Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (8 page)

Another fact was borne in upon him. “You
didn’t tell your father.”

“No.”

He waited, through an increasingly
uncomfortable pause, until it became evident that Callie was not
going to speak again. “Why not?”

She spoke quickly, as if trying to give the
impression of an offhand manner. “Pa hasn’t got the best judgment
of people sometimes. He might tell the wrong person without knowing
what he was doing, and if they found out you were still alive
they’d come after you.”

“But…if I make it back to Sorrel Creek…”
said Jim. Things were beginning to fall into place. “If I get back
to Sorrel Creek to tell them about the passage, we’ll have our
rustler in the bag.”

Another pause. “Callie, you know who it
is!”

“No!” she said, whirling to face him. The
pained, despairing look on her face convinced Jim almost against
his will that she was telling the truth.

“But you think you know,” he said, slowly
following out his train of thought. “Who was it that was at your
house last night?”

“Last night—!”

He gestured impatiently toward the fire.
“That stew’s good and cold. You’ve been stirring it over the fire
for five minutes and I haven’t begun to smell it yet. And
don’t
tell me it’s because I’m out of my head.”

Callie did not answer, but her eyes were
still fixed upon him with anxious dread. Jim was watching closely
for the effect of his words. “Who was at your place when you got
there, at dinnertime?” he said. “That you didn’t want your father
to tell? It was Dave Nolan, wasn’t it?”

It was a chance stab, but he knew as soon as
he spoke that it went home. Callie would have reacted with ridicule
if he had been wrong, he thought. Instead she did not answer at
all. Jim lifted his head from the blankets and fell back at the
inevitable twinge of pain, still feeling the little surge of
impatient anger that had driven his impulse to move. “So you’re
covering for him, is that it? Because you’re—”

“Leave me
alone!
” flared Callie,
flinging the words toward him as if trying to ward off an attack,
and she spun round and plunged out of the mine. Jim heard her
running feet scratching in the tunnel, and then when they faded
away all was silent. He lay back, his mouth folded up tight in
irritation, and cast an eye across the space toward the little tin
pail, just beginning to give forth the smell of stew and entirely
inaccessible to him.

Several minutes had passed, when he heard
another slight sound. Callie slipped in like a shadow, and went
straight over to the fire and knelt beside it. She took the lid
from the stew and stirred it, the spoon scraping against the bottom
of the pail, and then replaced the lid.

“It’d be a shame to let it burn,” she
said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Jim.
There was a pause, and then he ventured with extreme meekness, “May
I have my watch back now?”

If he had meant the exaggeration in his tone
to lighten the atmosphere between them, he was disappointed, for
Callie’s face did not change expression as she stood up and took
the watch from the pocket of her riding-skirt. She came over and
put it in his hand. “I didn’t intend to keep it,” she said.

“I didn’t think you did.”

Jim was silent a minute, pushing the watch
into his hip pocket, and then he said, “Want to tell me about it
now?”

“I rode down to Sorrel Creek,” said Callie,
slowly, “this morning. I went to see Jennie, to ask her if I could
borrow a dress pattern. She told me about how they’re all out
looking for you. Your horse came home with blood on the saddle.
They knew you were out trying to find the rustlers’ way out of the
valley, so they figured you…found it. Jennie said they hoped you
were all right, but didn’t think it was likely…”

She said in a quick, uncertain voice, “I
didn’t know when I went down there what I was going to do. I just
wanted to find out…I almost said something, but I…couldn’t. I just
got the pattern from Jennie, and went home.”

Jim twisted his head a little, squinting up
at her. She was facing away, so he could just see the outline of
her profile against the dimness flung by the tiny fire. It wasn’t
every girl who had an eye-catching profile, he thought; most girls
looked so ordinary from the side, all of them much like each other.
Maybe it was just that he’d been thinking Callie Lupin was a bit of
an extraordinary girl herself. But she had her weakness, like
anybody, and he thought he knew what it was.

“Well, you’ve got yourself in quite a spot,
haven’t you,” he observed after a minute. “Now you’ve gone to all
the trouble of saving me, you can’t get rid of me. Unless you were
to just shoot me and put me out of my misery—say, you’ve got my
gun, too, haven’t you?—but no, I can’t see you doing that. But you
don’t want to let me loose. What d’you plan to do, starve me until
I promise not to tell a soul about the hole in the rocks?”

Callie turned abruptly as if she had just
been reminded of something and went back to the fire, and removed
the stew from the flames. Jim watched her. “What did you figure on
doing with me when you helped me, out there?” he said.

“I didn’t even know,” said Callie, turning
to look full at him for the first time. “I couldn’t leave you there
for—anyone to find you; I just needed time to think.”

“Made up your mind yet?”

“No.”

“I suppose you realize you could always tell
Nolan that somebody’d found the hole,” remarked Jim to the roof of
the mine; “spike our guns if he didn’t use it again.”

Callie shook her head. “I couldn’t do
that.”

Jim shook his head too. “No, you couldn’t,”
he said. “It wouldn’t be in your book of what’s honest. You’ve got
some funny ideas about doing what’s right, you know that?”

“I don’t even
know
,” said Callie.
“Can’t you see that? I don’t know for sure about anything.”

“Why don’t you ask him, then?”

She flashed him a horrified look, as if that
was the most frightening idea she could conceive of. “No—I
couldn’t
—”

Jim said, “Are you engaged to him?”

“No,” said Callie. “I’m not even…I don’t
know if he even notices me. He comes around our place a lot, even
though Pa doesn’t really like him, but I don’t know if he—”

“But you’ve been kind of hoping he will, one
of these days,” said Jim.

Callie had been toying with the spoon she
had used to stir the stew, looking down at it as she turned it over
in her fingers. Now she picked up a tin plate, took the cover off
the pail again and began spooning stew into the plate.

“Is that what you really want?”

“What do you mean?” said Callie without
looking up.

“Do you still like him as well as you did
before, knowing he might be mixed up in this?”

“I don’t know that that’s any of your
business,” said Callie, speaking crisply for once.

“Well, not to make a joke, but now that
you’ve dragged me into it I guess it’s become my business,” said
Jim with a return of the edge to his voice.

Callie let the spoon drop on the tin plate
with a thin clatter. “Would you rather I’d left you lying out
there?”

“Oh, quit it!” said Jim, making an impatient
gesture with his hand and rolling his head back restlessly on the
blankets. He lay there staring up into the darkness while Callie
put the plate down and clapped the lid back on the pail, her sharp
movements testifying to her mood.

“Look here, Callie,” Jim began again, after
a few moments; more calmly, but with an earnestness in his voice
that had not been there before. “It’s because of what you did for
me that I think you’re a darned fine girl. There’s not many who’d
have had that kind of nerve. That’s why I’d hate to see you go that
way. You want a man you can believe in—no other kind would suit you
for keeps.”

She had risen again and was looking down at
him, listening to what he said, though she looked as if she half
wanted to shrink from it. He had to force the words and they came
bluntly. “Suppose he does notice you one of these days. Say he asks
you to marry him. Could you say yes, and go over to his little
ranch and live with him, not knowing if your husband’s a thief and
a killer—”

“Oh, stop!” cried Callie, turning her back
to him. Jim saw her put her hands to her face, and felt a momentary
stab of guilt.

He thought rather uneasily of what would
happen on his return to Sorrel Creek. What Callie would have to go
through, knowing a trap was being laid for the rustlers, waiting to
hear who was caught. It was too bad—she oughtn’t to have to bear
that, especially for the sake of a man who didn’t even know she
cared about him and had even chances of being innocent or guilty.
If only she could know now—a clean break, before all the mess of
the public disgrace and trial. Maybe it would be easier on her that
way.

And then it occurred to him—there was one
way to find out. An easy test. It was a risk, but what had risks
ever been to him? It was worth trying for the girl’s sake.

He spoke his thoughts aloud: “Why not find
out? Now?”

Callie dropped her hands and turned to look
at him, her face showing pale in the dimness. Her lower lip
twitched between nervously biting teeth again. “What do you
mean?”

“I mean there’s an easy way to find out
whether Nolan’s guilty or not,” said Jim. “If he’s the one who shot
at me, and he were to find out I’m still alive, he wouldn’t want me
to get back to Sorrel Creek. He’d try and make sure I
wouldn’t.”

“No!” said Callie, taking a half-step toward
him.

Jim managed to hitch himself up a little on
both elbows, stirred to forgetfulness of pain by the plan he was
rapidly conceiving. “You go and find him, and tell him just what
happened—you found a man hurt in the woods and you need help. Don’t
tell him who I am. Bring him here, and what he says and does when
he sees me will tell you all you need to know.”

“Oh, no,” said Callie. “I can’t! Don’t you
see that’s what I was trying to stop—part of why I helped you.
Whatever else had happened, I—I didn’t want him to be guilty of
murder.”

“If a man
wants
to go wrong, Callie,
you can’t stop him—no matter how much you care about him.”

“But you don’t have to put the chance right
in his hands!”

“Listen, I’m no more eager to get killed
than the next man,” said Jim. “I’m not taking any chances. You give
me my gun, and I’ll put it under the blanket here and be covering
him quietly the whole time. There won’t be any trouble.”

He leaned forward a little, his eyes holding
hers insistently. “The truth can’t hurt an innocent man, Callie. If
he’s innocent, you’ve got to know for sure. You know you’ve got to
have the truth…”

She stood still, staring not at the rock
wall of the mine, but away into some unfathomable distance. Jim let
himself back down on the blankets, feeling suddenly weak and
overstrained. Callie’s clear-featured young face was white and
still, and something in her dark eyes made him look uncomfortably
away and study the texture of the wool blanket pulled over him.

“It’s up to you,” he said after a minute or
two, not looking at her. “You know there’s only one other way,
besides that.”

“I know,” said Callie.

She looked down at him, and for a minute he
saw her again as the girl she had been when she first came to his
aid—the girl of clear thought and unhesitating action. “All right,”
she said in a low voice, but steady. “I’ll bring him.”

Jim nodded, unable to say anything that he
felt was appropriate, but hoping she could see how he appreciated
what she was nerving herself to do.

Callie glanced back at the fire and the
half-forgotten plate of stew on the ground. “You’d better eat
first,” she said, bending to pick it up, “and then I’ll go.”

* * *

Jim shifted his shoulders again on the
uncomfortably flattened pallet of blankets, and drew a long but
careful sigh. The pain in his leg was worse now, and his back and
shoulders were stiff and aching from the uncomfortable position in
which he lay. It wouldn’t be much longer, he tried to tell himself.
Just as soon as this ordeal with Nolan was through, he’d be able to
have somebody get him out of here and have the throbbing leg
attended to. He couldn’t lose his grip now.

Callie had given him his gun; it was loaded,
and he held it next to his body in his right hand, the blanket
covering his arm. He prayed to God he wouldn’t have to use it.
Nolan would be a fool to do anything with the girl there, unless he
lost his head…Jim didn’t know him well, but Nolan seemed pretty
even-tempered, not the kind to be shaken easily.

But was he getting ahead of himself,
assuming Nolan was the man they wanted? Were they both off their
heads, imagining things? No—he’d been right to suspect—and Callie
wasn’t the kind of girl to let her imagination run away with her,
especially about someone she wanted so badly to believe was
honest.

Callie…Restless doubts assailed him again.
Was he doing the right thing? This was going to hurt her—hurt her
like heck if Nolan was really guilty. But a good, straight girl
like that couldn’t marry a sneaking, back-shooting cattle thief.
She’d regret it one day, if she didn’t at once. But what right did
he, Jim, have to interfere? He’d forced this on her—but then again,
she’d forced it too, by taking advantage of him while he was
helpless like this. Oh, it was all a mess.

He had the watch in his pocket now to see
how long Callie had been gone if he wanted to, but somehow he
couldn’t. Every minute of the time found him keyed up to the same
pitch, as if each minute was the one he could expect to hear them
coming.

At last it came. He heard the sound of
multiple footsteps in the tunnel and a girl’s voice saying
something, low, and then more clearly a man’s voice making
reply.