Ride the Man Down (2 page)

Will said, “I think this thing is going to break, Lottie,” and he saw Lottie's swift look of apprehension. He paused to open the door of the barn, and Lottie stepped inside. Will walked over to the corner where the chestnut mare was stalled and stroked her silken rump, murmuring to her. Lottie hung the lantern on a nail beside the stall upright, and then Will looked at her. They held each other's gaze a long, troubled moment, and Lottie said quietly, “When, Will?”

“I thought it was this morning,” Will said, and he told her of the quarrel with Schultz. She listened to his brief account of everything that had passed in the saloon. As he finished he lifted the blanket off the stall partition and threw it over the mare's back.

“What does it mean, Will?” Lottie asked.

Will turned his head to look at her. “Bide's ready to start. He wanted to see if I'd take it from Schultz.”

“And Joe Kneen's against you too?” Lottie said quietly.

Will nodded. His green eyes were brash, lighted with a recklessness she could not help but observe. “Seventy thousand empty acres of Hatchet range is real loot, Lottie. A sheriff's star doesn't change a man's greed.”

He lifted the saddle on now and cinched it tightly. Lottie leaned against the stall post, arms folded across her breasts, and watched his swift, sure movements, the sudden coil of his back muscles under his calico shirt as he yanked the cinch. When he was finished he rubbed his hand over his face, and the passage of his palm down his beard-stubbled cheek made a faint rasping sound in the silence.

This gesture of weariness stirred the girl to speech, and she said calmly, “I suppose the pack had to gather sometime, now the old wolf is dead. You knew they would, Will.”

Will said musingly, softly, “If old Phil was still alive we'd be hunting Bide Marriner out of the country tonight. Joe Kneen, too, sheriff or not.”

“But he isn't alive,” Lottie said quietly. “And it's just the other way. They'll be hunting you.”

Will's smile was slow, tolerant. “If you worked for Phil Evarts you expected that.”

“But you're not working for Phil now—you're working for his brother,” Lottie said swiftly, almost sharply.

Will said gently, “It's still Hatchet.”

“A different Hatchet,” Lottie insisted. She stepped away from the post now and came up to him and put a hand on his arm.

“Will, listen to me,” she said. “Everybody knows John Evarts doesn't want to hold out. He can't. Everyone knows it but you—and Phil's daughter. But you're still blind—and you make the whole country angry, like you did Ray Cavanaugh tonight. Will, let Hatchet go! Let them take it! You can't prop it up alone! Let it go!”

“It's still Hatchet,” Will repeated stubbornly.

Lottie smiled then, a troubled smile of mild despair and defeat. “I tried, Will, but I guess you're blind to me too.” She shrugged. “It's whatever you say.” She paused and repeated softly, looking at him, “It always has been whatever you say, Will. You know that.”

Will covered her hand with his and then gathered up the reins and led the mare out into the night. He stepped into the saddle and looked down at her. The light from the lantern still inside the barn made a faint aura of gold of Lottie's hair.

She looked up at him, smiling. “I teach this town's children, Will, but it doesn't own me. Just remember that when you need me.”

“I'll remember. Good night, Lottie.”

Will kneed the mare around to start down the alley, but he checked her immediately and looked down at the girl.

“Lottie,” he said in a troubled voice, “don't talk that way again. I've got to know I'm right.”

Lottie was silent a long moment and then she said gently, “It's whatever you say, Will.”

Will came really awake only when the chestnut mare halted by the corral trough at Hatchet sometime after midnight.

He stepped stiffly out of the saddle, chilled and aching, and, out of long habit, looked over at the house bulking long and low under the piled-up blackness of its surrounding cottonwoods. There was a lamp lighted in the office, and at sight of it his sleepy mind roused. He stared at it a moment, a faint apprehension taking hold of him.

Quickly, then, he turned his mare into the corral and started for the house. He came abreast of the log cookshack and bunkhouse and was past it when someone called softly from the bunkhouse, “Will.”

He hauled up, recognizing the voice of Ike Adams. He had left orders for Ike to stay at calf branding this morning, and he was here now. Will started for the black doorway when Ike came out and came up to him and halted in the darkness.

“Bide moved the wagon over to Russian Springs after you left,” Ike said in his taciturn voice.

Will was quiet a long moment, and then he said softly, “So.” He knew now why Schultz had picked the quarrel this morning. Schultz had made his threat and caught the stock train, knowing Will would follow him for a showdown with Kneen. And Bide, having pulled Will out of the way, through Schultz, moved the roundup wagon to Russian Springs. A feeling of anger and a kind of sheepish guilt was hot in him now, and he shifted his feet faintly in the dark. Ike said, “They're waitin' for you up at the house. Danfelser too.”

“All right, Ike,” Will said and turned again toward the house.

As he approached the near wing of the dark building he saw the door open and Sam Danfelser move into its frame. The shape of him was big and blocky in the doorway, and a quick disappointment that Will could not analyze came over him and was gone immediately. This was the man Celia Evarts was going to marry, the man that dead Phil Evarts had approved for his daughter. Hatchet would be his someday, and he had every right to be here, and it occurred to Will now that his own weariness had made him impatient. As he came up he said, “How are you, Sam?”

Danfelser did not answer. He stepped aside, and Will got a brief glimpse of his square face, of the troubled, surly alertness there. He was a young man with a full-jawed, wind-ruddied face topped by short-cut hair as bleached as new rope. Not so tall as Will, he was heavier, thicker across the chest, and when he stepped back out of the door there was a hint of tremendous stubborn strength in his movements.

Will stepped into the office now, pulling off his Stetson, and nodded to Hatchet's owner, John Evarts, who was sitting on the worn leather sofa. Will moved across the room, hearing Sam close the door behind him, and pitched his hat on the rickety roll-top desk in the corner. He heard Celia Evarts coming down the corridor that led onto the rest of the house and he glanced up, his back still to Evarts and Danfelser.

Celia Evarts came in, then, tying the belt of her maroon wrapper, and when she saw Will she smiled. Will's answering grin was easy, friendly, and it came fleetingly to him again that in this girl he was seeing a pleasant and lovely joke of nature. For she had been sired by a man who was big and black and ugly and whose eyes windowed the tough, reckless spirit of him, a spirit without mercy and with only meager friendliness. Yet in this girl Phil Evarts' bony ugliness had been refined into a thin-faced, slim loveliness with hair like her father's falling thick and curling to her shoulders. She was small, and her eyes were Phil's—as gray and reckless, but with an open friendliness in them. She was Phil Evarts, blood and soul, but with the dross gone.

She stepped just into the room and put her shoulders against the wall, and Will turned and said mildly, “Ike told me,” and sat on the desk.

John Evarts said diffidently, “Well, it may not mean anything, you know.”

Sam moved away from the door and said heavily, without looking at Will, “That was a simple trick to fall for, Will.”

“Wasn't it?” Will agreed.

He was watching Evarts now, noting that he had pulled on trousers and coat over his nightshirt. He was a kindly-seeming man with a mussed ruff of gray hair over a face mellowed by small triumphs in small ambitions. He was the owner of Hatchet now, named so by his brother who had so little faith in the shrewdness of women that he had put his ranch in the hands of a man without any shrewdness at all. The irony of it was never more apparent than now, Will thought, and he did not speak.

Evarts said sleepily, “I think Ike is being spooked. Bide's roundup boss. He can order the wagon wherever he wants.”

He looked at Will and Will was stubbornly silent, and Evarts crossed his legs with a kind of irritability in the movement.

“You can't keep a roundup crew off your range,” he went on, almost pleading. “It probably doesn't mean a thing.”

Will murmured softly, flatly, “He'll stay there,” and saw the distress mount in John Evart's eyes. He had seen it there before, when John Evarts had to make a decision and refused to. He would refuse this one, just as he had refused to face each crisis since Phil Evarts' death. And the long list of these was graven in Will's memory as irrevocably as epitaphs on gravestones, for Will had pictured them thus—each as a new death for Hatchet.

It had begun with the blizzards in February which piled foot after foot of snow upon the flats until Phil Evarts, helpless and raging, had ridden out to his death in the storm in a vain attempt to cut the drift fences. That nightmare week had wiped out all but a remnant of Hatchet's cattle, leaving them piled in frozen windrows against the drift fences. Phil's death had set in motion the chain of events that brought John Evarts to Hatchet as owner. The crises began then and followed each other with the regularity of beads on a string. John Evarts could not swing loans from the bank, and the Hatchet crew, with no loyalty for a man who would not provide for them; broke up and drifted away with their wages owing. So now Hatchet's vast range that Phil Evarts had plundered from weaker men was empty and stood waiting for a man strong enough to take it. And that man, everyone knew, was Bide Marriner. In the struggle for more range and more water holes for more cattle that made up the life of a big rancher, Phil Evarts had outguessed and outfought Bide Marriner at every turn. But Phil was dead and Bide was alive, the ultimate crisis that John Evarts must face.

Will had known the showdown would come after the snows. Phil Evarts had been a brigand, tougher than, his tough neighbors, but his brother was a reasonable man, which in this country was interpreted as a sign of weakness. So now these outfits, large and small, were closing in on him and forcing his hand, for there was nothing between them and the empty limitless ranges of Hatchet except a timid aging man and an unpaid skeleton crew, of which Will was boss. A dozen times Will had decided to drift, and each time he had stayed, hating himself, helpless, waiting for the inevitable.

And now it was here. Bide had moved onto Hatchet under cover of calf burning, and John Evarts didn't want to see it. It was in his face and Will watched it, just as Sam and Celia were watching it.

John said reluctantly, then, “Maybe you're right, Will. But Bide might lease it from us.”

Sam Danfelser said flatly, “That's not the way to handle Bide, John.”

His heavy positive voice seemed to wipe out John Evarts' words; it was more than a contradiction, and the older man strangely seemed to welcome it.

Sam put his big hands on the back of the chair in front of him and spoke slowly now to Evarts.

“Bide won't lease. Phil took Russian Springs away from him, and he figures it's his. He won't pay for it.”

“What would satisfy him?” Evarts asked.

Sam said flatly, positively, “Give it to him. He's leading the pack. Cut the ground from under him and you've got them beat. Give it to him.”

Will made no move, said nothing, but he watched Celia. He could see the protest mount in her eyes, and he knew Sam Danfelser saw it, too, and didn't care.

Celia said challengingly, “If Bide wanted a chunk of D Cross would you give it to him, Sam?”

Sam regarded her coolly, almost impersonally, and nodded. “If I'd stolen it from him and didn't have a crew to fight for it, yes. I'd give it back before he took it—and a lot more.”

Celia looked to John Evarts now, silently appealing to him. And Sam was watching him, too, just as silently forcing his will upon him. Under the scrutiny of them, Evarts was uncomfortable, but some decision was necessary and he knew it. He sighed and said, “I believe you're right, Sam. He'll take it anyway.”

“Give it to him before he takes it,” Sam said. He was pleased with himself, and he could not keep a smugness entirely from his voice.

Celia looked fleetingly at Will, who was rubbing the edge of the boot-scarred desk, watching his hand, completely quiet, out of this. He was not going to help her.

She turned from him to her uncle, then, spoke with bitter resignation. “Give Russian Springs to Bide, John, and you'll have every outfit begging on our doorstep.”

Sam said easily, confidently, “Bide's the only one to worry about. The rest will sing small when he's satisfied.”

Again Celia looked at Will, and again he was not watching this. She spoke almost with desperation. “You pay Will to run Hatchet, John. Ask him.”

Sam shuttled his glance to Will and spoke immediately, aggressively. “John knows what Will would say. He doesn't agree with it.”

John Evarts looked relieved at Sam's words, as if Sam had saved him from saying the same thing. Now he said, “We'll ride over to Russian Springs early, Will. I'll talk to Bide myself.”

“All right,” Will said mildly.

Sam turned toward the door then, and John Evarts, saying good night, went past Celia into the other part of the house.

Sam paused by the door, his hand on the knob, and said, “I'll sleep here, Celia. Coming, Will?”

“I've got a little work yet.”

Sam looked at Celia then, and his stubborn face softened a little. “Good night, Celia.”

“Good night, Sam.”

Will toed the rickety swivel chair up to the desk and sat down heavily. He reached down the red-covered talley book from a desk pigeonhole and poked among the papers until he found the stub of a pencil. He knew Celia had not left the room, but he did not look at her.