The Eye of the Hunter (4 page)

Henry made arrangements for the horse.

He asked the stableman how to find Alice Gary's place, and the big simple man took a hoof pick and squatted down in the hard-packed dirt. With deep, rasping scratches, he drew a map.

“This here's Morley. Yonder's Sonoyta. Walk straight up the hill and turn right. Top of the hill. You can't miss it. Try to buy that bracelet from Allie. I ain't never seen it off her wrist, and I swear to God it's too big for me!”

“How big is she?”

“Size of a sparrow!” The laugh from Budge's deep, hairy chest sounded like
hee, hee, hee!
About right for Allie.

The climb was steep. When Henry arrived. breathing deeply. a Mexican girl with a long shining braid but no English led him to a bedroom in the rear where his bags rested on the floor beside a cot with a white counterpane. She tried to explain something to him but finally giggled and went away.

The room was much more comfortable than he had expected, the walls covered with flocked cream-colored Wallpaper, the high ceiling of stamped tin painted gray. There was a flowered porcelain fixture on one wall like nothing he had ever seen—a little china tank with a faucet, and a matching bowl below it. The brass bed was narrow, and near the window stood a small desk and a fragile chair. A bowl and pitcher reminded him to take his quinine, and he measured the dose into a water glass, filled it from a pitcher, and bolted it. The bitter taste almost curled his hair. Gasping, he made terrible faces at the mirror until he could get the cork out of a pint bottle of whiskey and down a slug. As always, he gasped. “Great snakes!”

Recovering, he brushed aside a glass-bead curtain and gazed down into the almost treeless bowl that held the town. The near hillside fell by terraces that held rows of small homes. At the bottom, one- and two-story business houses lined the north- and south-running streets. Water towers on stilts rose above the railroad station.

The far hillside appeared to be covered with cave dwellings, pole sheds, hovels, and privies. Lines of wash flapped in the breeze. He saw Spanish bayonet and a few mesquite, but nothing a respectable horticulturist would honestly call a tree.

Downtown, the streets ran capriciously, meeting to form wedgelike comers two fat people could hardly stand on. It would be a surveyor's nightmare, the only level land seeming to be where the railroad tracks lay like a basking snake between the hills. Yet, built though the town was of tin roofs and dirt, and completely undecorated, he liked it—the foreign smells, the lusty honking of a burro somewhere, and the cool, clean, cell-like room he stood in. It was completely free of clutter—exactly the kind of room a man needed who had some serious thinking to do. In fact, he realized, the room put him in mind of his little bedroom at Fort Bowie.

He studied himself in the mirror on the dresser. Was his skin a little more yellow? Definitely. Well, at least he had gotten this far without a spell of ague.

He stretched out on the white iron cot for his first real sleep in days, and sank into oblivion....

When he opened his eyes, the light in the room had faded. He lay still, enjoying the sounds of children's voices calling in Spanish. He sniffed something that smelled like apple pie. An idea had come to him as he slept: that since Rip's Uncle Hum was buried here, Rip's widow probably would have had him buried in the same cemetery, if he were dead. Tomorrow he would talk to the county recorder, but this afternoon he could check the cemetery, if it was not too far away.

He hadn't had time to think about Manion's telegram. What did “advise caution” mean, exactly? At least it would be the part of wisdom to tell no one what he was doing here.

He found the bathroom, spruced up, and walked down a hall to a kitchen. A small, aproned woman was standing at a worktable with her back to him. He tapped on the doorjamb, and she turned, her hands white with flour.

“Well, Mr. Logan!” she said. “Did you have a nice rest?” She was dark-haired and pretty, and he spotted at once the huge gold bracelet on her left wrist, massive enough for a mule skinner.

“I slept like a dead man,” Henry said. “I need to ask about board, Mrs. Gary.”

She told him he could call her Allie, that room and board was fifteen dollars a month or five dollars a week, and that sheets were changed weekly. Henry paid a month's board, using one of his gold pieces. She gave him some silver coins for change.

“We use Mexican pesos here,” she said. “They go for fifty cents.”

Henry liked the big cold coins' honest heft on his palm, their slick feel and the fierce eagle on a cactus, a rattlesnake in its beak; he clinked them on his hand a couple of times before dropping them in his pocket.

“I have a question, Allie. Whereabouts would I find a cemetery?”

She tried to suppress her amusement but giggled. “Oh, now you don't look
that
bad,” she said.

“I had malaria,” Henry said. “A friend thought I might feel better here, so—”

“You will, Henry, you surely will! I like to died in San Francisco—the damp. I had bronchitis. Here, I'm healthy as a horse. Will you be looking for work?”

“Depends on how I feel. First off, though, I'm looking for—”

“A cemetery. Well, if you walk south, you'll soon be on Cemetery Hill. There's also a lot of little houses where retired soldiers from Fort Huachuca have settled. And a bigger one where General Stockard and his wife, Emily, live. She's going senile, poor thing. Tomorrow you'll have time to visit the other cemeteries, if you're a mind. Dinner's at six and I ring the triangle on the porch. That's funny,” she said. “Most people want to see where the Yaquis burned the buildings, or where the Maid of Caborca was captured. You must have a relative or friend ...?”

Henry recited what John Manion had told him. “I'm trying to help a lawyer friend in Kansas City. A client of his passed away a while back, and there was a small fund for perpetual care. I promised I'd make sure—”

Allie giggled. “Surely they didn't send you to Arizona to count weeds on a grave?”

“Alice”—Henry chuckled—“there is no fooling you. The truth is, I'm with the Kansas City zoo, and I'm collecting roadrunners. They told me they're thick in cemeteries.”

He heard her laughing as he went down the hall.

The houses on the west side of the street stood several feet higher than those on Allie's side, all of them built of adobe, with peaked roofs and galleries running all around them like steamboats. On the walk to the cemetery, Henry saw some flowers growing by the road, and he picked a few lupines and Indian paintbrush for Humboldt Parrish's grave. Finally he came to the cemetery, a small, tilted, bedraggled half acre inside a rusty barbed-wire fence. Here and there Spanish bayonet and scrub oak grew from the caliche soil. A black buggy stood near a wrought-iron gate, and a gray horse, stone-anchored, browsed on the yellow weeds. The rig had a funereal look, as though plumes should stand in the whip sockets. But what was fixed on the nigh side, he saw, was a rifle in a scabbard. He leaned down to study it, and pursed his lips.

Nice! Excellent piece of the gun maker's art. The gun stock was of carved rosewood; the barrel, walls, and magazine of nickel steel. Looked like a Hotchkiss, what he could see of it, a gun Winchester had tried to sell the Army, so that a few officers got them. The weapon very much resembled his father's carbine—the one that had disappeared in the raid, or been burned and melted down totally. He eased it halfway from the scabbard and confirmed that it was the same model, then looked for the fortunate owner.

There he was—
she
was!—sitting by a grave, reading a book as big as a Bible. He conjectured: Would it be polite to ask a lady in a cemetery where she had come by a weapon? (And, if he got past this hurdle, would she like to trade for a newer gun that held more cartridges?)

Nothing ventured, he decided.

A rusty hinge gave an iron squall as he opened the gate. The mourner, a young woman, sat on a folding stool on the central aisle; she did not look up, but as he started toward her he came to a shocked halt. Though he saw her face in profile, he was certain it was the woman in the wedding picture! She had the same arch way of holding her head; even the braid brought forward across one shoulder was that of the woman in the photograph. She wore a white shirtwaist with a high collar and a full tan skirt; a little straw hat lay on the ground beside her.

Holding his breath, he studied his cards.

As of the time Manion got her wire, Frances Parrish's husband was missing.

Had he been found—and buried—in the few days since?

No, for the grave had settled completely

He decided there was one person could give him all the information he needed. The Widow Parrish.

As yet she had not seen him. She was writing furiously on one of those officers' field desks. He saw her suddenly thrust her fingers into her hair, stare at her paper, seeming distracted—then, with a shake of her head, dip her pen and scribble on. What a fine, theatrical gesture, perfect for so vital-looking a woman as the doctor's daughter. He sensed, however, that she would not appreciate being interrupted at her work.

So: He would stroll past, carrying his blue-and-red nosegay, and steal a glance at the marker. If not Rip's grave, then whose? He would walk on, then, and find Hum Parrish's grave. When she appeared to be finished with whatever she was writing, he could introduce himself.

In the late afternoon, Frances Parrish sat on a camp stool beside her father's grave, his old field desk on her lap, meticulously setting down the story of her husband's death.

Or was he dead? She had never seen his body, but there had been such a welter of blood on the ground that she presumed he had been shot and his body dragged away. Yet she had never seen him after that night. And just as she was beginning to hope that people would decide that Rip had wandered on, a trifler like him, and forget about him, a letter appeared at the post office that shocked her out of her wits.

The lawyer in Kansas City warned Rip that unless he heard from him promptly, the trust checks would cease.

And then yesterday a telegram was waiting for her when she arrived in town, informing her that a gunman named Henry Logan would arrive shortly to make inquiries. Now her anxiety exploded into panic.

A gunman!
Why
, in heaven's name? Did he think she was some wild gun-toting woman who had killed her husband and would kill again? But whatever the man called himself, his first move would certainly be to alert the county sheriff to the situation at Spider Ranch. She imagined herself sitting across a desk from George Bannock, that colossal, poky man with the bitter little eyes like rivet heads, and the grisly whisper of a voice. And he, too, had his own reason for hating her father, for Dr. Wingard had cut the deadly growth off his larynx and turned him into the croaking giant they called Whispering George.

Why haven't you (something, something, something), Miz Frances?
he would begin.

I'm sorry, Sheriff—I didn't catch all of that.

Blame your father for that, ma'am. They used to call me Big George Bannock. Now it's Whispering George. I said, why haven't you reported your husband missing?

Because I was afraid I might be accused of Rip's murder. And he takes off like this so often. So you see, Sheriff, I'm not even sure he's dead
....

Weren't you ever going to report him missing, Miz Frances?
The grisly death's-head voice barely comprehensible. She had to hold her breath to make out the words, but the glint of his eyes was always eloquent.

Well, I thought I'd wait a spell
, she would say offhandedly.
Richard might still come back
...

How long a spell were you thinking of, ma'am?
(Here he would cough, making the most of his disability.)

Oh—I suppose a year or so.

A year, Miz Frances?
Leaning toward her like a Tower of Pisa about to bury her in bricks.

Yes, sir
. Mas o menos.

You'd better get yourself a lawyer, dear lady.

So she decided to talk to that lawyer Rip's Uncle Hum had used—Ira Gustetter. He was a disgusting creature, and his wife had cut Frances on the street. But since he was a pariah, too, some common feeling might grow between them.

She had driven in the previous night and stayed with a Mexican family she knew in the other Nogales. Then she learned this morning that Gustetter was ill—ill, indeed! drunk or hung over—and she would have to stay overnight again. Just as well—she really ought to set down everything before trying to tell anyone. Even the fact that it had rained the day she rode out there might be important—it was why she had arrived at the worst possible time, at sundown, with Rip getting drunk.

So she put this down.

I was sure that my husband was camped at Spanish Church, on our ranch, so I left early that morning, August 14, to try to find him. I wanted to be early enough, if possible, that I could get back home the same evening
....

But a hard summer storm made her late in arriving at the spot. She had to stay out of the canyons and on the hillsides, which were slow going. At last, sunburned and tired, she rode out onto a bench overlooking a wash far back in the maze of canyons and volcanic hills on the western edge of the ranch. The ruins of a small adobe church spread over part of the bench. She could see right through the fabled Spanish Church, its south wall having melted into a berm. The structure was roofless, and its doors had been taken away long since. Weeds and shrubs sprouted from the tops of the broken mud-brick walls.

Below her in the wash, a shallow creek lapped against a volcanic cliff. Downstream a few hundred feet, the cliff split open and a side canyon joined the main one. In this delta there was a tiny meadow with a little grass and some hackberry trees and oaks, but mostly it had been taken over by brush. A trail continued up this side canyon to end abruptly a half mile south in a box canyon with steep, colorful stone cliffs. A stone fence had been erected across the mouth of the side canyon, making it a perfect holding place when cattle were being worked.