The Last Days of Wolf Garnett (6 page)

"A curious one."

Finley shook his head sadly. "The worst kind." He finished his smoke and shoved himself to his feet.

"I take it," Gault said acidly, "that you and the sheriff, and some others, don't want me in Standard County any longer. Might be I'd leave, and save you the trouble of killin' me, if I knowed why it was that you didn't want me here."

Finley smiled. It was a chilling expression on a humorless face. "Miss Esther ain't had much schoolin', but she's a tolerable good doc. She'll have you up and around inside of two, three days. Your buckskin's in the horse pen on the other side of the shed. My advice is get saddled soon as you're able to ride, and strike for some direction away from Standard County."

The deputy nodded and strode out of the shed. Gault lay for a long while, his mind milling in aimless circles. He saw Shorty Pike and Colly Fay pass in front of the open doorway, heading for the Garnett cornfield with long-handled hoes on their shoulders.

Gunhands hoeing corn. It made a bizarre picture. And it raised bizarre and disturbing thoughts in his mind.

He drifted into a troubled sleep, and when he awoke Esther Garnett was standing over him with a large crock bowl in her hands. "Deputy Finley said you was in a hurry to get well so's you could start back to your homeplace. You won't be doin' much ridin' for three, four days. And not then, if you don't start eatin'." She pulled up the milking stool and sat down and handed him the bowl.

"Sorry to put you out," he said with lingering bitterness. "I didn't aim to go and get myself shot on your property."

She ignored his heavy sarcasm. "Wasn't your fault," she told him. "All a misunderstandin'. Deputy Finley and Shorty and Colly thought you was drivin' off my cows."

There didn't seem to be any point in arguing about it. Gault gazed down at the soup, a rich brown broth swimming with grease and chunks of marrow. The thought of eating any of it caused his stomach to curl. What he wanted was a large glass of whiskey and some rest. More than anything else, a night of dreamless sleep. A night of oblivion in which Martha's terrified eyes did not haunt him.

"Eat," Esther Garnett said briskly, those clear eyes watching him from beneath the hood of her sunbonnet.

Gault dipped a spoon through the layer of grease and took some of the broth in his mouth. It was as bad as he had feared. After a few spoonfuls he put the bowl aside.

"Come breakfast time," she told him, "you'll feel more like eatin'." Gault lay back on the hay. For some time those clear eyes continued to look at him from beneath the hood of the sunbonnet. Then, in a gesture of mild irritation, she shoved the sunbonnet back with her forearm and let it hang down her back.

The change was startling. At first Gault was struck by what appeared to be her extreme youth. Her oval face was as smooth and as delicately tinted as Dutch china. She's only a child! Gault thought in amazement. He saw almost immediately that this was a mistake—there was something childlike in the blue clearness of her eyes, and in the delicacy of her complexion—but she was no child. Gault wondered about her age and guessed it at eighteen. Almost immediately he revised it upward to twenty, and finally settled on twenty-four or -five.

It took him several minutes to find the right word to describe her, and it came as something of a surprise when he realized that the word was "beautiful." It had not occurred to him before that beauty was such a rare thing on the frontier. Martha had not been beautiful—she had been pleasing to look at, and he had loved her—but she had not been beautiful.

He realized that he was staring. But apparently Esther Garnett was used to being stared at. She smiled and picked up the bowl. "Deputy Finley said your name is Gault."

Gault nodded. The thing about her that fascinated him was the rosy tint of her skin. In the Southwest a woman's face tended to become dark and leathery. At the age of thirty she was an old woman. Mostly because of the heat and the wind. At forty they began losing their teeth, and often their hair. It had something to do with not getting enough of the right things to eat, Gault had heard. He wasn't sure about that, but he did know that Southwest summers were hell on women. Or on anything at all, for that matter, that was delicate and lovely to look at. Wild flowers that sometimes dotted the prairie lasted only a few days. And Gault was sure that Esther Garnett too would soon begin to fade. But for the moment she was beautiful.

That night a sudden thunderstorm rolled in from the west, and for an hour the night shuddered with thunder and lightning, and rain slashed into the shed through the poorly chinked walls. Gault was grateful for the storm, and while it lasted he remembered his trail-driving days, before he had had a brand of his own. Then his biggest worries had been being struck by lightning or having his horse stumble in front of a stampede. His worst nightmares had been simple ones, like riding off a cut bank on a stormy night. Not like the ones now.

The storm, like most prairie storms, did not last long. Gault propped himself up on the mound of hay. The freshly washed night smelled cold and clean. He could hear water running in some distant gully or arroyo. Somewhere a nervous horse—perhaps the buckskin—huffed and stamped.

The storm passed, but Gault was afraid to sleep. Afraid to dream. He built a cigarette and lit it and smoked it slowly. Maybe, he thought to himself, I'll go away from here. As soon as I feel like ridin'. Maybe I'll head back to the Big Pasture country and lease some grass from the Comanches and Kiowas and start running cattle again.

No, he corrected himself, almost immediately, not the Pasture. That would remind him of his time with Martha. Maybe some state land, over in the Panhandle. There was still some open range left, in spite of the encroaching sodbusters and squatters.

He knew only too well that this was wishful thinking. There was a wild man locked up inside him. And rivers of bile. They would not let him rest or work or do any of the quietly productive things that ordinary men did.

He sat for a long while in the darkness of the shed. The last remnants of the storm had passed on to the east. An April moon and a few glittering stars looked coldly down on North Texas. Through the side cracks in the split pole walls, Gault looked bleakly out at the Garnett farmhouse and sheds. This, Gault thought, is where Wolf Garnett once lived. The outlaw had, no doubt, been in this very shed many times.

The taste of steel was in Gault's mouth. He tried to turn his thoughts in other directions. And for a little while he almost succeeded. He was about to get himself settled again and try to sleep when, suddenly, the flare of a sulphur match lighted up a small corner of the outside darkness. The deputy, Gault thought to himself. Or Pike, or Fay. They're still here.

Whoever it was, the light had come from a blacksmith lean-to next to the main barn, on the far side of the house. Gault waited for several minutes, scowling, but there were no more lights.

Gault was settling again on his hay bed when he first heard the sound of hoofs in the distance. Gingerly, he raised himself and peered through the crack. Apparently, he wasn't the only one to hear horses—a slender figure appeared out of the dark bulk of the barn and stood for a moment in the soft moonlight. He cocked his head to one side, listening. The man was too tall for Pike, and not big enough for Fay. It was Deputy Dub Finley, and, for some reason, he had been waiting there in the barn for just the sound that he was now hearing.

Gault's curiosity was whetted. He watched the deputy move a little farther out from the barn, his head still cocked, listening. Suddenly he began walking toward the approaching horsebackers, and after a few steps he broke into a jog. Soon the deputy had disappeared behind what was probably a small harness shed.

Gault started to pull himself to his feet in order to get a better look, but a pain went through him like a knife and he fell back gasping. He mopped the beads of cold sweat from his forehead and listened for the horsebackers.

There was no sound of hoofs. The night breathed quietly. In the far distance there was the faintest echo of thunder. The land lay as still and cold as a freshly washed corpse. Then, at last, the horses came on at a slow walk, making for the farmhouse, as near as Gault could tell. Cautiously, he returned to a sitting position and pressed his eye to the crack.

Two horses appeared beyond the building that Gault guessed to be the harness shed. Two riders got down, tied up at a corral and for several moments stood talking to Finley. One of the newcomers was a big, slope-shouldered man, heavy in his movements, and Gault recognized him immediately as the sheriff of Standard County, Grady Olsen. The other man was much smaller than Olsen and carried something vaguely round in shape, almost as large as a blanket roll, under one arm. Gault found this second figure slightly familiar but could not place him in his mind.

Leaving their horses, the three men made for the farmhouse in a roundabout way, keeping as much distance as possible between themselves and the shed where Gault was supposed to be sleeping. Gault lost sight of them as they entered the farmhouse. A faint light appeared in one of the farmhouse windows.

Long minutes dragged by. Gault could only guess at the time, but judging from the visible shift of the moon and stars, the three men had been inside the Garnett house for at least two hours. At the end of this time Gault sagged exhausted against the wall of the shed. For a time he tried to make some sense out of what had happened and what he had seen—but too many pieces of the puzzle were missing.

Standard County, he decided, was a puzzling place, and the most puzzling part of it was Sheriff Grady Olsen himself. Although the sheriff accepted scalp money and ran his county with an iron fist, he had been re-elected to office over and over. For his only deputy he had hired a cat-eyed assassin who, in turn, was aided by two gunhands who had once ridden with Wolf Garnett.

And Esther Garnett—where did she fit into the puzzle of Standard County? Why had Olsen and the second horsebacker braved a prairie storm, in the middle of the night, to talk to her? Wearily, Gault closed his eyes.

Exhaustion overtook him and for a time a restless sleep came down on him. When he awoke he noticed that the moon and stars had taken up radically new positions in the steely sky. He must have been asleep for an hour. Maybe longer.

The two horses, he noticed, were no longer tied at the distant corral. There was no movement in the farmyard. No light in the house.

After a time Gault had fallen asleep, but he slept fitfully and was awake again at first light. Esther Garnett appeared in the doorway with a plate of smoked side meat, hard-fried eggs and biscuits.

"Guess you heard the storm last night," she said briskly. "Blowed out one of my window lights in the kitchen."

Gault studied her closely in the harsh light. She was still as lovely and delicately tinted as Dutch china. "I heard some of it," he told her, "but mostly I slept."

Gault couldn't tell whether or not she believed him. "Here," she said, handing him the plate, "commence on this while I fetch you some coffee."

It was on the tip of Gault's tongue to ask about the two night visitors, but at the last moment he bit the question back. He dug half-heartedly into the meat and eggs.

Esther appeared again in the doorway, carrying a blackened coffeepot and a granite cup. "Can't expect a man to have his wits about him," she said, "until he's had his mornin' coffee. That's what my pa always said."

"Where's your pa now?" Gault asked curiously.

"Dead." There was only a slight change in her tone. "Almost four years ago. First Ma, and then Pa. Doc Doolie over at New Boston called it the summer complaint. Anyway…" She sat down on the milking stool and filled Gault's cup from the pot. "Anyway, within about two weeks, me and Wolf was throwed on our own. And Wolf…" She spread her hands and looked at them. "Wolf never was cut out to be a farmer. Claimed his hands just wouldn't fit around a hoe handle. On top of everything else, that was a dry year in Texas. Corn turned poorly and died. Most of the cotton never even sprouted." She paused and looked levelly at Gault. "Mr. Gault, do you see why I'm tellin' you all this?"

"No," Gault confessed, "I guess I don't."

"I know how hard you must feel, about your wife and all. And I guess I know that Wolf done some bad things in his time. But he was my brother, and now he's dead. And I'd give most anything I've got if I could get you to see it how it was, so that you wouldn't hate him so much and would go away and leave us alone."

Gault met those clear eyes for a moment. There didn't seem to be anything he could say. He had no wish to cause more grief for Esther Garnett, but it was highly unlikely that there was anything she could say or do that would cause him to stop hating her brother.

She sighed and gazed into space. "It's not just because of myself that I wish you'd let Wolf rest. It's mostly on your account, Mr. Gault. It's a bad thing for a man to go around with so much hate banked up inside him."

It occurred to Gault that this was a curious thing for her to say, although the thought had crossed his own mind many times. He wondered if someone had put her up to it. And if so, who? And why?

He ate half of the meat and one of the eggs and put the plate aside. She refilled his cup from the thick brew in the pot. The coffee was overroasted and bitter; the beans had been crushed Indian fashion in a limestone mortar and the resulting liquid was gritty enough to set Gault's teeth on edge. For the sake of appearances he drank part of what was in the cup, then built a smoke and lit it.

"Will you be stayin' on in Standard County, Mr. Gault? After you've mended enough to set a saddle?"

He forced a thin smile. "I don't think so. I've had enough of Sheriff Olsen's county to last me a while."

Was there a flicker of alarm in those clear eyes? "What makes you call it 'Sheriff Olsen's county'?"

He sensed that he was on thin ice. "Because he struck me as the kind of man that naturally runs things, I guess."