Coroner Creek (9 page)

“Why, yes. I'm not feeling good.” O'Hea, heading for his chair, would not meet Younger's eyes.

Younger let him sit down and then said, still mildly, “That's right, you're not feeling good. So you're writing a letter to the commissioners asking for six months' sick leave.”

Still O'Hea didn't look at him, and Younger went on with an implacable and mocking gentleness. “You've got money for a deputy, O'Hea. Appoint him. If he suits the commissioners, there won't be any special election necessary. And I'll pick a man who'll suit them.”

“Who?” MacElvey asked.

“You.”

MacElvey said dryly, “I didn't do so well today.”

“You'll learn, because you'll get some practice. At least you can fight your way out of a bushel basket.” He looked contemptuously at O'Hea, and then back to MacElvey. “I'm going to work it rough and in the open. Danning's first move will be to claim for Henhouse what they had a year ago. When he moves, we hit him—rough and in the open. We'll get him, legal and respectable.”

Again he looked at O'Hea, who had put both arms on the chair as if he were making an effort to hold himself erect.

“If we have to go beyond that, Mac, we'll go. Then you resign and O'Hea comes back into office.” He regarded MacElvey now. “All right?”

“You pay me,” MacElvey said, for the second time that day, and he shrugged.

Younger swiveled his glance to O'Hea. “I pay you, too,” he said bluntly. “Write your letter.”

CHAPTER VII

Seated in his chair on the veranda roof in the warm night, Walt Hardison had heard the team and buckboard drive up to the hotel. He had heard the two people, a man and a woman, get out, but they had not spoken. He had heard the man wrestle the trunk out of the buckboard and make several trips to unload gear, but he still had no clue to the man's identity.

So when, minutes later, Chris Danning stepped out onto the veranda roof and quietly greeted him Walt had half the answer to his question. The rest of it came a few moments later after Danning had rolled and lighted his cigarette and settled back in his chair.

“I brought Mrs. Harms in tonight.”

“Expecting trouble?”

“That's what I wanted to ask you.”

Walt said nothing, curious as to what this taciturn drifter would ask him. It came immediately.

“I want to find out from you what Box H claimed and used up to a year and a half ago.”

Walt considered the implications of that question and then said dryly, “Maybe you better bring Della in too.”

There was no answer, and Walt knew in the darkness that there was no answering smile either. It wasn't that the man was humorless; he was just in dead and competent earnest, he thought.

Walt said obligingly, “Roy Harms ran his stuff as far west as that feeder creek on the other side of Thessaly Canyon. East, he never went beyond the old logging road you can still see. South, up to the boulder fields at timber line. North, his homestead boundary on the flats, and another homestead he bought out.”

“So the rest is open range?”

“Not exactly,” Walt said. “Harvey Finch owned Rainbow before Miles. He was first in the country, and he bought a good chunk of the flats and mountains from the Indians, trading beef and powder and sometimes whisky for land. Some of it he had title to, and some he didn't. He'd sell it or give it away, as the whim took him. And he sold that stretch I just outlined to Roy Harms.”

“Then it belongs to the Harms women?”

“No, again. When the reservation was surveyed, the survey pulled the boundary clean back over the Blackbows. The Indians never owned the land; so Finch never owned it, so Harms couldn't have bought it from him. It's open range, on the books.” He looked at Danning's dark form in the chair. “There's your joker, son. Some men would figure Harms paid his money and the land was his. But not Miles.”

“No,” Chris said. He stood up now, and said quietly, “Thanks, old-timer.”

“What do you aim to do now?”

“Take it all back,” Chris said quietly.

Walt smiled in the dark and looked up at the tall man beside him. He wished he had more light out here; he would have liked to see Danning's face when he said that, although he could picture it well enough. Dead serious, indifferent, casual even, but dead serious.

He said, “Not Thessaly Canyon. Tip Henry had homesteaded that place, and he's a Rainbow hand. He'll sleep there, and Miles will put in the improvements for him and buy it from him. It's nothin' but a Rainbow line camp, but legally it's a homestead. One move against Tip and you'll have a U. S. Marshal on your neck. But I don't reckon I have to tell you that.”

“No,” Chris said. “Thanks.”

He tramped across the roof and was almost to the door when Hardison called, “Son, will you tell me something?” Danning halted, waiting. “What did Sam O'Hea want you for?”

“Brand changing.”

“Fools,” Hardison muttered. “Good night.”

Danning stepped into the corridor, and Walt listened to the solid tramp of his feet, as distinctive, in Walt's ears, as the sound of his voice. He had a sudden unaccountable longing, wild and unreasonable, for the use of his legs for just one week—just long enough to ride with this man, and know him, and share his luck. And then he smiled wryly into the night.
I'm a fool myself
, he thought.
His luck is that he'll die
.

Kate Hardison was seated in one of the lobby chairs, and when Chris came off the last step, she rose and came toward him. There was a dislike in her pale brown eyes that seemed to be carried over from their last meeting.

He halted, and she said, “You've got a good start, haven't you? You've moved Mrs. Harms out of her home, made a fool of our law officers, tattled on Mrs. Miles and beat up the Box H foreman.”

“Mrs. Harms talks too much,” Chris said mildly.

“When do you move Della in, so you can use Box H for whatever you want?”

“For brand changing?” Chris suggested.

“No. I don't think that. I just think you're using women and jobs and men and even acquaintances for your own business. What is your business, by the way?”

“My own.”

They regarded each other with open hostility now, and Kate finally said, “I think you're sick. I think you're sick with hating—maybe yourself. We have troubles here, but they're little troubles compared to the kind you're bringing us. Why don't you ride on through?”

“As soon as I'm finished,” Chris said. “Good night.”

He went out to the buckboard and turned the team and drove south, out of the last lights of the town. There was a gadfly quality about Kate Hardison that he was coming to dislike. Everything he had done so far had a solid place in his plan, yet this girl, as if she intuitively knew that his headlong wrecking of Younger Miles would hurt a lot of innocent people, had fought him. Not with anything but words and scorn, but both were sharp.

He felt a sudden restlessness now, and in the quiet night he fell back upon the old fantasy that always soothed him. It was an old fantasy, gray and secret as his hopes, and it had been part of his loneliness for more than a year now, festering its way into his soul and feeding his hatred. It was this: in his imagination, he had married Bess, and he had made a life for them. On the nights which now numbered in the hundreds, when he was camped in solitude by lonely fires, he lived that day with her—in his imagination. He followed her through each day's small duties, not as a man away from his womenfolk might speculate fondly on activities at home but with the hungry, painstaking attention of a man who has never known a home. He had imagined a continuing life for Bess and himself. In it, they had bought the small ranch they planned on, and he had ridden for the midwife that delivered his son, Ben. He had nursed Bess back to health and played with the boy, and they had ridden over every acre of their small holding. He had driven their first beef to the shipping point and had handed Bess the check. Always, in his accursed imagination, she was the most desirable of women, with a beautiful slow smile and the low, almost husky voice that drove his misery deeper and deeper. He would not let her die.

But tonight, it would not come right. Long before he reached the bald hill in front of the Box H, he had given it up, and the old waking restlessness was on him again. The stars were low and bright, and when he came down the grade the place was dark. The Dipper told him it was two hours past midnight; he felt awake and impatient.

He turned the team into the corral, and his sorrel, close to the open pasture gate on the far side of the corral, drifted over to him. Three other horses who had left off their night feeding to trail in for water, followed the sorrel back into the corral, too.

Chris, stroking his gelding's neck, looked at the stars again and came to his decision. He circled the horses and closed the corral gate into the pasture, then tramped over to the dark bunkhouse.

He went to the bunk below his own and felt Andy sleeping with his face to the wall. Putting a hand on Andy's shoulder, he shook him, and when Andy turned over, Chris said in a low voice, “Let's start now.”

Andy only mumbled, and Chris repeated, “Let's start now,” remembering that Mrs. Harms' last act before she left for town in the evening was to silently disapprove of the few supplies Chris took from the kitchen in preparation for the boundary ride. They were on the table behind him.

Andy uncomplainingly rolled out, and Chris put the few supplies in his blankets and they silently left the bunkhouse without waking Leach.

In closing the pasture gates, Chris had trapped a second-string horse of Andy's which Andy cheerfully agreed to take.

They saddled and rode out into the still night, and Chris, thankful to be in the saddle again, rolled a cigarette and lighted it. He was debating where to start his survey, which he hoped would acquaint him with all of Box H range, new and old, when Andy spoke from beside him:

“You'll likely want a look at the Falls first, because that's where the best stuff is.”

“The Falls?” Chris echoed.

“It's where Elder Creek drops into a canyon,” Andy said. “A big box canyon about five miles long and belly deep with the sweetest grass a cow ever grazed in. The mouth is so narrow we put a brush fence acrost it first thing this spring, figurin' to hold the feed for Della's prize hundred this fall. Ain't anything been in it, not even deer.”

“And what are the prize hundred?” Chris asked, curious now.

“A hundred head of two-year-olds we're holdin' over and feedin' with a spoon almost,” Andy said, a quiet pride in his voice. “They got two inches of tallow on 'em now. Last week we turned 'em into Falls Canyon, and by the first snow they'll be fat enough to roll down the flats. Miss Della's made arrangements to feed 'em through the winter and—”

“Bought feed?” Chris cut in.

“That's right,” Andy said placidly. “Her and Yordy figured there wasn't grass enough on the flats to carry 'em through the winter after the dry summer. But they'll be prime stuff next summer.”

Chris was silent a moment, considering this. “How far have we got to drive to a shipping point?”

“Hundred and forty miles south,” Andy said.

Chris looked at him in the darkness but Andy was not aware of the look. A hundred and forty mile drive over the mountains to a railroad would run off all the tallow it had taken a year to put on, Chris knew. That was like Yordy, looking for the short cut to big money, gambling on a scheme basically unsound with Della's money to back it. Chris didn't know what arrangements Della had made for winter feed, but they must be canceled, the two-year-olds shipped this fall and the scheme to hold them over forgotten.

Andy, garrulous now, was patiently describing the extent and quality of the Box H range, but Chris was not listening. When Andy fell silent, Chris asked, “Is there a trail into Thessaly Canyon from the upper end? Not the lower end, the upper end.”

Andy said reluctantly, “Yes.” He waited a moment and said, “It ain't our range, though.”

“Let's have a look,” Chris said mildly. “I want to see that shack they're raising, but on the quiet.”

“Now?”

“That's right.”

Andy didn't comment, but his very silence contrived to express his distaste for this. After a short stretch of the flats, the country began to tilt to the first step of the foothills and they took to a trail now, Andy's horse in the lead.

They came out shortly onto a bench which, with its long, fingerlike mesas reaching out from the mountains, was the last of the open country.

The smell of pine timber was presently in the air and the clumps of cedar gave way to scattered black timber. The footfalls of their horses were quieter now on the soft humus of pine needles, and presently the stars overhead were blotted out by the pine forest. The smell of resin was all about them as they rode.

Chris could only judge the grade now by feeling how his horse worked; and when they paused to blow their horses in a clearing of the timber, he turned and looked back over the flats. He could see only the faintest dusting of lights at a point to the north and east which would be sleeping Triumph; the rest was a gray expanse below that faded gently into the black of the night sky.

They went on, still climbing, and presently crossed a creek and they clung to it for a while, still climbing, and after a bit Chris, spotting the Dipper again, said, “Andy, is this safe country for a fire? I don't want to make smoke in daylight.”

Andy thought a moment and said slowly, “I reckon. Up a ways, though.”

“Good. Let's light and eat.”

Ten minutes up the trail, Andy pulled off the trail by the side of the stream. He built up a fire while Chris broke out the coffee pot and filled it in the stream and put it on the fire. Then Chris filled a frypan full of bacon and put it beside him. He squatted by the fire and rolled a smoke and Andy moved around the fire and knelt by it. He put his big hands to it as a man unconsciously does in front of a fire, be it summer or winter, and all his movements were slow and deliberate.