The Man Who Lost the Sea (27 page)

“Sure you’re ignorant,” he said, and smiled up at her, watching her face pale and her nostrils arch. “You know what? I’m ignorant too. I can’t run a printing press or play the vi’lin or tan a leather hide. You know things I don’t know, you’ve been places I never heard of. Everybody’s ignorant, Loretta, one way or another. Should I hold it against you you never happened to read books?”

“I never heard a man talk like you do,” she breathed. “I never.”

He rose at last, and went and got the book. “Here.”

She hesitated, then took it. He said, “About the words, I’ll get
you a dictionary any time Conlin works a town big enough to find one in. Meanwhile you can write ’em down, or mark them right in the book, and ask me. Eight times out of ten I won’t know what they mean either, but that’s all right; sooner or later the dictionary’ll straighten us out.”

He turned away from her; it was kindness not to look at her face just then. He went to the flat rock and shook out his shirt. It was light and warm from the sun, dry and clean. He put it on and went back to her. She stood where he had left her, holding the book against her belt-buckle with both hands. He said, “You didn’t climb no cliff to get here.”

“No, no, I didn’t,” she said absently. “Come on, I’ll show you how to get back an easier way.”

“I have a pony down …”

“Come on.”

They walked southward along the ledge, away from the shadowed pool and across a baking hell of broken rock. The terraced ground narrowed and tilted downward as they rounded the face of the mountain. Just before it turned into a rough trail there was an overhang, and in the shade the roan was tethered.

Loretta swung up on it before Scott could put out a hand to help her, and they continued down the trail. He glanced up at her occasionally; she rode in silence, evidently wrestling with some internal problem. The precipice at their left, which was the one he had climbed, gradually became part of the sidehill, until at last it was fit for a two-legged animal to walk on. She reined in.

“You cut back here, angling down,” she said. “You’ll be under the bluff then. Just keep going till you get to your pony.”

There seemed to be something else that needed saying, but neither could find words. He watched her until she vanished around the face of the mountain, then he watched where she had been. At length he sighed and turned back to find his pony and ride the creek-bed back to the hideout.

A hand on his shoulder, and up he came out of a shining dream of the New Mexican sun glaring off a page of Fenimore Cooper; but
it wasn’t print, it was a picture of a face with clear skin, hungry with puzzlement. But the thing was gone before he could grasp it. Then the hand touched him again. “Scott!”

He opened his eyes. Someone bent over him. “It’s me, Conlin. Come on.”

Scott slid into his pants and followed the smaller man through the firelit gloom of the bunkhouse and the falsebacked cabin. He wished he could see Conlin’s face.

Conlin led the way to a spot on the trail a short way from the cabin.

“This’ll do,” he grunted. “Siddown.”

They sat on a rock in the shadows. Scott heard the faint scrape of Conlin’s holster on the rock, and let himself yearn for his own Colt’s.

“How’d you make out?” he asked.

Conlin ignored the question completely. “What did you do with yourself today?”

“Looked around.”

“Where at?”

“Yonder.”

“By yourself?”

“Mostly.”

“All right,” said Conlin, “I know you was with Loretta. I know why, too.”

Scott remembered how quiet Conlin’s voice was when something ugly was going on, like the time he’d walked into the poker game in the bunkhouse. He tried to remember if this quiet was different from Conlin’s usual quiet, and he couldn’t.

Conlin said, “It’s all right. You passed.”

“Passed?”

“Some men,” said Conlin, “make it to the cliff and turn back. Some bull ahead the way you do and get to the spring. Some cast back and forth along the mountain until they find the easy way. Once one of ’em got lost doing that.”

Scott listened, so utterly surprised that he ceased trying to make sense out of any of this.

“Those that get to the top are two kinds—the ones who make mistakes and the ones who don’t. You didn’t.”

It seemed to be time for Scott to say something, so he asked, “You mean you set that up for me, all of it?”

“For you, for everybody. There’s some hombres just got to make damn’ fools of theirselves first chance they get, and the time to find it out is soon.”

“Seems to me …” But Scott was learning fast. This was Conlin’s method, Conlin’s business.

“Spit it out, Scott.”

“None of my business, Jim.”

“That’s all right.”

“All right then. Ain’t you taking a long chance with Miss Loretta?”

Conlin laughed that quiet chuckle of his. “Not a partickle. First place, ninety-nine out of a hundred wouldn’t chance tangling with me on the very first day here. Second place, Loretta can take care of herself. If she can’t do it with the back of her hand, she’ll do it with the derringer she carries. Third place, if anybody should move too fast or too rough for her, there’s Henry Little Hawk on the second bluff, up over the spring, with a long bar’led Winchester and the damnedest eye I seen yet. I seen Henry split a bullet on a knife blade and put out two candles.”

Half consciously Scott stroked his breastbone, imagining it suddenly slammed out between his shoulder blades before he could so much as hear the shot. He said, “You figure everything. And I don’t know as I like that much, Conlin. I got to tell you that.”

“You don’t have to like it,” said Conlin. “You didn’t have to come here and you don’t have to stay.” The Bookkeeper paused, then said, “Here.”

A small heavy cloth bag fell into Scott’s slack hand. “All gold, four hundred dollars. Your half share for today.”

Scott squeezed the bag and tossed it in his hand. Their shares—his and Conlin’s—should come to $2400. The other shares—five if the breed got as much as the rest—brought it to $6400. He whistled.

“Sure you’ll stay,” said Conlin.

“Why not?”

Conlin chuckled. “Now, Scott, somethin’ else. You might as well know right from the start that Loretta don’t cotton to you much. You got too much book-learnin’ and it scares her. But at the same time them books can be a godsend. She got a lot of time on her hands—I can’t be keepin’ her happy every single minute—and if you can get her to readin’ books you’ll be doin’ her a favor and me too. Reckon you might loan her some book, somethin’ easy to start on?”

I already did! thought Scott, with a vague start of excitement; this was coming through to him like a message from Loretta herself. He said, “If she’ll take it.”

“She won’t at first,” Conlin said positively, “but you just nip her along like a cow-dog till she’s headed right.”

“Can’t promise,” drawled Scott, “but I’ll try.”

There was a bang from the cabin—someone kicking open the false wall. “Right on schedule,” said Conlin. “We all come back different ways, you know. They’ll be driftin’ in for the next hour. You go on back to your bunk. Next gold you get, you’ll work for.”

They got to their feet. “Come on, Henry,” said Conlin. And as Scott’s heart leaped into his throat, what looked like a rock shadow detached itself from the hillside and said, “Yup,” and became Henry Little Hawk.

It was all Scott could do to start for the bunkhouse with an appearance of casualness. If Henry had been on that high bluff, he must have seen Scott give a book to the girl. Now Loretta was telling Conlin how reluctant she was. Was Conlin interested in exactly what lies were being told? Or would the fact of a lie be enough for a bullet out of the dark?

It wasn’t until he was back in his bunk that he recaptured the picture of Loretta after he had handed her the book—Loretta pressing it close to her body.

That, he thought as he fell asleep again, is quite one hell of a woman.

The days sped by, easy to lose count of. Some of it was hard to take. On a ranch there’s never enough time for all the work. At the hideout
there was never enough work. The broken-down buildings, weathered almost to invisibility, had to stay the way they were. The horses could be cared for, shod, watered, fed, and exercised just so much. Conlin permitted a weird kind of poker, which started and finished with chips returned to their box and all tallies canceled out; it was about as satisfying as blowing the head off a glass of branch water. Target shooting and more than a very little game hunting were out; on a still day the shots would be heard for miles. Twice Conlin let men fight; they did it out in the open, starting when Conlin said they could and knocking off when he felt they’d popped off enough steam. It was all worth it, but it wasn’t easy.

Most afternoons Scott would amble up to the house and he and Loretta would sit out on the front porch and bone over their books. They stayed in plain sight, without ever discussing the matter first. Sometimes they would sit silently for hours, saying nothing, until a character in Loretta’s book “essayed” something or said something “uxorious,” at which time she would yell for help.

Scott missed a dictionary; he was a reader, not a scholar, and many a turn of phrase that made sense to him in context were beyond explanation when he tried it word for word. But as the days went by, Loretta learned to hurdle the unfamiliar instead of running into it head on, and increasingly the books began to talk to her instead of fighting back.

Yet sometimes after a long silent period Scott would find himself looking into her eyes. This always made them laugh, and they learned to do it inwardly, without a sound and with barely a change of expression. And sometimes they would look out across the valley and see figures moving; if the figures happened to be Conlin and Henry Little Hawk, things seemed to get said that could come out at no other time; but if the bookkeeper and his little shadow were out of sight, it was sensible to assume that one or the other was within hearing.

It was at one of these times, while Scott was peering down the valley to be sure the group of men he saw breaking a horse included Conlin and the breed, that he heard a slight and disturbing sound and turned quickly to see Loretta crying. He leaned forward and
took her hand. “What’s the matter?”

She took a long time to find the words, and they came out as if they were hard for her to use. “You,” she said. “The way you treat me. You get up when I come in, you tip your hat. If I got something to say, you wait, just like you wait to let me through a door first. All that. It means …”

She had to tremble for a while, and then stop trembling. “Arch, don’t you know where I come from, where Conlin found me, what I was doing, what I am? Sometimes I think you … don’t know, and then I feel ashamed, the way you … And sometimes I think you do know, and all those things you do, they’re making fun of me.”

He kept his eye on the horses and let her have it out with herself. When she was quiet, he said, “Loretta, time was when I wasn’t more housebroke than a four-week mongrel dog. I used to let my dinner run off my chin and I hadn’t the wit to say whoa. Now am I the same Arch Scott? Sure I am. I grew up, that’s all, and I don’t do those things any more and never will again. Are you going to slap my hand today because I stuck it in a butter churn thirty years ago? Folks are what they are, not what they were.”

“Arch,” was all she said; but you couldn’t write or say how it sounded; you couldn’t paint a picture of how it looked.

There were other things said during these brief intervals of open speech between them. Things about past jobs Conlin had pulled, about the way he got his information. About the way he thought. And a good deal about his men. His complete, yet scornful reliance on Henry Little Hawk; how he trusted Big Ike Friend, and his thorough understanding of the Waley brothers, Moko and Gus, whom he had bought and who would sell out at any better offer. And of course, Al Coe.

Al Coe, the big, glittering, braided, pearl-inlaid two-gun-toter, was the only man there who had “failed” the Green Spring test. Conlin had known he would, and he himself had handled the Winchester. His single shot had clipped a boulder right by Coe’s head, just the way a Kaintuck rifleman barks a squirrel. He did it, he told Loretta, because he needed the man. He needed his noise and his color and the bragging, wheeling, roaring false front of him when they took a
bank or robbed train passengers. The sight of him would strike terror into many a man who might take an even chance against anyone as small and ordinary-looking as Conlin, or such saddle tramps as the Waley brothers. And as Al Coe was only a kind of front, for scaring people who were afraid of rattlesnakes, Big Ike Friend was another kind, for scaring people who are afraid of grizzly bears.

All this information came out in patches and drabs and small spurts of reminiscence. Scott never went after it openly, but he never forgot a word of it.

“Arch,” Loretta murmured one afternoon as they leaned together over a book freckled with her pencil marks, “you got to watch out. Al Coe’s been to Jim about you.”

“About you and me?”

“Yes, that’s really why, but he wouldn’t dare say so—Jim would kill him. Instead he’s trying to make Jim suspicious of you. He says you’re a railroad detective. He says he saw you seven years ago in New Mexico.”

“Yellow,” said Scott. “He ever make a play for you?”

“I told you. Only that once, at the spring.”

“And he got his ears pinned back. That’s what I mean, I tangled with him the day after I got here, and called him. Only that once. He’s had nothing to say to me ever since. What’d Conlin say when Al told him that about New Mexico?”

“Told him to go dip his head in the trough. But—you never know what Jim is thinking.”

“What do you think?”

She stepped back from the table and looked at him. “A man is what he is, not what he was,” she said.

He grinned, his mouth dry.

Then one day Arch Scott went to town.

He went, of course, with Conlin’s permission and blessing. Conlin was suspicious of men who didn’t want an occasional ride to town; they built up pressures which were unpredictable if they should explode at the hideout, and Conlin liked to predict. Scott went by himself, after accepting ConIin’s suggestion of company—Big Ike Friend; Conlin did not want Big Ike to go, but he did want to see
how Scott would take the suggestion, and he was satisfied.