The Man Who Lost the Sea (26 page)

“All right,” Scott said.

Conlin laughed at his expression. “Don’t get yourself so damn’ disappointed, Scott. You’re about to make the easiest money you’ll ever make with us. You get a half share of everything we make, just for stayin’ here. The other boys get one share each. I get two and a half. Your pay is free and clear. I got all the expenses. Understand?”

“Sounds fine to me.”

“Long as you understand, there ain’t nothin’ to argue about, with me or anybody. You want to know anything, don’t wonder and don’t start rumors. Ask.”

“All right,” said Scott. He wet his lips. “Where you going today?”

Conlin laughed again. “He wants to know where we’re goin’, Henry.”

From midair, apparently, came an amused grunt. Scott whirled and looked right, looked left, then looked up. Henry Little Hawk squatted on a rock ledge ten feet off the ground, toasting his sharp nose and his sharper shinbones in the morning sun. “God!” said Scott. “I never saw him up there.”

“I told you before. Henry goes everywhere, nobody ever sees him.”

Scott looked again at the little breed, who was slowly coming to life, crabbing sidewise down the bluff. Had he heard Loretta speak to him? And if so—what? Was this her hard luck, or Scott’s, or Conlin’s? Or maybe it didn’t matter. Henry Little Hawk wouldn’t be around at two this afternoon anyway.

Scott wrenched his mind away from these thoughts and said, “So where you say you’re going?”

Again that amused syllable from Henry Little Hawk. Conlin said, “Tell you what, you ask Big Ike.” He turned away and went back to the saddle shed. Scott watched him rope another horse and then went slowly back to the hidden bunkhouse. Al Coe was sitting at a deal table with the guts of one of his pearl-handled .45s spread out on a clean white cloth. For all his fancy-work, this man knew his weapons and treated them right. “Big Ike around?”

“Down to the corral,” said Coe.

“I was just there.”

Coe shrugged.

“Going to use those today,” said Scott about the guns. It was the kind of statement that is a question.

Coe shrugged again and went on working.

Scott said suddenly, “Do I bother you?”

Coe seemed not to hear at all; and then Scott noticed his bands had stopped moving. He sat like that for a long moment, then slowly turned a pair of frozen eyes to take in the newcomer, from his hat to his hands, his holster, the plain strong boot on a bench, the knee on which Scott’s crossed forearms rested. In a long, easy half whisper Al Coe said “No-o-o …” Scott might have said it the same way
if someone had asked him if he was afraid of mice.

Scott smiled and said, “Too bad.” He straightened up and went out, not hurrying. He knew that something had started that would have to be finished, and he regretted it; there were plenty of other things to worry him. Being liked or disliked by a jaybird like Al Coe didn’t matter; just why, though, might matter very much. One possible reason might matter so much that Arch Scott would wind up dead.

Outside he watched a squaw, a misplaced Pueblo, laboring up the hill toward him from the ramshackle cookhouse, carrying two buckets of what had to be hot breakfast. From the direction of the corral he saw Big Ike swinging along the hillside. Scott let the squaw go on inside and stood where he was, though his stomach wanted to follow her; he was hungry and those buckets smelled good. “Mornin’,” he said to the big man when he came up.

Big Ike nodded. Scott said, “Was down to the corral a while back, talked to Conlin.”

“Talked to Conlin, did you?”

“Said you were ridin’ out today.”

“Said that, did he?”

“Asked him where to, he said you’d tell me.”

“No, he didn’t,” said Big Ike. He would have gone on inside, but Scott caught his elbow. Big Ike stopped, freed his arm, and slowly wiped it with his other hand, as if Scott had left mud on it.

Scott said, “You don’t want to tell me, Ike, say so.”

Big Ike looked surprised. “Hell,” he said placatingly, “don’t go jumping salty. I wasn’t there, but I bet a empty ca’tridge to a dollar that Conlin didn’t say no such a thing.” As Scott’s eyes narrowed he delivered up a surprising, jovial grin and held up both his hands. “Tell you why. Ain’t none of us knows where we’re goin’ till we git there. Conlin he always works like that.”

“So why the hell didn’t he say so?”

“You know as much about that as I do. He had a reason—he figures everything. Maybe he just wanted you to remember this special.”

“The son!” said Scott, rueful and admiring.

“Yeah, he got his ways o’ doin’ things,” chuckled Big Ike. “Now, what was it he reely said?”

“You’re right,” said Scott. “All he said was, if I want to know where you’re ridin’ today, ask Big Ike. He didn’t say you’d tell me.”

“He didn’t even say I knew. Come on in and eat. You get a little tetchy when you’re hungry, I can see that.”

They went in to the buckwheat cakes and muscular black coffee the squaw had laid out. Al Coe had nothing to say to him.

Everybody but Arch Scott rode out at about nine o’clock. They rode east, but in these hills that could mean anything. Scott wished he knew where they were going.

At noon he was picking his way up a creek, crossing and recrossing and letting one of Conlin’s surefooted mountain ponies find the route. The Green Spring, he had been told, was the source of this particular stream. He had been told this by the Pueblo, who answered his question in Spanish. He had pretended not to understand her; he didn’t want anyone to add his knowledge of Spanish to Al Coe’s guess—if it was a guess—about Taos. So she had answered in English and he was now on his way. To what he didn’t know, but he had shaved first.

He had to leave the creek at an alder thicket and cut out to open ground. He was well up into the hills now, and could see the rolling country for miles. Ahead of him, a steep slope was capped by a rocky cliff, mostly sheer, in some places overhanging. “That spring better be under the cliff,” he muttered. “Sure won’t get over it without wings.”

He moved back to the stream when he could, and found it boiling along, large as ever. Well, maybe it ran along the base of the cliff …

But it didn’t. He swore helplessly when he saw how it gushed right out of the rock face and came brawling down the broken slope, with no sign of a spring at all, let alone a green one.

Who was playing games? Loretta? The squaw?

Jokers like to watch their victims. He looked around carefully, angrily. As far as the eye could determine, he had this cliff and this
creek to himself, and the whole world to boot.

He looked again at the cliff. Forty, fifty, some places sixty feet. Sharp, almost solid rock, with a few scrubs of jack pine clinging to cracks here and there, a spruce and hemlock at the foot. Up at the top, like as not, it would be flat earth soft as delta country—a giant terrace up to the mountain beyond.

Suddenly he saw an answer—the only possible way that the squaw could be right and Loretta not playing games. Not practical jokes, anyway.

He cast up and back along the face of the cliff until he located a possible break near the top—a long brown scar of spilled earth and the clinging evergreen thick around it. He rode to the foot of it, found shade for the pony, and started to climb a spruce which grew hard by the sheer wall. Near the treetop was a tangle of limbs, part from his tree, part from growth on the cliff. He thrashed his way across and began to crawl upward.

In twenty minutes he was winded and furious. He had been a fly, a mountain goat, a leapfrog, an inchworm. His fingernails were broken and there was dirt in his mouth and grit under his right eyelid. But the last fifteen feet or so were suddenly easy, with a dry wash he had not been able to see before, angling gently up to the right, and he got up it on his hands and knees, and at last reached level ground.

He didn’t attempt to get to his feet at first, but stayed there on all fours with his head hanging, blowing like a foundered horse. When at last he raised his head, there was the spring, waiting for him.

It was not, strictly speaking, a spring. Here, too, water appeared out of a hillside. It ran only a hundred feet or so, then widened into a pool overhung by trees and thick bushes. The banks were shadowed and mossy, yet only a few feet away one could stand in the sun and look out over seventy miles of country. Uphill from the pool, the slope became steeper and ended in another, much more formidable cliff. The stream evidently was underground most of the way, and came stitching out just here, to make the pool and disappear again through some fissure in its bottom.

Scott pushed his way through the underbrush to the edge of the water and stood a while, thinking nothing in the world but that this
was a mighty nice place to be. Then he scanned the banks and the whole terrace and hillside with a mountain man’s instinctive caution; and, seeing nobody, he took off his sweaty shirt and undershirt and doused them in the spring. He spread them on a flat rock to dry in the sun, then washed his head and neck and drank a little. Then he lay down in the mossy shade with his back against a boulder where he could see the whole pool with one flick of the eyes, and settled himself to wait.

He was, he realized with pleasure, early; by the sun, it couldn’t be much past one o’clock. From the back pocket of his Levi’s he extracted a small leather-bound book, and began to read.

“I never read a book in my life.”

For the second time that day a disembodied voice spoke to him. Along with the flash of astonishment, and just as strong, was a surge of irritation. He bounced up and crouched, his eyes everywhere. That all they do between jobs, he thought angrily, make a monkey out of a man?

Then he saw her, and the anger faded, leaving only amazement. She stood in the split trunk of an Engelmann’s spruce, her hatless head like a bright flower in the thick growth of mountain laurel which concealed the cleft. He crossed his big arms on his bare chest and said with an odd diffidence, “Beg pardon, ma’am; can’t say I saw you there. Let me get my shirt.”

She waded through the laurel and stepped out on the bank. “I’ve seen the like before,” she said. “Don’t put it on while it’s wet. What were you readin’?”

“Cooper.”

“What’s a cooper?”

“It’s a book called
Last of the Mohicans
by a man named Cooper.”

“I never read a book in my life,” she said again. She looked at the volume where it lay by the boulder, at Scott, at the book again. She seemed to be having a great deal of trouble getting used to the idea of a man reading a book. “What do you read books for?”

Now he laughed, and she flared up at him, “You laughing at me?”

“Lord, no, ma’am. It’s just that nobody ever asked me that before.”

He looked at the still water for a moment, thinking. “Tell you what,
suppose you had a friend, he knew a whole lot more than you do. He could tell you things about what people are like all over the world, the way they live, everything. And what folks were like a hundred years ago or even a thousand. He could tell you things that make your hair curl, lose you sleep, or things that make you laugh.” He looked up at her swiftly, and away. “Or cry.”

He kicked a pebble into the water and watched the sunlight break and break, and heal. “More than that. Suppose you had a friend there waiting for you anytime you wanted him, anyplace. He’d give you all he’s got or any part of it, whenever you wanted it. And even more, you could shut him up if you didn’t feel like listening. Or if he said something you like, you could get him to say it over a hundred times, and he’d never mind.”

He pointed at the book. “And all that you can put in your pocket.” Suddenly he faced her. “Talk a heap, don’t I?”

“Yes,” she said. But there was no objection in the word.

They stood by the water, their eyes trapped. Scott, then Loretta, tugged at the bond and for a moment couldn’t break it. They were laughing embarrassedly, and laughing at their own laughter.

She sat down, and he went down beside her, close, but not too close. “How many books’ve you read?” she asked.

“Lord, I don’t know.”

“I’d know.”

This time he did laugh at her. She looked up into his face without anger. They fell silent again, until he said, “Ma’am …”

“Don’t call me that. Loretta’s my name.”

“Yes’m—Loretta. Thanks. Was going to say, I have two-three more books in my bunkroll, you like to read them.” He waited a long time for her answer, but there was none. “What’s the matter?”

“I guess,” she said with difficulty, “I better not borrow a book.”

He drew breath to ask her why not, but the strain in her voice warned him away. Something here … Conlin didn’t like books, or didn’t like her borrowing from the bunch … or maybe something which didn’t concern Conlin at all. He could wait. It would come in time, if it was important. “Any time you change your mind,” he said pleasantly.

She moved impatiently. “Don’t you wonder why I asked you to come up here?”

He shook his head.

A series of expressions chased themselves across her smooth face—puzzlement, anger, amusement. “I don’t know whether to get mad at you for that,” she said.

“You shouldn’t.”

“All right, why did I tell you to meet me?”

“You wanted somebody to talk to,” he said immediately.

She made an odd sound, a short, surprised “Hm!” from her nostrils. Reluctantly her eyes met his. “What do you mean?”

“What I said. Someone to talk to,” he said carefully. “All the time the same faces saying the same things—Conlin talking business, Al Coe bragging, and in between times,” he added shrewdly, “trying on fancy clothes that nobody ever sees you in. Day after day … and you just naturally got to talk to someone.”

“You see a lot!” she blurted, in a voice that should have been banter but came out real.

“I say something wrong?”

She thought about it, honestly searching. Then, “No. You have a way of … I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it, I’m just a … what I mean, it’s hard to have secrets from you.”

Wisely he said nothing.

“I’ll tell you why I wouldn’t borrow a book,” she blurted. “You see, I don’t read so good. If I tried to read one of your books I wouldn’t know what the words meant, and you’d think I was ignorant, and that’s why.” She leaped to her feet.