The Plains of Laramie (9 page)

“Tell him how it was,” urged Johnny.

“Not a lot to tell,” mumbled McElhaney. “Travis forted up behind his saddle. He had a Winchester. Ken went north, Charley went around behind him, an’ I come in from the south.”

“You killed him?”

McElhaney looked exasperated. “Everyone asks that. There were three of us firin’ at him until Ken got knocked over. After that there was me an’ Charley. But Travis started to fall right after he shot the sheriff. Maybe Charley got him, maybe I did, an’ it’s not plumb impossible that Wheaton’s last slug struck him before he downed Wheaton.” Ace shook his head in a lowered way, looking annoyed. “How the hell do you know in a battle like that who shoots who, I’d like to know, an’ I’ll tell you somethin’ else, too. I’m getting sick an’ tired of talkin’ about it.”

The day after Parker Travis’s arrival in Laramie he rode westerly out upon the plains. He was gone all day, and, when he returned, he had a handful of corroding brass cartridge casings, a piece of cloth from someone’s shirt, and an indelible memory of the place where his brother had died fighting.

He took the things he’d found out there to his room, put them carefully upon a table, dragged a wired-together old chair to the front window, and sat there until night’s cooling breezes came to mingle with the scorched scents of a dead day that lingered on throughout the night.

Later, he cleaned up and went down to the hotel’s dining room, ordered supper, and killed the wait by drinking all the water he could pack under his dehydrated hide. He let all his muscles turn loose; it was a luxuriant feeling after suffering under the scalding sun all day. When his meal came, he realized that he had not been entirely aware of just how hungry he was until he actually smelled the food. Afterward, he evinced no hurry to depart. This was the first decent dining room table he’d pushed his boots under since leaving Arizona weeks earlier. The people coming and going, eating and speaking back and forth, fresh-scrubbed people in clean clothing, lifted his spirits a little. So did the meal. He sat on thoroughly enjoying this foreign atmosphere, was still sitting there, smoking one of those
black Mexican cigars with his eyes drawn out narrowly with little shrewd lines around them, when a thick-shouldered, gray-headed man and a lithe tall woman passed up to the dining room entrance, and paused there.

He recognized the man at once as the same person who had been speaking to Laramie’s sheriff in front of the express office the day before. But the rustyhaired, smoky-eyed woman he had never seen before; the high fullness of her upper body sang across that room to him, enlivening his every male instinct. Her wide mouth with its heavy-centered lower lip lay calmly closed, and her dead-level gaze, running over the room, which reminded him of smoke on a winter day, dropped once to his face, passed on, then came slowly back again. Her gaze though was cool, her manner indifferent. She had caught his unwavering regard; now she was returning it.

The older man spoke at her side indicating a table. The spell was broken, the two of them passed along into the room, and Parker removed his Mexican cigar to consider thoughtfully its inch-long dead ash.

The urges of a lone man always moved like the needle of a compass to consideration of a beautiful woman, and afterward, perhaps a lifetime later, if her initial impression was strong enough, he could recall her in each handsome detail exactly as he’d seen her that one time.

Parker, with his back to that couple, did that now, considered Amy Morgan as he’d seen her beside Lew Morgan that little moment in the dining room doorway. Later, when he arose and nearly passed out of the room, he turned suddenly and saw her glance following him. Over all those heads and unnoticed, they looked straight at one another. Amy didn’t look
away; she caught his gaze and held it, seemingly appraising him, her face composed, her gaze cool, and after a time her eyes showed a little flare of surprise at his boldness, a little lift of interest.

He turned and walked on out of the room, a big compact man who moved with a rolling gait and a determined, deliberate onward thrust.

Amy touched Lew’s arm. “That man leaving the room…who is he?”

Lew looked up and around, saw only the sweep of wide shoulders, and shook his head. “I don’t know, I’m sure. Just a traveler possibly. This time of year Laramie gets its share of stock buyers and whatnot.”

Lew stopped speaking as Hub Wheaton came up, nodded, and smiled downward. “Glad to see you in town, Miss Amy,” he said. “You’re looking pretty as a May flower.”

Amy smiled and Lew reached far over to draw forth an empty chair. “Sit down,” he said. “Had your supper?”

Hubbell said he had but he sat, and, when a waiter came around, he asked for a cup of coffee. While he waited, he looked at Lew and said: “You’re quite a fancier of horseflesh. If you have a minute after supper, I’d like you to walk over to the livery barn and look at an animal with me.”

“Sure,” said Morgan casually. “You looking for another saddle animal, Hub?”

“No. No, the one I’ve got is good enough for me. At least for now. Just want your opinion about something is all.”

Lew, sensing nothing here, went ahead with his meal, but Amy was slower to abandon her study of the sheriff’s melancholy face.

They talked of casual things until the meal was over. They left the dining room as a trio, went out to where Lew had his top-buggy, and there they drove northward and across to the livery barn.

“I’ll only keep him a minute,” said Hubbell Wheaton to Amy, as he climbed out and turned to look back. He seemed to be balancing something in his mind. In the end he didn’t say it; he only nodded and walked around the rig where Morgan was waiting. Together they passed out of sight between two smoking carriage lanterns into the barn’s gloomy interior.

Amy watched riders pass through alternate splashes of light and dark around her on the roadway. She heard the tinkling laugh of a saloon woman come out of the Great Northern, and she saw the stranger leaning idly against an overhang upright, smoking another black cigar and looking out into the westerly velvet night as though unconscious of everything around him, as though entirely lost to everything except his thoughts. He did not stir or drop his gaze, even when two rowdy cowboys swung past behind him. Her interest quickened again, seeing him like that. Then he did an entirely unexpected thing. He stepped down off the plank walk and strolled purposefully toward the Lincoln Ranch buggy. At the last moment, though, when Amy was positive he had seen her, had recognized her, and was going to speak, he swung out and around, passed behind the rig, and appeared upon the far side, walking past her uncle and Hubbell Wheaton where they were emerging from the barn. After that he was lost to her. The next moment her uncle mumbled—“Good night.”—to Hubbell Wheaton, grunted up into the rig, freed the lines,
kicked off the foot brake, and clucked at the horse between the shafts.

Lew drove well beyond Laramie out on to the prairie before either of them spoke. There was the beginning of a full moon above. Star shine lay silver-soft over everything and mantled the distant dark-cut mountains with an eerie paleness.

“There’s a thoroughbred horse in town,” Lew said abruptly, without any preamble at all. He swung his head. “That doesn’t mean anything to you, though, does it?”

Amy shook her head and leaned back. There was something to a night such as this one that stirred her, made her restless and dissatisfied.

“The blood bay is a thoroughbred, Amy.”

Gradual understanding came now. She rolled her head upon the seat back to look, hard, at her uncle. It was not what he had said, but what he had not said that encouraged her to say: “And the owner of this other thoroughbred…?”

“Hub’s going to find out. He just happened by tonight. The hostler called him over, invited Hub to look at one of the finest specimens of horseflesh the hostler had ever seen. It was this thoroughbred.”

“Hub thought of the blood bay?”

“Not right off. He said it struck him an hour later when Johnny Fleharty was telling him how a stranger in town asked Ace McElhaney if he had killed that Travis feller.”

Amy said no more. She rolled her head in the opposite direction and solemnly looked up where stars like flung-back tears shone with diamond brightness.

Lew was also quiet. When they arrived back at Lincoln Ranch, he saw her to the main house door,
then muttered something about caring for the horse, and was gone two hours, long enough to feed and bed down twenty horses.

Amy did not remain indoors. It was too still and stiflingly hot. She went out into the rose garden behind the house, sat down there in a little arbor, and heard a timber wolf cry in the far distance, this sound coming faintly in its sad, sad way down the hushed long miles.

The warnings were going out, she thought. Hubbell Wheaton had been first, then her uncle, and now, she was certain, Lew had gone to the bunkhouse, taken Charley Swindin outside, and had told him, too.

She stood up. She paced across the yard and back again. Her restlessness was stronger than ever. Finally she turned rigid in soft shadows, looking at the rear of the house. Inside, someone was moving about. A light came on in her uncle’s bedroom. He had, she knew, come back from caring for the horse, which meant that once more a chain reaction was in motion.
They never learn,
she told herself with bitterness.
They had only last month buried their sheriff and a man whose luck had run out upon the Laramie Plains, and now they were firing one another up to repeat the same blind blunder all over again. They never learn.

She made a slow swing of the garden and beyond it out into the yonder ranch yard. She had no purpose in doing this except the driving restlessness that possessed her.

She had no purpose at any rate until she stopped out there, looking beyond the orange-lighted bunkhouse where Swindin and her uncle’s other riders lived, straight at the immense wooden barn where it stood, moon-shadowed in soft gloom.

The idea came in a rush. Her uncle was retiring. The men at the bunkhouse were also bedding down. If any of them thought of her at all, they would think she had also gone to her room. No one would stop her; no one would miss her.

She was halted, woman-like, for a detaining second while she considered how she was dressed, for supper in town at the hotel dining room, not for racing down the night on her horse. But Amy Morgan was direct in thought and action. She dismissed this notion and struck out deliberately for the barn.

It required very little time to saddle up, to rig out her horse and mount it, to go quietly out of the barn’s rear opening on to the plain beyond, make a wide circuit, and eventually come upon the stage road, then to ease her horse over into a long lope and feel the whip of good night air against her burning face.

The ride into Laramie never seemed long in a buggy. Even at other times when she’d gone in on horseback, it had never appeared to take as long as it did this night When it appeared that she’d never arrive, the few late-hour lights sprang up out of the onward night, burning yellow in the otherwise natural light. She slowed at Laramie’s north end, looked right and left, then paced along to the livery barn where her uncle and Hub Wheaton had looked at the thoroughbred horse. There, she turned in on her lathered mount, came under the astonished stare of the night hawk, and asked at once who owned the thoroughbred horse.

The nighthawk was an elderly, paunchy man known only as Toby. His face very clearly said that he was now nonplussed at Amy Morgan’s being out
this late unescorted, in a fine gown, and looking as though she’d been racing in the moonlight.

“The thoroughbred…?” he said blankly, not at once drawing his scattered thoughts together. “Oh…you mean the brown thoroughbred.”

Amy nodded. She had no idea of the animal’s color, had in fact never seen him, but there couldn’t be two thoroughbreds in the livery barn, so she said: “Yes, the brown thoroughbred.”

“Well, Miss Amy, as far as I know it’s some feller stayin’ over at the hotel. Feller named Jones…or was it Smith? No, it was Jones.”

Amy sprang down, tossed her reins to the night hawk, and ran lightly across the darkened roadway. Toby stood there, gaping after her until she disappeared between the globe lights on either side of the hotel’s entrance. Then he blinked at her horse, slowly wagged his head back and forth in a scandalized fashion, and led the animal in out of sight. It was quite late. There was little chance of anyone’s seeing the horse much less recognizing it as Amy’s in the night gloom, but a man of Toby’s age and ironbound proprieties preferred not to take any risks at all.

He was sitting on a horseshoe keg, looking as solemn as an owl, when Amy came hurriedly back, thanked him, sprang up, and wheeled out of the barn in a long lope.

Parker Travis was by habit and inclination an early riser. Even in a land where all men arose at sunup or shortly after, he was an early riser. He did not know it, but this long-standing habit kept him from a grilling by Hub Wheaton, for as soon as he appeared in the lobby, the night clerk came over and handed him an unaddressed envelope.

“Left for you last night…or early this mornin’…whichever you prefer.”

Parker stood, gazing at the envelope. The clerk stood there, too. Parker dredged up a coin, dropped it into the clerk’s hand, and walked on out into the predawn coolness of the empty, hushed roadway. He knew no one in Laramie.

It occurred to him, after his surprise abated, that the letter was not intended for him at all, that it was meant for someone else and had been mistakenly handed to him.

He gazed up the road and down the road. There was no one abroad. Laramie was quiet as a tomb. He went along to a bench, dropped down, broke open the envelope, and drew forth, not a note at all, but a hastily drawn map. The only writing on it was at a place that had been encircled. There it said simply:
I’ll be waiting here at ten o’clock.

There was no signature, either. Parker’s brows ran together in a perplexed frown. He studied the map, made sense from it, then closely examined both map
and envelope for some hint of the sender. There was none.

He sat a while, putting pieces of this puzzle together in his mind’s eye, and came to a sound conclusion. He remembered his trail into Laramie vividly enough; he could check off each blaze on that trail against landmarks on the map. They led him eastward back beyond that big ranch where Frank’s blood bay was. After that, he did not know the land at all, but he recalled the peaks and forms well enough to be confident of locating the spot indicated by those written words. It was somewhere deep in the forested foothills where the Laramie Plains were pinched out by mountain flanks.

He stood up. The town was still except for a rooster crowing in the middle distance. The sun was not yet up, would not be up for another hour. He paced thoughtfully over the roadway onward toward the livery barn.

No, he told himself, this was no mistake. There was a connection of some kind between the blood bay’s new home and the appointed meeting. The longer Parker considered this, the more convinced he became. Obviously the meeting place was within the confines of that big ranch where his brother’s horse now was. Someone out there, someone with a reason, wanted to see him.

He halted where the liveryman stumped forward to yawn and nod—then turn stiff all over. Parker, an observant man, noticed this quick change. He waited, giving the night hawk time to speak. When no words came, he wrinkled his eyes at the night hawk and said: “What’s your name?”

“Toby.”

“I’ll remember that,” Parker said, strode on past,
and went along to rig out his mount, step over leather, and strike out of Laramie in a northward direction. He paused once to look back. Toby was in the doorway. He sucked back instantly, whipping out of sight. Parker swung back forward and continued on out of town. He didn’t smile but he felt a little exultant. Someone had guessed who he was. From that it wouldn’t be hard to guess why he was here. He reined east upon the stage road, thinking that in a small, garrulous place like Laramie it wouldn’t be long before everyone connected with his brother’s killing would be remembering or fabricating personal excuses and defenses. The word would spread like wildfire.

He speculated a little, as he rode through the faultless gray softness of predawn, on the identity of the person who had discovered his identity. He also wondered how this had come about. Well, a man’s footsteps on earth may not be enduring, but as long as he’s around to leave them, other men will watch him, think about him, rummage for his secrets and his motives. He had to let it lie like that because, so far, he had met only one person to whom his presence had been electrifying: Toby, the hostler back in town. Of course, there were others, but thus far he’d encountered none of them.

Where Lincoln Ranch’s boundary lay, marked by a stone cairn, Parker considered the richness of that good land. Later, when buildings were in faint sight, he knew that before this day was past he would meet another one who knew his identity, someone connected with that large cow outfit.

He came even with the pasture fence where the blood bay had been, saw that he was no longer in
that enclosure, and to break the monotony of this ride lifted his gelding into an easy lope.

When he slowed his mount a mile beyond Lincoln Ranch’s hushed buildings, the land began to lift a little, to break into gentle rolls and adobe gulches. Still farther he encountered individual pine trees standing as sentinels to the onward hills. A very faint pink streak stained the eastern horizon, widening, broadening, altering its color chameleon-like until the palest blue imaginable began to tint the eastward heaven.

The hills came on to meet him, bulky, coarse, and crumpled, their deeper cañons still holding that night smokiness that was elsewhere beginning to give way before the paling eastern sky. Where he came upon a shallow creek with glass-clear water and visible gray pebbles on its bottom, he paused to offer his animal water. The horse drank, rinsed his mouth, and stood a moment, head still down, looking ahead where the first forest tier began.

He had left the stage road a mile back, had swung northeast while the road meandered slightly southeast. But even so, at this shallow ford where he now sat, there were signs that this crossing was much used. He found tracks that were no older than the day before. Under these tracks were older ones. He was interested in determining how many riders had passed up into the hills recently. Yesterday there had been only that one rider. Other times there had obviously been several at a time.

Out upon the Laramie Plains the sun jumped up, a faint-lighted world turned abruptly bright, hard yellow, and another sizzling day had commenced. In the forest that light came cathedral-like, long, broad beams of it spilling in arrow-straight lines where it
could get through stiff-topped pines, and lie golden upon the carpeted floor. It found Parker Travis now and then, where he passed across openings, caught his shadow, and made it run on ahead.

He plodded along through the peacefulness of this cool, soft-shadowed place with the blue jay always 100 yards ahead making his warning cry. The trail passed through a damp clearing where forest ferns grew stirrup high. Here, because these ferns were jungle-like plants that covered tracks within days, he had to dismount and feel his way along ahead of his horse.

The trail upon the fern bed’s far side emerged and went, faintly discernible, into the forest again. It rose sharply over a hogback, plunged into a narrow little gloomy cañon, swung suddenly due north, and ran along a shale ridge for 100 yards, then angled downward again into a secret dell where a creek ran brawlingly southward. Here, it seemed to end.

Parker tied his horse where trees were thick and darkness still lay. He unshipped his carbine, paced up to the very edge of that little glen, and halted to stand a long time, just looking. Neither making a sound nor moving at all, just looking.

Someone visited this place often, and yet, although he had no difficulty tracing out the pathways this person had made, he found no indication of fresh human sign, or that which he particularly sought—an established place of concealment.

He stepped out into the glen. He stepped along to the creek, halted, stared downward, put aside his Winchester, and dropped to one knee. The boot track there was no more than twenty-four hours old, which did not surprise him, but it was small, narrow, delicate—which did surprise him. He stood upright,
reached for his carbine, and looked a moment at the hurrying little white-water creek. This secret place was not the refuge of a man at all. This belonged to a woman! No man had feet that small or that made so light an imprint upon creekbank soil.

He returned to his horse, brought it down into the glen where emerald grass was plentiful, loosened the
cincha
, dropped the reins, and left the animal to hike back to that shale rock ledge. There, he hunted a cool vantage point, sat upon a punky deadfall pine, and made a long, careful study of the land formation around him. Far off he could distinguish where the Laramie Plains ran westward from the mountains.

He had a feeling of safety in here. Partly this came from solid knowledge. On the way in he’d watched the trail, no one had preceded him, no one had branched off to circle around and perhaps lay an ambush. But it was the great depth of silence, of unchanging serenity that went down deeply into him, giving full reassurance as he sat there, Winchester across his knees, hat back and muscles loose, studying this land, getting the hang of it out of habit, remembering distances, landmarks, lifts and rises.

It was so totally quiet that when the blue jay broke out down-country, angrily denouncing some trespasser, Parker’s heart momentarily thudded. He sat like stone listening to the bird, by its course tracing out the route of whatever was entering this quiet world.

He did not readily accept the notion that whoever had summoned him to this meeting was coming, for the simple reason that it was too early in the day yet. Then he heard a horse clear its nostrils, and after that he heard a shod hoof strike stone. He rose up, glided onward to an overlooking rib of land, faded
out in shadows there, and waited. Below him the trail passed across that unobstructed fern patch.

The camp robber came winging; it flashed iridescent blue, settled upon a low limb and scratchily kept up its loud scolding. Horse and rider appeared crossing the fern patch. Parker, lightly dappled, half shadowed, half not, unmoving, waited until he had a good sighting. He let off a soft sigh. It was a girl and he recognized her, the girl who had been in the hotel dining room.

He remained where he was. She passed beyond sight into a little shallow gully, then he heard her horse working upward again, coming straight along the path that lay only 100 feet off on his right. He did not move. Suddenly the beast heaved up over its last obstacle, moving along head down, reins swinging, obviously using a trail with which it was entirely familiar. The girl was riding easily in her saddle; she was wearing a rusty-colored split skirt and a lighter tan shade of blouse. Her deep colored hair was caught at the back of her head and held in place by a little green ribbon. She swung her head, looked straight at Parker, and passed by without any break in expression at all. She had not seen him.