Shadow on the Land (23 page)

“You have such a good memory, Lee,” she murmured. “Perhaps you remember telling me you loved me.”

He had not, and he was surprised that she had asked. He said: “No.”

“Or perhaps you can remember asking me to marry you.”

Again he was surprised. He had never thought of it. He had seen Deborah and himself as the same kind of people: smart and worldly, understanding that when their time together had passed, they would separate, travel their own ways, and forget. He said: “No, I never did.”

There was a small smile on her red lips. “I thought about it after you had left Shaniko that morning. You see, you and Mike looked at me differently. After you left, I knew how it would be. I'm not sorry for that night. I had to have it to get you out of my mind and to know I loved Mike. I had to find you were as cheap and irresponsible as you took me to be.”

There was a strange irony in this thing—Mike Quinn's wife asking him to save their marriage. He hated Quinn. Quinn hated him. Yet, looking now at Deborah, there was a shame in him. He had hurt her more than she had hurt him, but not once had he thought about it that way. He would kill a man who looked at Hanna as he had looked at Deborah. And that was the way Mike felt about Deborah. Mike was right and he was wrong, and he felt the guilt that the knowledge brought him.

“You put it hard,” he said at last.

“I'm being honest, Lee. I don't know much about love. I've had very little of it in my life, and it came on me suddenly. That morning after you left me in Shaniko, I married Mike because I loved him. I want to keep him . . . and I know I'm about to lose him. That's why I need your help.”

“All right,” he said heavily, and motioned toward a chair. “What do you want me to do?”

She moved back to the window, slowly, and lowered herself into the chair. “I want to make a deal, Lee. I can clear up some things you haven't been sure about. In return, I want you to see Mike as soon as you can. Tell him you're not the father of my child.”

“Maybe I am.”

“No. I was two months pregnant. It's Mike's baby, and he's got to believe it before it comes. I didn't tell him when we were married, and, when he found out, he jumped to the conclusion that it was yours. He thinks you wouldn't marry me, and I married him just to give my baby a name.”

Lee nodded, knowing the jealousy of which Quinn was capable, his quickness to anger and the depth at which his fury ran. “I don't think Mike would believe me,” he said.

“You've got to make him believe you, Lee. I want my baby and I want a home and I want Mike. I don't know how you can do it, but there must be a way.”

There was agony in her, as much agony as there had been in Mike the night he had found Deborah in Lee's arms. And because there was in Lee the sense of guilt for having brought this thing upon them, he said: “I'll do what I can.”

She relaxed against the back of her chair, as if his words had released a tension in her. She said: “Then I'll deliver my part of the bargain. You knew that I was associated with Jepson before I married Mike.” Lee nodded, and she went on: “I teamed up with Jepson because he was a schemer and we both wanted money. We weren't very particular how we got it.”

Lee had filled his pipe, and, lighting it now, he watched her and held his silence.

“Jepson knew that a railroad was bound to come. A railroad meant suckers, and Jepson was very good at separating suckers from their money. The trouble was, we'd had a bad deal on California real estate, and we'd lost about all we had. He fixed that by staking out Jepson City, running off a bunch of fake advertising folders, and sending them all over the world. He sold a lot of Jepson City property, but none around here. I doubt if three people in central Oregon ever saw one of those folders.”

“Highpockets saw one. An Australian on the stage showed one to him.”

“I know. That Australian stopped at Redmond and showed the folder to Herb Racine. That's why Jepson killed Racine. You see, Jepson saw that the people's movement was a way to make our fortune, and that Racine was the key man in the movement, so Jepson buttered him up until he had him where he wanted him. He even fooled Hanna, and she's sharper than her father ever was. Racine agreed with Jepson that the proper route for the people's railroad was to swing east through Burns and Vale and Jepson City. That railroad would have meant a million dollars for us. But Racine was too honest. The minute he saw the folder, he swore he'd expose Jepson and see that the railroad missed Jepson City by fifty miles. They had a quarrel in Redmond, and that night, when Racine was coming home, Jepson shot him.”

“Racine didn't talk to anyone about Jepson?”

“No. Jepson promised to return the money and quit advertising until he did have a city. Racine believed him. I'm not sure, but I think the Australian is buried in the desert somewhere. I do know he threatened to make trouble when he saw Jepson City, and he disappeared rather suddenly. After that, Jepson expected to use Hanna the way he had planned to use her father, and he had fixed up some political connections himself. That's the way it was when we heard about the Hill and Harriman lines coming up the cañon. Jepson had seen Stevens somewhere . . . Montana, I think . . . and he heard Stevens was in a Portland hotel, registered under the name of Sampson. We went to Portland, stayed at the same hotel, and kept an eye on him. That's how we spotted you. I fixed it so you could talk to me on the
Inland Belle
, and wiggled my hips once or twice so you'd keep coming. You did, but I never succeeded in prying anything of much value out of you. I already knew Mike well, but neither Jepson nor I dreamed things would work out the way they did.”

“Neither did I,” Lee murmured.

“Mike didn't know about my connection with Jepson. He doesn't know yet as much as I'm telling you. He put me on a salary, and I traveled with him part of the time, because I knew the country and could help him with some of the people he had to deal with. Actually I was passing on to Jepson everything I found out from you and Mike. What we wanted to know mostly was whether either line was building across the desert and whether they'd follow the known surveys.

“What Jepson hoped to accomplish was to get the two lines to fighting so much that the Oregon Trunk would quit or sell out, and, if that happened, he thought the Harriman line would slow up or stop building entirely. Then the people would start thinking about the state-owned railroad again. Every move he made, such as that dynamite scheme and the time they tried to ambush you and all the rest, was made to make you or the Harriman people think the other side was doing the dirty work. Those schemes might have succeeded if you hadn't held back.”

“You knew about them?”

“Not until afterwards, but I couldn't have stopped him anyway. He said my job was to spy on the men and his was to make our plan go. I failed because I began to think more of Mike than I did of my job, and Jepson failed because he couldn't stampede you into making a fight. Now he's changed his tactics. He's given up the people's railroad, but the Harriman survey across the desert runs through his property, and he plans to move his town site to it. The Hill survey misses him by miles, so he wants to hold the Oregon Trunk back and help the Harriman line beat it into Bend. Then he believes the Harriman people will build across the desert and he'll still win.”

“Was he really drunk in Shaniko that time?”

“He never gets drunk. He's built that idea up until people believe it, and he uses it as an alibi.”

“What about the time they tried to kill me at your place?”

“I don't know anything about that, Lee,” she said earnestly. “It was Jepson, but I didn't have any inkling of what he aimed to do until we found you in the snow. Jepson is in love with me, or so he says, and he's bitter because I married Mike. He knew when I played cards, and I think the killing was planned to fix the blame on Mike.”

“But Mike wasn't . . .”

“He's crazy jealous, Lee. You know that. If he wasn't, he'd believe me. He's made some threats around town about what he's going to do to you, and it might have been hard for him to prove an alibi, because he was alone between here and Trout Creek.”

Lee leaned forward, empty pipe held in his hands. “Will you tell this in court?”

She shook her head. “It would make me lose Mike, and I've been into too much of it myself.”

“I've been able, through luck and using my head a little, to keep Jepson from doing too much harm,” Lee said slowly, “but as long as he's alive and free, he's dangerous. He's just cagey enough so that I've never been able to get the proof I need.”

“I'll go to court if it will help you, Lee,” she said then, “and if you can get Mike back for me.”

“He doesn't know about Jepson?”

“Not much, and he doesn't believe what he has heard. He thinks Jepson is just a smart-talking, insignificant little man who is betting on a long chance with his town site.”

The door swung open, slamming hard against the wall. Lee came to his feet and, turning, saw Mike Quinn in the doorway, his cheeks ruddied by both wind and anger, his gray eyes made ugly by a compelling bitterness. He stood in silence for a long minute, and there was no sound in the room but Deborah's labored breathing. Outside in the street a drunken man raised a shout, and the wind roared around the corners of the hotel and sent an empty can
banging
down the street.

Lee said: “Come in, Mike. We were just talking about you.”

“I'll bet you were,” Quinn said coldly, “and I don't need to come in. I can do what I came to do from here. I found you two together once before in this hotel in a little different position. Isn't it enough for me to marry the . . .”

“Mike!” Lee shouted.

Quinn waved a big hand in derision. “Don't like to hear it, do you? You aren't man enough to stand up and take the blame for what you've done. I can marry her and raise the kid . . .”

“Shut up and listen,” Lee cut in, anger cording the muscles of his jaws.

“Listen, hell! You've got nothing to say I want to hear. Jepson told me about that night in Shaniko a week before we were married. If it happened once, it could have happened before, and it leaves me just one answer to make.”

Quinn's hand came from his pocket, a gun clutched in white knuckled fingers, and Lee, standing helplessly across the room from Quinn, saw violent hatred sweep across the wide, craggy face.

“No, Mike, no!” It was Deborah, and she came too quickly from her chair. She stumbled and fell and did not rise.

Mike Quinn shoved his gun back into his pocket and there was horror in his eyes, as if he had just realized what he had planned to do. Then he came to her and, dropping to his knees, lifted her head. Her face was distorted as a spasm of pain swept through her. Then it passed, and she whispered: “Get the doctor, Mike.” She tried to smile, and a hand came up to touch his cheek. “It's your baby, Mike. If anything happens to me, don't ever doubt it.”

* * * * *

After Deborah was in bed in another room, and the doctor and a woman were with her, Quinn came back to stand in the doorway of Lee's room. He stared at Lee in silence for a time, shoulders hunched forward in a characteristic menacing roll; his face was sullen, but the violence of his anger was spent. “We'd better get a long ways apart, Dawes, and stay that way,” he said bitterly. “We've always wanted what the other fellow had, but I won't share my wife.”

“Funny thing, Mike.” Lee got up and began pacing restlessly around the room. “I don't want Deborah. I asked Hanna to marry me, and she turned me down. I always thought I could have any woman for the asking, but when I find one I want to marry, I can't have her.”

“Hanna? Well, I'll be damned. Jepson said . . .”

“You're a bigger fool than I think you are, Mike, if you believe anything Jepson tells you. Why do you think he told you what he did?”

“He's just an old woman, I guess. Wanted to shove gossip along.”

Lee laughed shortly. “If you had any brains at all, you'd know he's been trying to get us to tangle all the time. You've got the woman that half the men in the country would give an arm to have, but you aren't satisfied. She came here tonight to ask me to tell you that it's your baby she's having and not mine. You've been jealous so long you're letting it make a bigger fool of you than Nature intended, and you're breaking the heart of the only woman who ever did love your ugly mug. Damn it, Quinn, you are a fool.”

Quinn sat down on the bed and rolled a smoke and nursed the doubt that had been in him so long.

Lee watched him a moment in silence, and then said testily: “You gave me some sanctimonious talk about me bringing out the devil in a woman and you having respect for Deborah. Maybe if you could think back about nine months, you might remember at least one occasion when that respect kind of slipped. You don't think this kid isn't yours, Mike. You just think you haven't got all of Deborah, and you're so damned thick-headed you can't tell when you have.”

Quinn threw his cigarette stub out of the window and brought his eyes to Lee's face. He said huskily: “We've fought and cussed each other, Lee, but we've never lied to each other. You aren't lying to me now, are you?”

“I'm not lying, Mike,” Lee said.

They waited through the long hours until, near dawn, a woman came to stand in the doorway, a small, blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. She said: “Your wife thought you'd want to see him, Mister Quinn.”

Quinn came to his feet, eyes briefly on Lee, and then he slowly crossed the room, and stood looking down at the baby. He remained there a long time, and Lee came to stand behind him. He laughed, a great belly laugh that broke the tension. “The spit'n image of you, Mike. Red hair, flat nose, and an ugly Irish mug if I ever saw one.”