Fiddlefoot (11 page)

He watched them go, afterward hazing the loose team ahead of him down the road, and he was presently above town. It was not until he was off the grade and on the edge of Rifle that he really made up his mind to see Carrie. To explain to her that his plan was conceived in anger and planned in defiance and was to be carried out with some risk would only baffle her, and he had no intention of telling her where he was going. She would ask why he wanted to antagonize Rhino, and where was there an answer to that? Nevertheless, he wanted to see her.

He hazed his two horses into the side street, and presently approached Tavister's house, dark and cool in its lawn under the big trees.

The two loose horses, seing the lush grass of the Tavisters lawn between the brickwall and the road, moved over and started to graze it.

Frank, some distance behind them, saw Carrie kneeling along a bed of flowers in front of the house, pointing out something to their handyman beside her. When she saw the horses stop, she rose and ran swiftly to the iron fence.

“Get away!” she scolded. “You get away!”

Frank reined up in the road and grinned. Carrie saw him and called, “Can't you keep—” and then, recognizing him, left the rest unspoken. Frank rode up now and Carrie cried in exasperation, “Frank, they're tramping our lawn!”

“Boys, quit it,” Frank said mildly to the horses. They went on grazing, and now Carrie had to laugh. Frank stepped out of the saddle and moved across the walk to the iron fence. Carrie looked cool and small, and her face was alive and still lovely from her laughter.

“Shall I ask them in?” she asked.

“No, they're shy,” Frank said solemnly.

Carrie raised up on tiptoe to kiss him, and then she folded her arms along the top of the fence's blunt-end iron pickets.

She said, “Stay for supper?”

“I'm horse-trading,” Frank said. “I'll be gone for a few days.”

“Not through Saturday,” Carrie protested. “Oh, Frank, there's a dance Saturday night at the Masonic Hall.”

Frank thought a moment. “I don't think I'll be back.”

Carrie accepted this with a sigh of resignation. “Who're you trading for? Rhino?”

“For Chess and Company, horse-traders.”

“Who's the company?”

“The five thousand dollars I hope to clean up on the deal.”

Carrie didn't smile. She said, “So you're not a rancher any more, but a horse-trader?”

“If all you've got to trade is horses, you're a horse-trader, aren't you?”

“Yes—if it's all you've got to trade.”

Frank grinned swiftly. “We aren't getting anywhere, are we?”

Carrie shook her head too, and then cradled her chin in her arms and gazed across the street into the somnolent afternoon. “No, we aren't.” She looked obliquely up at him. “Nice to be on the move again?”

Frank said, “Yes, we're in a hurry and—”he paused, looking down at Carrie. “You devil,” he said mildly.

Carrie reached out and patted his hand. “That's all right. When you can't sit still, you can't sit still.”

“That's not it,” Frank protested. “I've got to make this trip, Carrie.”

“So your feet will stop itching?”

Frank said in mock solemnity, “Some day, I won't come back.”

“I believe you,” Carrie answered soberly. And then, as if this conversation had taken too serious a turn, she straightened and made a shooing gesture with her hands. “Go on, go on. I've got flowers to water.”

Frank moved over to his horse and mounted. Carrie wiggled her fingers at him and then called, “Please try to be back for the dance, Frank.”

“I'll try,” he promised, and now he whistled shrilly at the grazing team. They moved reluctantly back into the road, and he turned them at the next corner, driving them toward the main street. A vaguely guilty feeling remained with him now, when he thought of the dance. Carrie would like it, and he had been home so little lately that he had taken her nowhere.

He pushed his team across the main street, left them at the McGarritys' in care of a hostler, because neither Jonas nor John was in, and then he kept on to the river road and turned downriver. Presently, below town, he was on the main wagon road.

The horse string was somewhere ahead of him, he knew, but he was in no hurry to catch them. The heat here in the river bottom was a close and constant thing, held by the tawny rock of the gorge that sometimes crowded close to the river, only to fall back at other times for lush meadows and stands of river timber.

The memory of his parting with Carrie was a small and nagging worry in his mind now, taking the pleasure from the day. There had been an edge to her words today, as if the thought of his giving up Saber still rankled. And she had been quick and sly enough to make his few days' absence seem like his old restlessness, and his horse-dealing an obstinate whim. Perhaps her skepticism was justified, and now he examined his own feelings. It was true that he was glad to be on the move, to be away from Saber and town, and the reasons were plain enough. He wanted to avoid Hannan and his questions, and Rhino and his ultimatum. The flaw in that reasoning came to him immediately; he wasn't avoiding Rhino's ultimatum; he was merely postponing having to think about it.

He had reacted to that ultimatum promptly and recklessly, the way he had reacted to most things in his life, he understood now. He wanted to hurt Rhino, and getting his horses to Crawford ahead of Rhino's was a way to hurt him. Beyond that, he had reckoned it would give him a start and a stake—a start that would be stillborn and a stake that would be meaningless in the face of Rhino's threat.

That fact, Rhino's ultimatum, he had not faced. Looking at it closely now, he saw no way to avoid accepting Rhino as partner, for Rhino had summed it up precisely:
I can do anything I want with you as long as you're afraid of that soldier suit
. That was true; he could do anything. He had killed Rob and stopped Frank's mouth. He would get half of Saber, too. A bleak awareness of what this meant came to Frank then, and he thought,
He won't stop there; he wants it all
.

Almost under his horse's feet now, a quail with her four chicks broke out of the wayside brush and started across the road. The deep dust muffled the hoofbeats of the oncoming horse for a few seconds, and then the quail saw him and gave the alarm. She ran across the road, two chicks following her. The two chicks trailing, however, hesitated and dived back into the brush. Passing them, Frank saw them huddled in the brush, utterly still, their topnots unmoving. The sight of them scarcely stirred the moroseness of his thoughts.

In the late afternoon, he came to a wide meadow crossed by the road, with a thick fringe of trees back against the tawny canyon wall. There was track of a wagon, hours old, across the meadow and Frank glanced over at the fringing trees. Under them he saw a loaded wagon, apparently abandoned.

Kneeing his horse off the road he cut across the meadow, and when he rode up to the wagon he saw it was a big, high-sided freight wagon stacked high with a clutter of household furnishings. Off through the trees in the deep shade were four horses, heads to rumps, stomping flies.

And then, from under the wagon, he heard a puzzling sound, and he dismounted and looked. Stretched out in deep sleep was a man he recognized as Bill Schulte, one of Rhino's teamsters. A stone jug sat upright at his head.

Frank retrieved the jug and shook it, and it seemed half-full. He regarded Schulte idly; this was the breed of teamster that Rhino was going to lick the McGarritys with.

He uncorked the jug and took a long pull at the raw whiskey, then swung the jug against a wheel hub. It shattered heavily; Bill Schulte did not stir in his drunken sleep.

Frank mounted and sought the road again, the whiskey warming him pleasantly. Schulte, he remembered, was one of Tess Falette's charges, and he found himself recalling her story of yesterday with an odd pleasure now. He remembered how troubled she seemed when she told it. Oddly, there was something friendly and easy and unworried about her, and he found himself smiling at the thought of Carrie firmly trying to make over her life, and of Tess just as firmly refusing to have it made, and of how unlike they were.

But when the warmth of the whiskey wore off, his old mood returned, and it deepened with darkness, its torment deepening, too, so that an hour after dark, when he came to a large meadow and saw the flicker of his crew's campfire reflected high up on the canyon walls, he thought it a welcome sight.

He skirted the center of the meadow where the horses were grazing, and dismounted short of the fire. Three of the crew were in their blankets, already sleeping. He off-saddled, and Cass rode in out of the night to pick up his horse. Cass hazed the sorrel toward the bunch and then he reined up.

“I'm calling Johnny at midnight. There's grub on the fire, and your blankets are under the trees.”

Frank thanked him and tramped toward the fire. He was not hungry, and a grinding weariness was on him.

Pulling off his boots then, he rolled into his blankets and lay there, staring at the tangle of low stars overhead, his depression deep and black as the night above him.

The futility of his being here tonight, of even starting this, came to him with a sickening stealth, and he tried again to find some small reason in what he was doing. There was none save that it would hurt Rhino, and Rhino, with Saber coming to him, could afford that hurt.

Chapter 10

There was a not-too-strict routine which Hugh Nunnally followed every morning after the lot opened up. He liked to leave the restaurant after an early breakfast, with a fresh cigar lighted, and saunter down the side street past McGarritys' to the river, just as the town was coming awake. This route eventually brought him to the rear of Rhino's lot, and each morning he paused by the gate in the rear fence and looked at the tracks in the dirt. The hostlers had strict orders to take every horse on the lot down to the river once a day to drink, since they kept better if this were done than if they were watered from buckets or a tank. It was an onerous job, and the hostlers shirked it, but Hugh, from long practice, could read in the tracks whether or not his orders had been carried out fully, half-carried out, or skipped entirely.

Today, with the forty-odd horses cleared out for Crawford and no new stuff come in, the sign was easy to read. All the horses had been driven to water. He strolled through the back gate and headed for the big stable, in a corner of which the sick and ailing horses were stabled. He always had a look at them, afterward glancing at the big manure pile to see if the corrals and stables had been cleaned.

By this time the crew would be gathered at the big stable, and he would assign them work. Then, moving up toward the office, he would stop at the barns and have a look at any new grain or hay that had been brought in while he was absent. He kept a careful check on the quality of feed, and he' was strict about it. Somewhere along here in the process, he would remember Tess and send a man to the office to learn her freighting needs. Once he knew them, he would pick the teams, choose teamsters, name the wagons, and then move on toward the office.

This morning, after he had greeted her, he paused just outside the railing. “The McGarritys are beginnin' to board up.”

“Are they? I hadn't noticed,” Tess said pleasantly.

Hugh started to move on, then paused, and said, “I couldn't be lucky enough to have you say nobody's asked to take you to the dance Saturday, could I?”

Tess smiled. “No. I'm already asked.”

Hugh gave her a friendly grin and moved on down the corridor to Rhino's office. Rhino was seated in his swivel chair, his feet on the window sill beside his desk. He and Hugh greeted each other pleasantly, and Hugh sat down, saying anew, “The McGarritys are beginning to board up.”

“Damn bullheads,” Rhino growled.

“Virg Moore got in last night,” Hugh observed. “I sent him out to Ed Hanley's for a couple of days.”

Rhino smiled, but said nothing, and they were both quiet a moment. Then Rhino said, “Any talk around town about our ruckus with Frank?”

“No,” Hugh said. “Willie Haver don't even know what happened. Hannan's quiet about it.”

“Tavister wouldn't have heard?”

“No,” Hugh said. “That's my guess, anyway.”

Rhino hoisted himself to his feet and stretched enormously. There was a faint twinkle in his bleak eyes now as he observed, “Time to work on him, then.” He picked up his battered Stetson from the desk and moved ponderously out of the office and outside.

It was another bright day, and the sun felt good in his face, so he took off his hat and carried it. Passing the few mean shacks that lay between the lot and the business part of town, he spoke pleasantly to a raggedly dressed little girl behind a sagging fence. She answered hesitantly, her manner puzzled, as if she were wondering what this benevolent-looking Santa Claus was doing without his beard.

At the four-corners, he stopped for a chat with Mrs. Maas, and then cut across the street to the bank corner and mounted the stairs alongside the bank.

Judge Tavister looked up from a book at Rhino's courteous tap on the frame of the open door.

“Busy, Judge?”

At Judge Tavister's spare smile of welcome, Rhino came ponderously in, and they shook hands.

“I don't often see you, Rhino,” Judge Tavister observed.

“Well, a horse-dealer always tries to stay away from a judge,” Rhino remarked, and Judge Tavister smiled again. Rhino knew he could afford to make this joke, and he also knew Judge Tavister knew it too, which put them on an amiable footing. Judge Tavister indicated a chair, which Rhino settled into gently.

“I see your daughter around more than I do you, Judge,” Rhino observed.

“She works. I loaf.”

Rhino chuckled. “Well, now that Frank's back for good, I suppose she hasn't much time for her father.”