Coroner Creek (2 page)

McCune leaned forward now, and he talked in short sentences and was answered in kind, and Danning, watching him, thought,
I've waited eighteen months for what he's going to tell me next
, and he wondered now at his own patience. It was a patience that had taken him a thousand miles, tirelessly tracking down the men at a half dozen scattered Army posts who had been first on the scene after the Karnes Canyon massacre. It had taken half a hundred laboriously written letters, and the patience to wait for their answers, which were always barren of the information he wanted. Until now, in a strange land, he was going to hear the words spoken by an Army scout he had not even known three days ago, and whom he would never see again after tonight.

McCune was finished now, and said to Danning, “Sal Juan knew him. The white man worked in the big post at Pima Tanks—Nohl and Johnson—freightin' for them. He was stocky, strong, maybe thirty, light curly hair, and dark brown eyes like an Injun's, with little hoods at the corners. He remembers the eyes most.” McCune paused. “That what you want?”

“That's it.”

Suddenly the Apache spoke, and McCune swiveled his head to listen. Danning, watching the buck, saw a sly kind of malice in his face. McCune then turned slowly and looked searchingly at Danning.

“What did he say?” Danning asked.

McCune answered quietly as he got to his feet. “Nothin' you'd want to hear,” and brushed the dust from his coat. He spoke his parting gravely to the two Apaches and they left the firelight for their horses.

They were on the dark flats again before their horses pulled abreast and then Danning asked, “Does this go to the Colonel?”

McCune was a long time answering. “I reckon not. It's water under the bridge except for the pay chest the renegade white got away with.” He was silent a moment. “That was a few thousand dollars. Turn the story over to the Army and they spend five times that amount investigatin' and gettin' depositions and stirrin' up a bunch of 'Paches what wouldn't open their mouths about it anyway.”

“Don't worry about the white man,” Danning said.

They didn't speak again until they were on the wagon road, and then Danning reined up in the darkness.

McCune halted his horse and pulled his feet from the stirrups, folded his hands on the horn and spat. Then he said mildly, “Well, you leave me here, don't you?”

“Yes. What'd begin to pay you for your help?”

McCune grunted. “Forget it. Nothin'.” He looked keenly in the darkness at Danning. “Maybe somethin' too. A question. If it's none of my business, tell me.” He paused. “Was she your wife, son?”

“No. So that buck remembered her?”

“Your sister, maybe?”

“No. What did he say?”

McCune said quietly, without bitterness or outrage, “He has a silk dress from that raid, white like a wedding dress. He wondered if that's what you wanted.”

Danning didn't say anything, and McCune reached in his pocket and hauled out Danning's gun and gave it to him.

Danning rammed it in the waistband of his trousers and then murmured, “She was on her way to marry me.”

They parted after that, McCune heading back for the post, Danning riding on.

CHAPTER II

It was late summer when he came onto the flats below the Blackbow Range. He did not come in from the south over the mountains, which might have led to speculation, but from the dune country to the north, and he led a pack horse whose brand newly matched that of the sorrel he was riding. He came openly and camped on Coroner Creek the first night, and all the next day he looked upon the level brown grasslands of the Blackbow flats with the relief of a man who has lately come from the desert.

It was past suppertime, yet still light, when he entered the town of Triumph. It had been built on the flats at a bend of the Coroner, and a long level stretch of grass flats lay between it and the dark-timbered Blackbows hulking to the south.

He crossed the heavy bridge over the Coroner and faced the setting sun at the end of the long street, and the pitiless light of it seemed to take away the solidity of the frame stores flanking the wide and dusty street. Cowtown fashion, the bigger buildings crowded the four corners, and it was here he reined up in the slow evening traffic of the town, first looking down the street to his right and then to his left before he saw the archway of the feed stable. He turned left and passed the big hotel on the corner, and some doors beyond it he turned into the livery stable and dismounted.

He turned his horse into the corral in the rear, took his warbag from his pack, asked permission and received it of the hostler to leave his blankets and gear here, and sought the boardwalk, a tall, taciturn, sun-blackened man in tattered clothes, whose face was stern and forbidding.

The traffic of a summer evening stirred lazily on the streets, and Chris, remembering the hotel on the corner with the chairs on the flat railinged roof of its one-story veranda, turned toward it, warbag slung over his shoulder.

Ponies stood ranked in front of the big saloon opposite the hotel, and he let his gaze shuttle across the street.

The sign was there across the second building from the corner, and he paused, reading it.

M
ILES AND
M
C
K
EOGH
, G
ENERAL
M'
CH
'
ND
'
SE

The name M
ILES
was new, the white of the letters brighter, the black of the background darker than the rest of the sign. He thought without surprise,
He knew how to run a store, didn't he?
and stood there a moment, his bitter gray eyes reflective and without urgency. He let a pair of homeward-headed horses pull a spring wagon smartly past him, and then, his mind made up, he crossed the street and went into the store. Depositing his warbag by the door, he slowly cruised the aisles, watching for the face of the man whose description he had memorized. Presently he hauled up at the rear of the store before a door into a small office where there were two desks, a safe, and not much else. A young man with red hair looked up from a ledger and Chris asked, “Miles around?”

The man shook his head. “He spends most of his time out at the ranch. He's in mornings, usually.”

Danning nodded and tramped out, and his disappointment was minor. A little more time didn't matter—was welcome, in fact.

Turning in at the hotel, he found the lobby deserted, and made his way across to the desk in the angle of the stairs.

Nobody was behind it, and yet Chris had the feeling that it was not long deserted. He waited a moment, looking past the worn chairs in the lobby through the big windows that looked out onto the main street and the cross street. Still nobody came, and then, spying the register before him, he turned it and signed his name. The keyboard hung beside the counter, and now he took a key from it, lifted his warbag and mounted the stairs which angled once before it lifted to the long corridor running lengthwise of the building.

At the head of the stairs he turned right and saw the numbers on the first and second doors, and knew he was going in the wrong direction. About-facing, he only then saw the two women down the lamplit corridor coming toward him. One, the slightest of the two, had her arm about the waist of the second, girl who seemed to Chris to be walking in her sleep. The slight girl had rich golden hair that may have once been done neatly atop her head, but which now straggled in wisps across her face. Even as Danning watched, the other girl staggered, and they both slammed abruptly against the wall.

Chris came toward them, and the slight girl, intent now on holding up her companion, looked up with a momentary surprise that washed out the distress in her face.

Chris said, “Can I help you?” and accepted the slow look of relief that came into the girl's face.

Chris bent and picked up the other girl, one arm under her knees, the other under her shoulder. Her head rolled back loosely against his shoulder, and he smelled the rich fragrance of her dark hair. And he smelled something else too, which was liquor.

The slight girl tried the nearest door and went in, stepping aside for Chris, who crossed the room and put down his burden on the bed. Standing over her, he looked at her a moment and in the fading evening light he noticed that her face, young and pretty and pale as death now, had a kind of sulky defiance even in repose.

Chris glanced briefly at the girl beside him. She made no effort to tidy the wisp of hair that straggled down across her forehead and ear. She, too, had been watching the sleeping girl, and now she looked at Danning, this time more carefully, and her eyes, Chris noticed, were a pale brown, pale as old amber.

“You're new,” she said.

Chris nodded.

“Do you know what's the matter with her?” the girl asked, inclining her head toward the girl on the bed.

“I'd say she was drunk,” Chris answered. There was no censure in his voice, no interest either.

There was a faint bitterness in her that was reflected in her pale eyes as she nodded and glanced again at the sleeping girl. She bent over her now and put a hand on her shoulder. “Abbie, Abbie, wake up. Can you hear me?”

There was no pleading and no hysteria in her voice, and Chris sensed that she had done this before. She straightened and took a deep sighing breath that lifted her bosom under her plain blue dress. And now, almost absently, she tucked the stray strand of hair back in place and, looking at Chris, said, “Have you ridden far today? Eaten, too?”

The strangeness of her question held him mute a moment, and then she went on, “I need help with her. I've got to get her out of here and back to the ranch. I—don't like to shame her by asking somebody she knows, and everyone knows her.”

The bluntness of this girl and her sudden kindness lessened for an instant the deep taciturnity in him and he said, “I'll help you.”

The girl put out her hand now. “I'm Kate Hardison.”

Chris told her his name, removed his Stetson and took her small hand in his, and then she said, smiling only faintly, “Smoke a cigarette. We'll have to wait until it's darker.”

She sank onto the edge of the bed, and Chris sat down stiffly in the rocker next the bed, put his worn and battered hat on the floor beside the chair and reached in his shirt pocket for his sack of tobacco dust. He did not speak, content now, as always, with silence. He fashioned and lighted a cigarette, and then leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees, staring quietly at his cigarette, and he had the tranquillity of a patient, patient man.

Kate Hardison studied him for perhaps a minute, and then she stood up and crossed over to the dresser and took a match from the tray and lighted the lamp. She put the lamp on the table beside the bed and said, “Her buggy is in the alley back of the hotel. When it's dark enough, you can carry her down to it and drive her out to Rainbow.”

“Who do I ask for?”

“This is Mrs. Miles,” Kate said. “They'll take her off your hands.”

Something in his face must have revealed his surprise, for Kate said, “You didn't come here to work for Younger Miles, did you?”

“Younger Miles? No.”

“Do you know him? Or anybody at Rainbow?”

“No. I'm a drifter.”

Kate laughed shortly. “I don't mind calling Younger Miles a dog to his face. I have. It's just that it's bad manners to call him one to a person who might be a friend of his. If he has a friend,” she added quietly.

Chris looked at the sleeping girl again, thinking,
So he bought a store with it and ranch with it and a drunken wife with it
, and then he looked down at his cigarette again, patient again.

Kate said, “She's pretty, isn't she?” and Chris started at the sound of her voice. He looked at her strangely and nodded, and Kate said, “She's good, too. Not like this. If it will make you feel repaid for this, you can believe that.”

Chris was silent, and Kate, when he did not answer, said, “I think you can bring her now.”

He lifted Abbie Miles in his arms, and Kate led the way down the corridor to the back stairs. They opened into the kitchen, dark now, and she opened the back door. A team haltered at the high loading platform and hitched to a top buggy swung their heads around in the near darkness to watch their approach. Chris gently set the girl in the buggy seat, and when he climbed over her and took his seat, she slumped heavily against him. Kate, speaking softly across Abbie Miles, said, “You can follow this alley south to the edge of town. The road takes you to the canyon of the Coroner and passes by Rainbow. The team will take you.”

Chris picked up the reins.

“I'll wait up for you,” Kate said.

Chris backed the team around and headed down the alley, and presently was on the main road south which pointed straight for the heart of the Blackbows.

He held the reins loosely in his big hands now and relaxed in the seat, thinking of the strangeness of his errand as he felt the girl's dead weight against his side and shoulder.
I've got his wife
, he thought.
I could kill her now if I were sure it would hurt him
. It gave him a feeling of power and he contrasted it with the months of helpless and hopeless bafflement that had ridden him ever since he got the few brief facts of the massacre from the Apache through McCune.

He was remembering, too, the weeks he had spent at Pima Tanks. When he had identified the long forgotten freighter by the name of Younger Miles who used to work for Nohl and Johnson, he was only a little farther along the trail he had to travel, for Miles was months gone, and nobody knew or cared where. It was in the second month there, when he had nothing to feed his anger except stubbornness, that he got the hint that had brought him here, a half summer's travel to the north. He had taken up his station in the saloon that morning, just as he did every morning, hoping against reason that something in the million words of barroom gossip he was ready to listen to would hold a clue to Miles whereabouts. He had been the first customer, and he had listened to the two tattered swampers gossiping about customers as they cleaned up the saloon. One of them had spoken of the vanity of a Nohl and Johnson freighter in regard to boots he could not afford. Chris had listened and questioned, and when he learned the freighter they spoke of was Miles, he had written five bootmakers, expecting nothing. But one day a letter came. Yes, the Texas bootmakers said, they still made boots for Younger Miles, and they named this town.