Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (6 page)

“Sure I am. I seen his eye with my own
eyes!”

“Oh!” cried Etta as if suddenly stricken,
and turned and fled by way of the cloakroom door. The small boy
gave a bounce of excitement; he enjoyed “scenes.”

“Now see what you’ve done,” said one of the
younger men to Joe Conner, who only growled, albeit uneasily.

“Wait a minute,” said Mattie Arnold. “Was it
the right eye, or the left?”

Conner, brought up abruptly, thought and
frowned for a second. “Right,” he said.

Blackburn swung his legs around and faced
Runyan’s chair. “Cal, did you get a look at him?”

Runyan shook his head. “I got hit as soon as
we came round the turn—dropped the shotgun—almost fell off, and I
was hanging onto the side trying to get my breath while they were
yelling at Joe to pull up and toss over the cash-box. I didn’t see
much of anything.”

“Hmm,” said Blackburn. “Joe, now, you’re
sure
about the eye—”

“I told you, it was the right,” said the
driver stubbornly.

“It was his left!” cried the little girl
with flaxen braids suddenly. “I looked out the window and saw.”

Joe Conner blustered, “What’s she talking
about? I tell you, it was the right—”

A buzz of agreement and disagreement rose up
around the room, and everybody began talking at once. Dinner had
been forgotten. Even Mary had come out of the kitchen; all
enterprise was suspended. Etta re-emerged from the cloakroom as
Blackburn raised his hands, trying to restore some kind of order.
“Hold it, folks, just hold it.”

“Joe, which side of the coach did the man
with the eye come at you from?” questioned Mattie Arnold
peremptorily.

“My side. The left side,” said Joe Conner.
“But—”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Mattie, moving into
assured action. “Come here, Joe, and sit in this chair. Look at the
marshal standing here, on the same side of you that the hold-up man
was. Now look at him, and tell me which one of the hold-up man’s
eyes it was that was blacked.”

Joe Conner, planted in the chair before he
knew what was happening, stared at Blackburn for a minute. Then he
slowly lifted his right hand and pointed at the marshal’s left
eye.

“Your right, his left!” said Mattie
triumphantly. “Don’t you see?”

“I’ll be darned,” said one of the men, and
the little girl with the braids cried, “I
told
you it was
the left!”

Etta cried out, “And Mark’s was the
right
—”

“Good Lord,” said Runyan, “she’s right. I
was standing over here this morning, and Mark was sitting in that
chair over there, and it was his right eye that was closed up, sure
enough.”

The children’s mother said with a queer note
in her voice that could have been the beginning of either laughter
or over-strain, “
Two
men with black eyes—”

Mattie laughed suddenly. “Of course,” she
said. “That was kind of clever—and mean. Marshal, I think the man
you want is the other one who’s got a black eye—
Billy
Leeser!
And Ames, too—Ames probably planned the whole thing.
Billy’s not bright enough for that. Nobody could really say how
that fight this morning got started. They must have planned it all
out—picked a fight with Mark, and made sure to let him land a good
one on Billy before they got him down and pounded him. Easy enough
to get their boss mad at him, and Tripp was bound to go right along
with him. Then when the folks on the stage saw a hold-up man with a
black eye, they’d guess right off it was Mark—who’d just lost his
job and owed money, and was maybe just reckless enough to try
something foolish like holding up a stage. Billy probably even
creased his hat the same way on purpose.”

“Yeah, it hangs together all right,” said
Blackburn, nodding in a mixture of comprehension and amazement. “By
thunder, it does. They just bungled over not making sure it was the
same eye.”

“Well, you saw how easy that is,” said
Mattie. “I’ll bet Billy didn’t realize it when he had Mark facing
him, while they were fighting—just like it happened to Joe.”

Joe Conner was still staring at Blackburn’s
eyes. He murmured, “Left…”

“Well, I’ll pick them up, that’s for sure,”
said Blackburn, “and if you’re right, we shouldn’t have much
trouble getting the truth out of them. Cal, why don’t you come with
me and get that arm fixed, and I’ll send somebody up to the
Kammerman to let them know why the stage didn’t come through.”

“Joe, you get the lady’s luggage unloaded
and sent to the hotel,” said Runyan, still on the job, as Blackburn
helped him to his feet, “and take the shells out of my shotgun
before you kill somebody.”

The crowd of onlookers began to dissolve,
talking among themselves, and found their way back to their tables
and half-finished dinners. Mattie Arnold picked up the empty glass
from the table where Runyan had sat and went back toward the
kitchen. Etta had already flown wildly ahead of her, leaving the
swinging door careening back and forth. When Mattie came into the
kitchen, where Mary was back slicing more potatoes into a skillet,
the back door was open too, and Etta had just plunged breathlessly
into the back hall, which had doors to the alley, the cloakroom,
and the stairs that led up to their bedrooms on the second
floor.

“It’s all right!” said Etta. “You can come
out.” And Mark Lindsey emerged from the staircase, followed by
Tripp. Mark was grinning, true to form.

“That was a close one!” he said. “Etta,
you’re a treasure! How’d you manage it?”

“I remembered you said you were coming back
for dinner!” said Etta. “I remembered right in the middle of it
all, and I ran out the back way and ran around to stop you. I knew
the marshal’d arrest you right away, even though we weren’t
sure.”

“I’d like to see what you’d do if you were
sure!” said Mark. “We heard most of the end of it from in there.
Mrs. Arnold, if I ever get in real trouble, I want you for my
lawyer!”

“You’ve been in enough trouble for one day,
Mark Lindsey, so don’t you dare go planning any more,” said Mattie
tartly.

“No need to borrow it, hey?” said Mark,
grinning again.

“Not where you’re concerned,” said Mattie.
“If you want dinner, you’d better go out the back way and come in
the front, and make out that you don’t know anything about what
just happened till someone tells you. You’ll be better off that
way, I think.”

“Right,” said Tripp. “I’d like to see the
Boiler’s face when he finds out he played right along with those
two slinking salamanders, firing us like that. Prob’ly just make
him even more sore at us, though.”

“I’ll bet,” said Mark. “And I’m hungry.
Well, thanks for the use of the hall. You’re a real pal, Etta. See
you!” He smacked a quick kiss on her cheek, and departed with Tripp
in cheerful oblivion of the electrifying effect it had upon
her.

The back door slammed. The three women in
the kitchen exchanged a glance that was almost conspiratorial—half
amused and definitely relieved. Mary went back to slicing potatoes,
smiling, and Etta looked up at her mother with big, meek eyes, not
quite sure yet if what she had done would meet with approval. Her
pinned-up braid had slid more than halfway off her head, hanging in
a comical loop below one ear.

Mattie Arnold looked at her daughter, and
then she smiled. She put out a hand and tweaked the hanging braid.
“Either pin it up or let it down, Muffin,” she said, “and let’s get
on with dinner. We’ve got two more orders to fill.”

She turned and pushed open the swinging door
to the bright front room, and the clamor of clattering dishes and
the loud voices of the noonday rush spilled in through it.

The fissure in the rock was all but
invisible from a few yards away. Upon drawing closer, however, one
saw that what had appeared to be an uneven line running down the
cliff face was actually the edge of a sharp right-angle turn into a
narrow passageway between steep rock walls. Jim Reid marveled at
the perfection of its natural concealment. He had searched this
valley from end to end, and must have passed and re-passed this
spot half a dozen times without ever suspecting there was anything
but a solid rock wall behind the aspen trees. The height of the
cliff was even across the top; none but the birds or perhaps a
venturesome mountain lion could know that there was a break in
it.

A pure freak of chance had led him to the
spot. Finding no clues on the ground after hours of search, he was
riding back, scanning the trees as he went, still mechanically
searching for something—and his eye had lit upon the sharp stub of
a broken branch high in a yellow aspen. Something unusual about it
made Jim turn aside to look. He realized upon inspection that if
the branch had been broken by the wind or some climbing animal, it
would have been caught in the bushes beneath. But there was no sign
of it. This branch had broken against the head or shoulder of a
passing rider, who had pulled the broken part off and carried it
away so the hanging end would not betray their presence. A narrow
streak of white on the underside of the branch showed where a strip
of the soft bark had peeled away when they tore it off. Somebody
had been just a little too careful.

Jim inspected the ground in the narrow
passage. They must bring the cattle through here practically in
single file, he thought. That was just fine for them, since they’d
been taking small bunches at a time—filching them in twos and
threes and half-dozens from among the strays and off the edges of
the herds. There was more space behind the fringe of aspens than
he’d thought. They must have entered behind the trees further down
the valley, where the ground was mostly hard gravel that would hide
their tracks.

Jim backed his horse out into the brush and
turned him around. There was no need for him to see where the
passage led. It came out into the valley on the other side of the
ridge, and that was enough. His foreman had long suspected that one
of the small ranches in the other valley was responsible for the
persistent rustling of Sorrel Creek cattle, but had never been able
to find out how they got the cattle through the range of high rocky
hills that divided the valley from Sorrel Creek range. Every known
gap had been watched for weeks, but the rustling continued
unabated—they were powerless to stop it so long as there was some
undiscovered way through.

And now he had found it! Jim cast a
satisfied glance back at the cleft in the rock.

He threaded his way out through the trees
and put his long-legged gray gelding into a trot down the wooded
glen. The autumn afternoon was quiet and mellow; the sun glimmered
through the light but dense curtain of small leaves on the trees.
Jim was thinking as he rode, his mind full of this new
intelligence. He would get back to Sorrel Creek with the news and
they would take immediate action. This would put an end to a
months-long nuisance that was just beginning to be a serious
problem. All they had to do now was set a guard over the passage,
and take the rustlers red-handed the next time they came
through.

They would have to do it quietly, though,
without letting the news get about. Virgil Thorsden, the Sorrel
Creek foreman, had made a point of not sharing much information
with the neighbors ever since the rustling began to be noticeable.
Of the four small ranches that lay on the near slope of the other
valley, and even the two or three on this side of the hills, there
wasn’t one he completely trusted. Even if there was only one guilty
party, there was no telling who might let news of the trap get
around to their ears, deliberately or not. Jim had been too
consumed with his efforts to find the hidden way through the hills
to think much about who the guilty party might be. The elusive
passage had frustrated him to the extent that he had practically
demanded of Virgil Thorsden that he be allowed to spend all his
time searching until he found it. Virgil had looked more amused
than expectant, but he had agreed.

Jim was unaware of a movement in the woods
behind him, of something passing among the trees where he had been
a moment before. The aspen leaves quivered as they were stirred a
second time, but they were too light to give warning, and any other
sounds made by the pursuer were kept from Jim’s ears by the thud of
his own horse’s hooves. The gray splashed through the thin trickle
of a small stream and went up the pebbly bank, and on into the
sun-dappled trees.

They emerged from the brush at the top of a
gently sloping bank that led down into an open grassy space. Jim
ducked his head to avoid some low-hanging branches, and the gray
snorted and broke into a lope for a few strides.

The report of a rifle ripped from the brush
behind. Jim’s horse leaped under him at the same instant a jarring
impact threw him forward and sideways out of the saddle. He struck
the ground on his back with a shock that seemed to jar all his
senses loose and send them floating up, hovering over him for a
moment, and then away and out of his reach.

* * *

The little glade was as quiet again as it
had been before, when muffled hoofbeats sounded in the aspen wood,
and a girl rode out into a gap between the bushes.

She reined in her horse quickly as she
caught sight of the man sprawled unmoving in the grass. She rose a
little in the stirrups and leaned forward for a better view. For an
instant she hesitated—her first impulse seemed to be to urge her
horse forward, but she glanced about her a little apprehensively.
There was no sign of any other presence in the still woods.

The girl bit her lip, and then made up her
mind and swiftly dismounted. Letting the reins fall to the ground,
she advanced a few cautious steps toward the motionless body. Still
cautiously she knelt down beside him. She laid her fingers on his
wrist to feel for a pulse. Looking down, she saw that the lower
part of his shirt was spattered with blood, and put her other hand
to his side to push back his vest.