that he had been in the wrong tonight, shamed at having let a smaller man whip him, and finally his fury was directed at the doctor and Bill Lyans for their offers to be helpful. He couldn't put down the idea that they had been making fun of him, gloating over his helplessness in a smug and mock-serious derision. Well, he wasn't going to give anyone else that chance. As he decided that, he was swinging his legs down off the bed and stepping into his boots.

A spell of dizziness, quickly pa.s.sing, hit Merrill as he stood erect. He looked at his watch and was surprised to find the hour close to 1:00. He went to the window, cupped his hands to his face, and peered out and down along the dark street. There was a light on in the window of a bakery, the semaph.o.r.e at the station winked greenly, and out beyond that, in the distance, the bright myriad of stars dimmed before the darker shadow of a cloud bank.

Ed crossed the room unsteadily to stand with feet spread widely, peering at his reflection in the cracked mirror over the washstand. His right eye was swollen shut; no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't even slit it open. Both it and the left were purpling under deep bruises. The cheek bone below the shut eye was gashed and a livid red. Merrill had refused to let the doctor put sticking plaster over it. His upper body and arms were sore to the touch in a dozen places, and he couldn't close his left hand because of the intolerable ache in a bone of the palm. He knew that his impulse to ride out home tonight, to avoid the looks and questions of friends and acquaintances on the street tomorrow, was a rash one, yet any amount of torture was worth the saving of his injured pride, and, when he walked back soundlessly along the corridor to the back stairs, he knew that he would get out to Brush tonight if it half killed him.

In the alley, Merrill turned left toward the feed barn lot, hoping the stableman had left his horse in a stall. He had taken perhaps thirty steps, and the outline of the big pole corral was coming up out of the darkness, when a sound from a building close at hand abruptly stopped him.

That building he identified as the Acme Land Company's. The sound he couldn't define; it was a m.u.f.fled tapping, sharp yet indistinct, the ring of metal on metal. Then, suddenly, Ed was seeing the big safe that sat behind Fred Vanover's desk in the Acme office, and as suddenly knew that someone was trying to break into that safe.

He stood there uncertainly, ruling out at once the idea of calling help because he was in no shape to be seen. His gun was in a pouch of his saddle, down at the barn, but to find the saddle and get back here might mean he'd be too late. Still hesitating, he peered hard into the thick shadow at the building's rear. Something he saw sent him tiptoeing in toward the door, aware that the sounds inside had ceased.

He was reaching out for the broken handle of a broom that leaned against the wall when the door close beside him grated open. s.n.a.t.c.hing up the rounded three-foot stick, Ed whirled to face the door, and the man who lunged through it. He swung the stick viciously, yet the blow that took his a.s.sailant across the forearm only increased the power behind the gun arcing down at Ed's head. Its sharp heel caught him high on the forehead, and made a pulpy sound as it drove deeply in his skull. His big frame went loose all over, and he melted down into the darkness. A moment later a dull heavy thud rode across the stillness.

The man who had hit Merrill wheeled in through the doorway quickly on the heel of that m.u.f.fled explosion. He choked as the stinging stench of burned nitroglycerin bit into his lungs. Coughing, his eyes filled with tears, he crossed the dust-filled room, kicked aside an overturned swivel chair, and pushed open the sprung door to the safe.

By the brief flare of a match the man located a strong box and two filled money sacks. He was out the alley door and running in toward the hotel's high outline by the time the first shout sounded on the street. Presently he disappeared into the shadow at the rear of the hotel. The faint squeak of a door hinge deep in that shadow was the only sound that betrayed his entrance into the building.

Homeward Bound.

Joe Bonnyman was disappointed and angry. Barely a mile out of Lodgepole, he had left the dry, smelly warmth of the stove-heated caboose to stand on its rear platform, his frame wedged against the wall by a boot braced on the sooted railing. There, tense under the violent lurching of the long line of cars gathering speed under two locomotives for the stiff grade leading to the pa.s.s, he watched the lights of the town recede into the distance. He could no more define his regret at leaving Lodgepole than he could the impulse that had brought him down here from Wyoming after vowing never to lay eyes on his father again.

The twin ribbons of steel unwound beyond the platform's edge into the night. For a time they held Joe's glance fascinated, two bright spots reflecting the gleam of the caboose's warning lanterns glowing rosily. Finally he let his glance stray to either side and out into the country flanking the railroad's line. To the south the flats stretched mile upon mile, dropping ultimately to the desert, he knew. Northward, he could picture the climbing folds of the sage country that would eventually put a man at the edge of the broad mountain-backed mesa on which Anchor and the other big ranches were lost in the vastness of a rich and gra.s.sy land.

Joe tried to put down a small run of excitement as he saw a pinpoint of light s.h.i.+ning down from that high country. That light might well be coming from a window of Anchor's sprawling stone house, his home, or it might be the lantern hung outside the bunkhouse door to guide in a late rider, his father, or Blaze. Joe eyed it long and fixedly, hardly aware of the train's labored jerking as it took the long grade into the low tangle of foothills that was an offshoot of those northward peaks backing Anchor.

Now that Joe was alone and could look back sanely upon the night's happenings, his mind gradually built a web of thinking that was logical and dispa.s.sionate. Back there his judgment had been a little warped by the unexpectedness of once more clas.h.i.+ng with his father's will. But little of his anger remained when he remembered Yace's look, how much he had visibly aged. He knew his father must feel himself on the downgrade of life. Soon, five years from now, ten at the outside, Yace would be but a sh.e.l.l of the man whose brute strength and iron will had carved a cattle empire from this far frontier. Then, his family gone, the fruits of his life's struggle would seem barren and valueless in his loneliness. Yes, even Yace Bonnyman would one day find his world meaningless.

A slow rebellion built up in Joe as this picture flashed before his mind's eye. He could even feel sympathy for Yace, see him as a pathetic, lost figure whose only solace would come in memories of days long gone. He considered his reasons for leaving-his inability to get on with Yace, his reluctance to face the blame for his original foolhardy act of selling out to Middle Arizona. And he knew now that, wherever he went, whatever he did, the memory of having backed down before these two obstacles would always rankle.

It naturally followed that Joe began considering ways to make amends, supposing for the moment that he stayed on in this country. He could avoid Yace, get a job that would never take him to Anchor; the job Clark had offered was such a one. He could pull in his horns, mind his own business, and maybe one day prove to the others that he wasn't all bad. Blaze had been right; he should take the chip off his shoulder. People would gradually forget, so would Yace, and in the end, when time had glossed over the past, he could one day go back to Anchor.

Suddenly Joe awoke to the fact that his problem was already half solved. In his experience, the actual doing of a thing was, more often than not, less difficult than deciding to do it. Now that he had decided there was no logical reason for not remaining here, the thing to do was act on that decision.

He did, turning at once in through the door into the caboose's now dark interior. The conductor had undoubtedly turned into his bunk for a couple of hours' sleep before the train reached Junction. The brakeman was up in the cupola, at his solitary vigil of watching the top of the long line of freight cars.

Joe lugged saddle and war bag out onto the platform, and then down the steps. He tossed the saddle down the embankment, and then, war bag in hand, swung out with a tight hold on the hand rail. He hung there for a moment, judging the train's speed. When he did let go and jump, he found the shadows deceptive.

Misjudging the depth of his fall, he landed with knees rigid. His weight overbalanced and he fell inward, barely avoiding the iron steps. His war bag was torn from his grasp and his left arm whipped down across the near rail with such force that it set up an ache that traveled to his shoulder. Then, the pain quickly pa.s.sing, he lugged the war bag back to where the saddle lay, and stood peering out across the night-shrouded reach of land close by.

Off there some place, no farther than a mile, he judged, lay Ernie Baker's ranch house. Ernie was good for the loan of a horse.

Joe cached the war bag under a pion close to the embankment, and, slinging the saddle over his shoulder, set off diagonally northwest from the line of the rails. He didn't mind the long walk that lay ahead, for his mind was at ease and a world that had minutes ago seemed gloomy and depressing was now to his liking.

It was less to his liking some forty minutes later, as he threw his saddle on the back of a scrubby big-headed bronco alongside Ernie Baker's corral. His only greeting had been the persistent yapping of a cur dog that had heard his approach and signaled it long and loudly.

The weathered frame house was deserted, and Joe had found the corral gate open. It was only by accident that this pony had been inside the enclosure, licking at a salt block. There was every evidence of Baker's having been away for several days.