Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (2 page)

“I don’t know if he has or not,” said Vern
in a flat voice, turning away from the wall where he had hung the
bridle. He gestured toward his horse. “Rub him down for me, will
you, Lars? He needs it.”

He picked up his saddlebags and walked out.
Lars Holcomb, open-mouthed, made his way out of the stall into the
aisle of the stable, stumbling a little as he stared after Vern
Lennox’s retreating back. He was amazed, and not a little curious.
His impression had been that Vern Lennox was likely to go after
that pair of train hold-up men himself. What had happened? Lars had
never seen him in a mood like this before. Had some unforeseen
disaster befallen on the assignment?

Vern walked down the street, dimming now as
evening approached, to the gray-sided boarding-house on the corner.
He went upstairs to the small, plain room overlooking the street
that was always his lodging when in town. He put his saddlebags
across the back of a chair, and then he went and stood by the
window. He took hold of his right hand with his left and put
pressure on it, a little at first, and then more, testing the
strength of his right wrist. He held it as long as it could support
the strain, bending his head slightly to see it better, close to
the failing light from the window. There was a lamp in the room he
could have lit, but he avoided it, as if perhaps he did not want to
look at himself too closely. When the wrist could take the pressure
no longer he released it and let it fall to his side again. Then he
stood there looking out into the darkening street.

Three months before, his horse had shied at
a rattlesnake in the trail, and he had broken his wrist in the
fall. Since the splints came off he had been working with it,
trying to restore its former strength, but still he could not use
the hand in anything like its normal capacity. He could not use a
gun. He might hold it, and pull a trigger, but never bring it from
a holster with speed or accuracy. Sometimes a twinge of pain in the
wrist when he tried kept him from getting it out at all.

He stood staring out into the gathering
dusk, with dark eyes as empty as his world without the use of that
hand. It was not his defenselessness that bothered him; he seldom
gave that a thought. It went deeper. He felt incomplete—a fraud in
the eyes of the people who knew him by the things he had done with
a gun in his right hand. That was what he was to them, he thought.
They were pleased to talk to him and associate with him, and
pleased that their town was his town, because he had a name and a
reputation. They might like his company, but that was what sparked
their interest.

He felt this with dreary certainty, though
it sometimes seemed his lot in life to be certain of nothing else.
The man who stood alone by the darkening window was a man who
doubted himself, judged himself and tested himself continually
against his own doubts and criticisms, and never imagined that
everyone else did not look at him in the same way.

Three months of nothing. That was not what
they expected from him. And what then, if they learned they could
expect nothing else?

* * *

He went up to the hotel that night, to see
Judge Macklin.

The Judge was holding court at his usual
corner table, with the group of men from town who often gathered
there of an evening to talk and listen and argue. Someone had
evidently just told some humorous anecdote as Vern approached, for
the Judge was leaning back in hearty laughter that was echoed all
around the table, while swirls of cigar smoke ascended around
them.

As he finished his laugh Macklin saw Lennox
and waved to him to join them. Vern came over, and several of the
others greeted him warmly as he sat down, on a chair pulled up at
an angle near the table since they were sitting all around it.

“There, have at him,” said the Judge,
leaning forward to pick up the bottle of brandy that stood on the
table and pour himself a drink. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than
I did. Hey, Vern? Here’s to you, anyway.” He lifted the bottle in
salute.

“Not likely,” said Harry Keller. “Good to
see you, Vern. Have a drink?”

“But go on, go on with what you were
saying,” said Judge Macklin, motioning to the man across the table
as he passed the bottle to Keller.

“There’s no more to tell,” said Marshall
Preston. “In fact, I don’t believe she ever said another amusing
thing in her life.”

“Who?” said Vern aside to Keller.

“His wife’s aunt.”

“Just proof that we all have our moments,”
said Marshall Preston.

“Some, more momentous than others,” said the
Judge sententiously.

“He’s as good at complimenting himself as
ever, you see,” said Harry Keller to Vern, jerking his thumb at the
Judge.

“Well, he’s got a reason,” said Vern
gravely, but with an eye on his old friend that betrayed the humor
in it. “The Judge makes his living off speech-making, so it’s good
business for him to show folks he’s earning it honestly.”

The men laughed, the Judge best of all. Vern
lifted his glass, but it never reached his lips, for a man at the
next table spoke up in the lull that followed the laugh. “Some
folks do a pretty good job of staying in business without showing
what they can do.”

The men at the table turned to look at him,
without speaking. There was something in his voice that gave the
remark a weight different from their own conversation. He was
looking at Vern Lennox.

Vern looked back at him. He said, “For
instance?”

The other grinned somewhat maliciously. “For
instance—well, what line of work are you in?”

Judge Macklin moved abruptly in his chair.
“I guess you haven’t been introduced,” he said, somewhat pointedly.
“This is Vern Lennox.” He gestured with noticeably less formality
toward the other. “Johnny Benson.”

Johnny Benson wore a gun conspicuously low
around his narrow waist. He was lean and sandy-haired, with an
unpleasant eagerness about his sharp face and darting eyes. He had
killed a man or two in unnecessary quarrels, forced for the sake of
trouble, but inside the law. Vern knew this; he knew that while he
himself had been away tracking criminals so as to draw as little
notice as possible, Johnny had been here doing everything possible
to get himself noticed.

Johnny grinned again. “I’ve heard of you,”
he said. His eyes were faintly mocking. “Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of
talk about you. A lot of talk.”

“I never really liked talking myself,” said
Vern. “It’s an annoying habit.”

Johnny either missed the barb in this or
disregarded it. “Well, you’ve been able to make sure plenty of
other people do your talking for you.”

“That’s called having friends, Johnny,” said
Judge Macklin, “but I suppose you wouldn’t know much about
that.”

“Well, I know one thing, anyway,” said
Johnny Benson, the gleam in his eye focusing more directly on Vern
Lennox. “When you hear that much talk about anybody, you can bet
most of it’s not true.”

There was a short silence. Harry Keller and
Marshall Preston looked at one another, and then at Lennox. But
Vern seemed not to have heard. He sat quietly fingering the edge of
his glass on the table.

“Are you calling me a liar, Johnny?” said
the Judge with extreme politeness.

“No,” said Johnny, as if reflecting, “not
particularly. I never heard of anybody calling a telegraph-wire a
liar, or a speaking-trumpet.”

There was another frozen silence. Yet in it
the corner of Marshall Preston’s mouth twitched ever so slightly,
as if perhaps he was thinking that Johnny would live to regret
this. The others did not look at each other, but each knew they
were all thinking close to the same thing.

Johnny Benson leaned forward slightly and
spoke directly to Vern Lennox, and this time his meaning was
unmistakable. “What would you call it, Lennox, bragging by
proxy?”

“Call it whatever you like,” said Vern, and
he rose from his seat and walked away from the table without
another word.

No one moved; they sat for a second with the
half-smiles frozen in place. Even Johnny Benson stared as Vern
Lennox crossed the room and disappeared through the front door
without looking back. But Johnny was the first to recover.

“Did you see that?” he said. He sounded half
taken aback as well as exultant. “He walked out on me. You saw
him!”

The men at the table made no reply, but
looked uneasily at one another. They were not ready to answer him,
for they did not know what to say—and the glint in Johnny Benson’s
eyes told them he would have plenty to say before they ever got the
chance.

* * *

The town stirred with an undercurrent of
amazement, and whispered. It was unlooked-for, it was nigh
impossible, but sane and sober men had acknowledged it was
true—that Vern Lennox had backed down from a fight with Johnny
Benson.

Judge Macklin sat at a table in the hotel
barroom, and shook his head with incredulity when besieged with
questions.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I could
make sense of it, but I can’t, that’s all. Vern must have his
reasons.”

A stubborn refusal to go further than this
in speculation, at least in public, was the demonstration of the
Judge’s friendship. The Judge was known to be stubborn when he
wanted to be and people gave up on him, but Lennox’s other friends
found themselves in the trying position of not being able to answer
questions, even if they wanted to. And Vern Lennox was not making
himself available to provide answers. He was not hiding; he was
there in town, visible at any hour of the day, but somehow never
where they could get hold of him to talk to him. Clearly he did not
want to talk. They knew him well enough to deduce that.

Meanwhile, Johnny Benson was talking loud
and clear, and his voice was being heard.

What disturbed the town was how unlike
Vern’s previous behavior the incident had been. He had been
challenged by reputation-seekers before. They had seen it happen.
Full of confidence, venom, brashness, the challengers had flung
their barb and waited for its effect. And Vern Lennox had looked at
them in a peculiar way, which had the effect of making fire-eaters
suddenly lose their appetite for gunsmoke, and retire convinced
that it would not sit well on their stomachs. Johnny Benson ought
to have been the latest in a line of them. But he had not.

Why not?

Vern Lennox stood by the window in his
corner room and looked down into the street. Inside the room was
dim; the afternoon sun, coming from behind the house, struck down
into the street, baking the dust and the weathered boardwalks. He
watched people passing, saw them meet and cluster to talk, and knew
at least one thing that they spoke of. He knew the answer that
would eventually be propounded—if it had not been already—to the
question: that Johnny Benson would not have sheered off like others
before him, and Vern Lennox had known it, and had deliberately
shunned a fight.

He had never liked fighting for its own
sake. Seventeen of the twenty men he had brought in to justice he
had brought alive and unharmed, and would have done the same for
the other three had they not chosen to fight when cornered. It had
grown easier of late, because now men knew what his good right hand
could do and had no wish to test it themselves. He had managed to
avoid personal quarrels, in much the same manner—but had always the
knowledge in reserve that he could give a good account of himself
if a fight was unavoidable.

He did not want to fight Johnny Benson. Odds
were he could have made Johnny back down, but there was always that
small chance he would not. Vern would have to admit, then, that his
gun hand was lame, that he was not able to face another man in a
fair fight. There was no shame in a crippled man excusing himself
from fighting. But the emptiness he had looked into last night at
the window had risen up, had showed him so much loneliness and
blackness in a life no longer remarkable for anything, no longer of
interest to the people whose friendship he cared about, that he had
clamped his jaw down tight on the commonsense explanation he should
have given. He had walked out, left them to draw their own
conclusions. And now he was paying the price for it.

He wandered down to the livery stable, empty
at this time of day, quiet and pungent-smelling with shafts of
sunlight glaring into the empty stalls on the right side of the
aisle. He rubbed the silky forehead of the black gelding, which
stood nosing at the piled hay in its stall, occasionally stamping a
hoof at flies—mercifully unaware of all doubts and controversies,
always trusting of him.

Lars Holcomb came into the back of the
stable from the corral, by the creaking little board door that
showed sunlight through all its cracks. He stopped and looked at
Vern through his spectacles, then tilted his nose down to look over
the tops of them, and then he turned round and picked up a
pitchfork and went over to the corner stall. Vern stood and watched
his horse’s ears and listened to the energetic scrape, whisper and
thump of the pitchfork. He knew Lars was only moving the heaped-up
hay from one side of the stall to the other, and he could tell from
the little puffs and hisses of his breathing that he was working
off his indignation on something, getting himself into the mood he
wanted as he always did before speaking.

The sounds from the stall went on for a
minute or two, and then Lars stopped, leaned on the pitchfork, and
pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose, which was a
little shiny from the exertion. He put the pitchfork against the
wall, turned round and came over to Vern. “Ain’t you going to say
anything, Vern?”

“Not till you want me to,” said Vern, his
eyes still steadily on the horse.