Play a Lone Hand (19 page)

At Mrs. Wiatt's Cass rang the bell. Mrs. Wiatt answered the door and told him Mary was in the back yard drying her hair. Cass walked around the house and found Mary sitting on the grass in the bright morning sunlight, and he sat down beside her. Being both a gregarious and curious man, Cass's first impulse was to ask Mary why she wasn't at work, thus getting the whole story of her dismissal by Kearie. But he remembered his errand and after they had exchanged the time of day, he asked, “Have you seen Giff Dixon this morning?”

Mary was running her fingers through her long hair that was already curling; her hand halted and she looked sharply at him. “No. How do you mean have I seen him? Is he hurt or something? Or do you mean has he been in to see me this morning?”

“That's what I mean—the last,” Cass said. At his answer, he thought he detected a kind of relaxation in her manner.

“I haven't seen him since yesterday morning,” Mary said. There was a special alertness in her eyes as she watched him. “Why? Can't you find him?”

Cass said soothingly, “No. But it doesn't matter; he's around.”

Mary said, “It's more than that. You wouldn't have come clear here if you expected to see him on the street. Has something happened, Cass?”

Cass hesitated only a moment, then told her of his search for Giff. He tried to seem unconcerned but it did not come off.

Mary listened soberly, a kind of alarm rising in her. She remembered Kearie's anger of yesterday and she thought immediately,
No, Kearie's afraid of him
. Memmory leaped back to the conference in Sebree's office and she remembered Sebree's smug words—
He'll be taken care of
.

She fought down a mounting panic and made herself consider this carefully. Her threat to expose Sebree if any harm came to Giff had been plain and unadorned. Sebree had understood it too. He wasn't the sort of man who would let dislike of a person wreck his fortunes. He would hate Giff, of course, but not enough to risk ruinous exposure.

Mary said, not believing it, “Maybe he has friends. Maybe he's just tired of town.”

“He didn't take a horse.” Suddenly an expression of surprise came into Cass's face. He looked sharply at her and then away.

Mary asked, “What are you remembering, Cass?”

Slowly Cass plucked a handful of grass, held it in his rough and callused palm and looked at it and then discarded it. “If he's gone and he didn't take a horse, maybe he took the night train. Can you give me one good reason why he should stay here?”

It was true, there was no good reason, Mary thought. He'd been picked up by Welling for a camp swamper with no responsibilities other than seeing to the horses and to feeding Welling and Fiske; but in the course of time, the whole burden of Welling's investigation had fallen on him. He had done the work and he had taken the beatings. Why shouldn't he decide in some lonely and discouraging hour of last night that it wasn't his fight and that he had had enough of it?

It was plausible but somehow Mary did not believe that either. She said, “No I can't, Cass, but you don't believe he left either, do you?”

“No,” Cass answered in a low voice, “I guess I don't, but where is he?”

“I can't tell you, but he'll turn up. I just know it.”

On that illogical and inconclusive statement, Mary took her stand. Cass, realizing that his visit had settled nothing and that he had only communicated his doubts and worries to her, came to his feet, a sudden discouragement within him, and took his leave.

Afterward she brushed her hair out, then went inside to her room. It was a big corner room across the hall from the parlor, the best in the house. Entering it, she closed the door behind her, wanting privacy.

She seated herself before the walnut vanity and began to do up her hair. The day had a strange Sunday-like quality about it and she realized it was because she was not working on a weekday—
on a press day
, she corrected herself. A year ago the thought of not working on a weekday would have terrified her. Now she didn't care. There was Sebree's money deposited safely in a Las Vegas bank to fall back on.
Blackmail money
, she thought, and for the first time naming it in her mind gave her a small feeling of shame.

It was a sensation foreign to her, and puzzled at it, she let her hands fall to her side and stared at herself in the mirror. Up to now, there had been no sense of guilt in her relations with Sebree. He was dishonest and a crook, and she had simply uncovered one facet of his crookedness that he could not afford to have known. The day she had found the two copies of the April seventeenth issue of the
Free Press
tucked behind some ink bottles on a shelf high over Perry Albers' cot in the back of the pressroom, she had counted the luckiest day in her life. Simple curiosity prodded her into examining them. When she found one issue contained six more final proof notices than the other, she compared them with the copy in the files. She copied down the names of the six extra entrymen and found in the courthouse records that they had deeded their homesteads to Sebree.

Staring at her image in the mirror now, she frowned, trying to recall what she had thought when Sebree's swindle was uncovered. She had thought first of all of revenge—of getting even with the man who had so subtly corrupted her father, who had flattered him and loaned him money and neutralized him, and finally watched him drown in liquor. Mingled with that desire for revenge was a wild need to show that she was not weak and soft like her father, but tough-minded and hard. Last of all, she remembered, was the need for money.

She could have taken the papers and sent them in to the General Land Office as evidence of fraud, but there was a better way to get even. That way was blackmail, making Sebree pay her for silence, and always having Sebree in her power. The money was welcome, and Sebree could afford it. As for the ethics of it, weren't Big Men stealing lands all over the West, sometimes with the collusion of the Land Office itself? Her evidence wouldn't change this corruption, and she would have been a fool not to demand money from the corrupters.

But now she wasn't at all sure she had been right, and she realized it was Giff Dixon who had bred that doubt. Her feeling of guilt was closely tied to him, too, for if she had turned over her copies of the
Free Press
to him at first, she wouldn't be worried about him now. And she was worried, she told herself; she was slowly approaching panic. There was one thing she must hold to, though, and that was the belief that Sebree loved riches above revenge.

She busied herself the rest of the morning helping Mrs. Wiatt. In the back of her mind all that afternoon was the coming meeting with Sebree at Deyo's office where she would receive the last of her blackmail money. Perhaps Sebree would let slip by a word or an expression that he knew of Giff's whereabouts. A little before five o'clock, the hour that was set for the meeting, she put on a fresh dress and afterward called to Mrs. Wiatt and asked if she needed anything from the store. Then she let herself out into the warm late afternoon and made herself stroll the few blocks to the land office at a leisurely pace.

The land office, cool and shaded against the late afternoon sun, was deserted save for the Mexican clerk working at his desk. She saw Deyo through the open door of his office and a faint blue haze of cigar smoke betrayed Sebree's presence there too. Lifting the counter gate, she nodded to the clerk and entered Deyo's office.

Sebree rose at her entrance and courteously placed a chair for her, then moved over to the door. Mary, with her back to him, did not catch his glance at Deyo, nor the brief movement of his head.

Deyo rose, gathered some papers together, and said stiffly, “I've got to go over these with my clerk. Excuse me.” He went out, trailing a faint odor of bay rum.

Sebree walked over to the chair Deyo had vacated and sat down. Looking over the desk, he complained mildly, “Why won't some men put an ash tray in their office.”

Mary was watching him closely. He seemed in his usual serene spirits, she thought, and she found herself hating him again, not for his rich clothes, his fine cigars, nor for what he represented, but this time for his bland and affable front.

Sebree tilted back in his chair and regarded her a brief and friendly moment before he said, “I didn't bring any money and I'm not going to pay you any more. You've been on the merry-go-round long enough and now you're getting off.”

The mildness of his words in contrast to their content was confusing for a moment. When Mary understood their full meaning, she felt a nameless excitement. She had often wondered how she would handle this very situation and had rehearsed it in her mind. Remembering, she rose and said coldly, “Suit yourself, Grady.”

Sebree said quietly, “Don't be in such a hurry. You haven't heard all I have to say.”

“I've heard enough.”

“I think not. The second thing I have to tell you is that I want your copy of the
Free Press
.”

Mary stared unbelievingly at him, then she said tartly, “You can get it tomorrow by taking it away from Dixon. He will have it.”

Sebree began to shake his head slowly from side to side. “You're wrong about that. Dixon won't have it by tomorrow morning for the simple reason that I've got Dixon.”

Mary stood utterly still, terror seizing her. Then she sat down and Sebree read the torment in her face and smiled.

“You've got Dixon?” Mary echoed slowly.

Sebree nodded. “Unhurt and very well guarded.”

Mary waited many seconds before she could trust herself to speak. “What are you going to do with him?”

“Why, trade him to you,” Sebree said in mild astonishment at her lack of perception. “You give me your copy of the
Free Press
and I'll turn him back to you unharmed.”

“Yes!” Mary said quickly. “Yes! I'm willing.”

Sebree smiled, and said, “At your house at nine, say.” When she nodded, he could not resist a last thrust. “Maybe he won't have you, once he knows you are a blackmailer.”

“Maybe,” Mary said quietly.

7

Giff had been sleeping when he was aroused by the trap door slamming back on its hinges. Carrying the lantern ahead of him, Traff stepped into the stifling attic and then moved aside to make way for Giff's two guards. They were carrying ropes and wordlessly they rolled him over on his face and bound his hands behind him. Then Traff motioned with his gun for him to stand.

Giff rose unsteadily to his feet; the hot fetid air of his prison was like a drug and he stared stupidly at Traff. His mind worked with difficulty and he knew that he should be concerned now with this new move, but the heat, his thirst, and the pain of his aching head, had robbed him of all vitality.

“You're too heavy to carry,” Traff said curtly. “Walk down.”

One of the guards slipped down the ladder and Giff, as he approached the trap door with its blessed current of fresh air, could see him waiting below in the dim light of the corridor lamp. Uncertainly and awkwardly he made his way down the ladder and then Traff prodded him down the stairs and into the empty saloon.

Save for his guard and Traff, there was no one about. He had never seen Bentham after his first appearance in the attic. The lamps were all burning brightly and he blinked against the unaccustomed light. He turned his head to ask for water and, out of the corner of his eye, saw Traff's movement.

Putting a booted foot in the middle of Giff's back, Traff shoved. Too late Giff saw him and then he was off balance. He fell heavily to the floor and tried to roll over on his back in time for Traff's attack, but Traff approached him slowly and looked down at him.

“Want another kick?” Traff asked.

“Another won't matter,” Giff said quietly. He knew Traff saw the cold, sustained hatred in his eyes, and he didn't care.

Traff only turned to the guards and said, “Tie his feet.”

When that was done and his hat mashed down on his head, three of them lugged him out into the night and down the steps. He was thrown in a waiting buckboard and a tarp pulled loosely over him. Then began the long jolting journey. Giff had no idea of where he was being taken or for what reason. He could hear a horseman on either side of him, but there was no conversation. Sometime during the first half-hour, he heard the up-stage clatter full-tilt past them, raising such a racket that he could not have been heard even had he shouted.

Later they left the sound of the creek and achieved a smoother and less rocky road. Were they headed for Torreon, Giff wondered? For the past twenty-four hours, he had tried to fathom the reason behind his kidnaping and had not succeeded. He was fairly certain that if they intended to dispose of him as they had disposed of Albers, they would have done it by now. A lifeless body was much easier to haul along mountain roads and dim trails to its final resting place than a live man with a voice. The anger at his own gullibility the night he was seized had never ceased rankling. Beyong it was the deep and murderous hatred of Traff. Either Traff must kill him or he would kill Traff, and he wondered if the man knew that.

More than two hours had passed, he judged, when the buckboard and its outriders slowed from a mile-eating trot into a walk. In some way the sounds of the wagon tires and the hoofbeats were altered and seemed almost muffled. Giff listened closely, his senses alert, trying to interpret the change. Their pace slowed and finally they came to a halt.

“Everything all right?” Giff identified the voice as Sebree's. He heard Traff's voice say, “Sure,” and then the sound of the two guards dismounting.

The canvas was yanked off him and above him he saw great arching trees against the night sky. His feet were grabbed and he was hauled halfway out of the buckboard, then raised to a sitting position. Immediately he saw he was in town and then, only an instant later, that the buckboard was pulled up in front of Mrs. Wiatt's.