The Vanquished (11 page)

Norval Douglas and Jim Woods sat at the first officer's table. That was where Zimmerman and Charley sat down. A heated conversation was in progress; Woods was talking: “—you can settle it, Norval. You were with the Walker expedition in 'Fifty-four.”

“It was a bloody mess,” Douglas said imperturbably. His eyes acknowledged Charley's presence.

“There,” said Woods. “You see? None of them are easy, O'Rouke.”

O'Rouke, a commonplace man with a ragged beard, said, “Just the same, this is different. We're going down there to protect them, not invade them.”

“It will be fine,” Woods said, “if the Mexicans see it the same way you do. Hell, do you think we'd be gettin' such high pay if we wasn't going to be taking risks?”

“We haven't been paid so high yet,” Charley said.

Woods turned a mock-angry glance on him. “Leave that kind of talk be,” he said with a friendly tone. “There's always one joker like you in the crowd, Charley. You're a God-awful pessimist.”

“What I see makes me that way,” Charley said, and bit into his meal.

The conversation continued between Woods and O'Rouke. Norval Douglas paid little attention to it. After a while his yellow eyes came around to Charley and he said, “I understand you did a nice piece of work last night. Didn't get hurt, did you?”

“No.”

“That was a mean blow.”

“I hope I don't see another one like it,” Zimmerman said.

“We lost a cargo hoist,” Woods put in. “That'll make unloading pretty slow at the dock tomorrow.”

“There's no hurry,” Douglas said, and got up to leave, a tooth-pick in hand. His lean form ambled out of the room and soon the tables emptied.

When he came out on deck into the warming sun of the early afternoon, Charley found a youth lounging at the rail. He remembered that old John Edmonson had told him there was another young man in the party; restless, Charley went toward the youth, who was tall and very thin with tousled dark hair and an underslung chin. Charley said, “You in the Crabb outfit?”

The youth gave him a stare of evident discomposure and said nervously, “Yes—yes.” His eyes were fever-bright.

“I'm Charley Evans.”

“Carl Chapin.” The thin youth accepted Charley's handshake and once more turned his troubled glance out to sea. Out there he seemed to be seeing the darkness of his own future. The paddlewheels churned with steady grunts and regular splashes. A tall column of smoke drifted away aft of the stack. Charley found himself in a mood commensurate with Chapin's silence, a sleepy kind of mood with his mind clothed in a mist of uncertainties; the ocean's impenetrable vastness made for a silent, threatening loneliness that no amount of human company could offset. Out beyond the grinding paddles, not a single sound broke the stillness for hundreds of miles. He shook himself and looked at the pallid youth beside him; he said, “You look kind of young for this kind of business.”

“So do you.”

“That's different,” Charley said. “I'm forty years older than I look.”

The youth gave him a strange glance and, like a dog bristling against a faint unfamiliar scent, lifted his guard, pushing Charley out of his presence. It irritated Charley; he gave Chapin a deliberate glance and when the youth put cool, almost indifferent eyes on him, Charley said, “I'm in McDowell's company.”

“So am I.”

“We ought to stick together,” Charley said. “You and me, we're the only ones in the bunch not old enough to vote.”

“I don't want to vote,” Carl Chapin said, and swung abruptly from the rail toward the hatch that led down by ladder into the cabin in the hold. Charley watched him go, angered a little by the youth's rebuff, but presently forgot about it and rested his lazy attention on the gray-green infinity of the sea. Fine short wrinkles converged around his eyes and he thought he could see, just on the eastern horizon, the rise of a blue strip of land. It was hard to tell; it might have been clouds.

He felt weight behind him and turned to see a heavy figure standing with a cool smile—Bill Randolph. Sudden apprehension went through Charley's nerves. A chill ran down his back and Bill said, “All healed up, kid?”

“I reckon so,” he said, remembering a recent beating he had suffered at Bill's hands.

“That's good,” Bill said. “I didn't mean you no harm. You made me kind of mad and I was in a lousy mood that day.”

“Sure.”

Charley had worked under Bill at the Triple Ace for a long time. He had come to know the big bartender's tempers. Some-times Bill became loquacious. Today he seemed in one of those turns of mind; he said, “You know, it's a funny thing.”

“What is?”

“There was a woman back in Sonora. You recollect the barmaid?”

“Gail? I remember her.” Charley kept a seal on his expression.

“Night before we left, she damn near clawed me to death. See that scab on my neck?” Bill thrust his head forward, turning it, peeling back his dirty shirt collar with a finger.

“I see it.”

“She's a bitch,” Bill said, and hooked a bootheel over the lower rail. “All women are bitches. Good for one night at a time. You know that, kid?”

“Maybe,” Charley said.

“Ain't no maybe about it. Ain't nothing so treacherous as a Goddamned woman.” Bill turned and walked away. Five paces distant he paused and turned, and seemed about to speak. But he held his tongue. Charley looked curiously at him and Bill turned twice around, then said, “No hard feelings, hey, kid?”

Charley just looked at him. Bill said, “I mean it. I ain't got nothing against you. The bitch had me in a lousy mood and I took it out on you.”

“All right,” Charley said. “Forget it.”

“You're a good kid,” Bill said, and went.

Charley wondered what had prompted him. It didn't make much difference. Gail was a long way behind him, no more than a memory of brief friendship and brief pleasure. Perhaps Bill was right. The sea was all chopped up in little pieces and had a flinty glitter. The smell of it was part of everything. He stood with somber gravity, touched the small handful of coins in his pocket and knew that privation had at least taught him the unimportance of most of what he did not have. He wondered why he had come here and why the sea was.

He turned and went around to the starboard side and faced the west, the ocean without limits, and put his back to that when he knocked on Helen Zimmerman's door.

The first thing she said was, “I wanted to thank you.”

“Never mind. How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” she said. “Come in, Charley.”

She let him in and, he noticed, left the door open when she came around and sat on the edge of the bunk. Charley said, “Now that we've known each other two days, we ought to be old friends.”

“What do you mean?”

He went to the door and put his hand on it as if about to close it; he looked across the deck at the gentle lift and drop of the sea, and he left the door as it was, turning around toward her.

She wore a dove-gray dress with a high collar and her slim, smooth hands were folded in her lap, oddly delicate against the heaviness of her body. Her face still showed high color, the mark of last night's adventure. Her eyes were round and smiled a little. The throb of engines kept the place vibrating. He sat down on the bunk with a space between them and looked sideways at her. He remembered a place he had seen once in the Sierra Nevadas where the trail passed through a rich meadow of deep tangled grass, and in the shallows of a creek clear water chuckled. He said, “Don't you get scared?”

“I was scared last night.”

“I don't mean that.”

“Then what?”

“You're the only woman on this boat. A hundred-odd men and damned few of them honest.”

“You're honest, aren't you?”

He felt his nerves string tight. “No,” he said. “Three days ago I stole a miner's poke.”

Her glance drifted away. She had nothing to say, but he knew she was disappointed.

He studied his fingers, the grain of wood in the floorboards, the metal hasp of her trunk on the floor. “I gave the money back to his wife—his widow, I guess you'd say. He would have been robbed anyway. I just beat him to it.”

“Who?”

“Another thief. The man who killed him. The one who got shot last night.” He flicked a fast look, but her eyes were averted. She displayed a kind of brooding indifference. “Hey,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“What for?”

He had no ready answer. “For saying anything. For rolling the miner. Maybe for giving the gold back. Hell, I don't know. I wish you didn't know about it—I wish it hadn't happened.”

“You saw this man kill him?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn't report it.”

“No. I guess that wasn't right, was it?”

“I guess not,” she said. Then he saw her eyes lift, full of something he could not identify, perhaps interest and perhaps fear, or something else altogether. He said, “I made a bad guess. Why is it you can be good all your life, and then do one bad thing, and be marked bad from then on?”

“You're only bad if you think you are.” She was watching him earnestly but he didn't believe her. “You're not bad, Charley. Not after what you did last night.”

“That was selfish.”

“Was it?”

“Sure. I did it for myself. I like you.”

“It's still not selfish. You could have stayed below where it was safe.”

“They were all sick down there. It smelled like hell.”

Her smile was gentle and it made him loosen up. He leaned back on his elbows and crossed his legs and threw his head back, staring at the ceiling. “Maybe I ought to say something about Parker to one of the officers.” When she did not encourage him, he said, “Would you like me to do that?”

“Don't do anything on my account.” She added, “Don't do anything until you know it's right.”

“Well, then,” he said, “what's right?”

“You've got to know that for yourself.”

She wasn't much help. A breath of cool sea air came in through the open door; someone strolled by outside. He said, “I can't get your brother figured out.”

“Why?”

“Last night when he caught me here, he picked a fight with me. I hit him a good one, and he quit cold. I figured him for a coward then. But later on, he came out there and hauled both of us inside out of the weather. That took guts.”

“Maybe one thing was more important than the other,” she said. “I was there, and if you'd hurt me, I would have said so. He knew that, and that's why he didn't keep fighting with you.”

“I guess so.” Charley thought about it. He found things rubbing off on him from all kinds of people. He let himself lie flat, legs dangling over the side of the bunk. His hands were laced under the back of his head and he felt the satisfying tough hardness of his stomach muscles stretching. Seeing the girl's turned face from the back and side, he watched her with grave care in silence until she said, “I don't ordinarily let men in my room.”

“Smart,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn't have let me in. I usually don't treat women as well as I've treated you.”

She looked surprised. “Oh, now, you're not as tough as all that. I'm not afraid.”

A sarcastic rejoinder crossed his mind and he thought it might be amusing to voice it, but he kept it to himself and was, there-after, puzzled by his own reticence and sudden gentility before this girl.

“You're young, but you've known a few women,” she said.

“None like you.”

She made him feel that she regarded it as more than just a silly boyish compliment. Uneasy, he got to his feet and stood holding the edge of the door high in one hand. Half-leaning on his arm that way, he said, “I guess you and your brother won't be going on with us?”

“No. We'll stay in San Pedro.”

A distinct regret crossed his feelings. “I guess that's better. It'll be a rough trip overland. Maybe I'll see you again when this is all over. Damn—we'll be in San Pedro tomorrow. Where will you be in a year's time?”

“I don't know.”

“Well,” he said, “you meet somebody and then you go away. Is that all there is to it?”

“If it is, isn't it good enough?” she asked. “We've had this much. We've met, we've learned a little about each other.”

He felt disappointed and low. “It's a long way to Mexico.”

“I'd like to see it sometime. They say it's very beautiful.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Charley said. “What's the name of the school you'll be at back East?”

“Here,” she said. “I'll write it down for you.”

When she handed him the slip of paper he looked at it as if it were clear to him, folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. “Will you write to me?” she said.

“Maybe. Maybe I will.” He wandered toward the door. “We don't dock until tomorrow. I'll come back,” he said, knowing he wouldn't. She directed a long, gentle look toward him. “So long,” he said, and pulled the door closed.

Charley was alone on deck. Questions of destiny occupied his mind, overlaid by memories and apprehensions. The loneliness of the vast sea came close enough to touch him threateningly.

CHAPTER 10

For all his seeming indolence, Sus Ainsa was seldom far out of touch with news of importance. In the San Pedro hotel which headquartered them, and which would be the officers' last indoor quarters for some time to come, he came into Crabb's view at the suite doorway and knocked on the open door politely.

Crabb looked up and waved him forward, all the while considering his handsome, loose-jointed brother-in-law. He was perceptive enough to say, “You've found something out.”