Spanish Crossing

by Alan Lemay

  "Now, just a minute, MacDowell...."

  "Don't try to lie out of it with me! You killed Slade Tucker and took his horse, and 1 know that as sure as steers can't spit!"

  Distinctly, High Wind's tone called for a smash in the nose. For a long moment Tip Roddy hesitated, trying to tell himself that this was an old man, and Kit's uncle at that. Then he mounted his horse. "Well, and what if 1 did?" he said from the saddle.

  It sounded like cool insolence to MacDowell. Anger gagged in his throat, and, before he could find proper words of denunciation, Tip Roddy was gone.

  High Wind had no intention of swallowing his wrath, however. He went stamping and breathing hoarsely into the house, and there poured himself a five-finger jolt of forty rod. When this was downed, his whiskey-laden bellow resounded through the house.

  "Kit! Kit! Come here!"

  "What on earth's the matter with you?" demanded Kit, presently appearing in nightgown and slippers.

  "You know who we've been feeding in this house?"

  "One mighty sweet young man," said Kit levelly.

  "Oh, so that's the color of the wind?" High Wind was rocked back a little on his heels, and for a moment he hesitated; but he lashed himself and went on. "Well, if you don't know, I'll tell you... that's the man who killed Slade Tucker!"

  "1 don't believe it," said Kit, automatically defensive. "And who in the world is Slade Tucker?"

  "Slade Tucker," roared High Wind, "was the best, straightest, squarest, whitest two-gun waddie that ever stood on his rights!"

  "You're just tryin' to get yourself worked up," Kit told him. "1 don't believe Tip Roddy shot anybody."

  "Oh, 1 am, am I? And he didn't, did he? Well, he admitted it himself!"

  "Tip did?"

  "1 put it straight up to him... `You killed Slade Tucker,' says 1. `And what if I did?' says he, as cool as to hell!"

  Kit hesitated. It set her back for a moment, hearing that the man she loved had admitted killing somebody, but she rallied loyally. "If Tip shot somebody," she said, "1 guess he good and well needed shooting."

  "He shot him for the reward," steamed High Wind, "and to get hold of Slade's horse!"

  "I don't believe it! But 1 guess if there was a reward out...."

  "Well, there shouldn't have been! That was just one of the fool things this country has done since it went sissy! Tucker was jumped four to one by a bunch that was poison mean, and he gunned `em down, as any right-minded citizen would do, and then..."

  "And then he ran into Tip Roddy," Kit improvised. "And that was something else again. 1 think more of this boy every minute, so 1 do!"

  "And Roddy shot him in the back," said High Wind malignantly.

  "That was whose story?"

  "Don't you suppose there's such a thing as common knowledge?"

  "1 suppose Tip did no such a thing, that's what 1 suppose. And I'm going to ask him straight out, and let him say himself how it was."

  "You'll not speak to him again," thundered High Wind. "No, and he'll not set foot on this place!"

  "Who says he won't?"

  "1 told him to get off and stay off... and the same has stuck with more and better men than him!"

  "You told him that?" blazed Kit.

  "Well ...1 was about to tell him, but, when 1 turned around, he was gone."

  "He'll be back," said Kit.

  The next day was a long one for Kit. High Wind rose very late, red eyed and ominous. Kit was somewhat puffy eyed herself Roddy, as she knew he had intended, was in another quarter of the range, looking over the offerings of a different brand, but he had promised to stop by the MacDowells' during the evening.

  "Women folks bust up a man's business," High Wind grouched. "If he hadn't been rolling calf eyes at my niece, I wouldn't've had to run him off, and I could have sold him them stag bulls."

  "You can tell him tonight," said Kit without interest.

  "1 won't have him on the place! I'll run no chances."

  "Not much danger," said Kit, who had been doing a thinkover of her own.

  "You give him up, do you?"

  "What does it look like?"

  "It looks like you're going to bawl. Women make me sick! Well, 1 can't sell him tonight, because he won't show."

  The long day dragged away; and at last, as Kit had predicted, Tip Roddy came riding through the twilight. He was whistling "The Roving Gambler." He evidently, Kit thought, had set aside High Wind's objections to killers as a cranky whim, not to be taken seriously.

  High Wind was out in the stables, and Kit had to receive Roddy in some fashion. She kept the screen door hooked between herself and Tip, until he could get the idea that all was not as he thought.

  "My uncle will see you in a few minutes," she told him frostily.

  "You're joking me," he grinned.

  "Am 1?" she said bitterly.

  His face went black. "Why, Kit.. .what on earth... my name's Tip Roddy. You seem to have forgotten me... but last night..."

  "I never knew you," she said. "1 thought 1 did, for a little while, but it seems 1 was wrong."

  "I don't know what this is about," said Tip, "but something seems to need talking over. Don't 1 get in any more, even?"

  "Oh, come in if you want to."

  When she had let him in, they stood looking at each other in the lamplight.

  "Now, what's the matter, Kit?"

  "I guess 1 took a lot for granted, Tip, that's all." Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes. "Oh, why couldn't you have told me yourself?"

  "Told you what, honey?"

  "Did you think 1 wasn't even interested in whom you killed, or where? Do you think it's just nothing...?"

  "I don't know what you mean. Unless.. .if you're talking about that Slade Tucker foolishness...?"

  "If you call killing a man... any man.. .just foolishness...!"

  He hesitated. For a moment Kit was swept by an impulse to tell him that it didn't matter, that whatever he had done was all right - he looked so lost, disillusioned, and uncomprehending, standing there with his hat in his hands. But that was before his mouth hardened.

  He said slowly: "1 thought ...1 would have thought that you'd know if 1 did something out of the way, why, 1 had a reason for it."

  "Then you admit...."

  "No...I never killed Slade Tucker, if that's of any interest to you."

  She studied his face for a long moment; and she knew that she was wavering.

  "But what's the use of that," he said wearily, "or anything else we say, if you're going to start off by doubting me, right from the beginning?"

  "Tip, that isn't fair."

  "1 guess maybe 1 don't know what's fair and what isn't. 1 thought...."

  The rear door of the room crashed open, and High Wind stood, solid and malignant, surveying them both. He was wearing his heavy gun belt, the holster sagging low on his right thigh.

  High Wind looked Roddy up and down, deliberately. Then Kit cried out: "He never killed Slade Tucker.. .he says he didn't!"

  "No, 1 reckon he never did," said High Wind. "And I reckon nobody else did, either. 1 got the dope on him now. 1 thought it was kind of funny, all along, nobody ever having collected the reward, and all. But 1 see through it, now. I've been talking to Lem Wilkinson. He recognizes him. Tip Roddy, huh? There's no such name, and never was!"

  "What on earth are you talking about?"

  "Kit, he didn't kill Slade Tucker, because he is Slade Tucker... Slade Tucker himself!"

  There was a silence before Kit said: "But you told me you knew Slade Tucker, Uncle... that you were one of his best friends."

  High Wind's face darkened above the bristly beard, but he did not answer.

  "That part's simple enough, Kit," said Roddy, without shifting his eyes from High Wind's. "You've maybe met folks before that claimed to know people that never heard of 'em. He thought it sounded big, 1 guess, since everybody bragged up Slade Tucker as being so bad. So Lem Wilkinson identified me, did he?"

  "Lem Wilkinson doesn't have
the truth in him," said Kit contemptuously.

  "Maybe 1 was fooled for a little while," said High Wind, beginning to raise steam, "maybe it's so that 1 only saw Slade Tucker once, and that time at a distance, and didn't remember him exact. But, by cat, 1 don't forget the horse! And the description of Tucker fits in...tall, sorrel hair, hazel eyes, salty way of doing business... it's him, all right!"

  "Let him say for himself if he is," said Kit.

  Tip Roddy smiled on one side of his face. "And what of it?" he said directly to High Wind, his voice hard.

  "If you think," rumbled High Wind, "that a damned murdering outlaw with a price on his head can come here and make free with my niece...!"

  "Now just a minute," said Roddy. "Seems to me last night you had a whole lot to say about the name of Slade Tucker. He was a good man, according to you, then. Square shooting, you said, and white as they come, and a lot more apricot butter... right along the same lines... about this Slade Tucker that you knew so well. Seems to me you're kind of flighty, Mister MacDowell."

  "I'll take no slack in my house!" roared High Wind. "Now you clear out! Git, and stay git, or by the great Almighty...!"

  "Yeah, 1 will," said Roddy, not moving. "But first I'll tell you this.. .you were a good man, once, to all accounts. But right now...."

  "Shut your damned...!"

  "No, 1 won't. The waddies around here aren't men enough to tell you this, and maybe you'll never hear it again. But I'll tell you, by God, and you'll remember it. You're an old bag of wind, and a nuisance to the range, and not even fit to be hung as a cattle thief any more. Now you've got it...and you know it for the truth."

  High Wind's face was purple. His hand whipped to the holster, where it fumbled once, for it was long since he had gone for the rod, but in another second the gun came up.

  What happened then was confusing to the eye, and Tip Roddy did not understand the significance of it until a moment later, when the exploding gun had followed its own bullet to the floor. Roddy had turned to go out, but as the crash of the gun arrested him, he saw that High Wind was nursing his knuckles, and that Kit was holding a candlestick of Spanish brass.

  That candlestick had come into Kit's hand as if of its own volition as High Wind went for his gun, and, as the gun had whipped upward, she had struck out blindly - but the blow had fallen true, and High Wind's broken hand let go.

  Kit was weeping. "You might have killed him!"

  "Why, Kit," - MacDowell's voice was queer, as if all the wind was out of him at last - "why, Kit...you turn on me, Kit...." It was the old tyrant of the Redregon that was the pathetic figure now, with all the iron tradition stripped off of him, leaving nothing but a humiliated old man.

  "I'm ashamed of myself and ashamed of you," Kit stormed at him. "I don't care who he is, or what he did...he's the best man that ever stood up, and I had him, and I've lost him, and all on account of you...you old balloon!"

  High Wind MacDowell rallied. His voice was low and gentle, as it had been once, when he had known how to clean out a tribe, or a range, but it was the gentleness of rattlers. "Get out," he said. "Both of you! Get out and stay out, and if ever you set foot...!"

  Roddy laughed. "Come on, Kit. We understand each other, I guess."

  They rode slowly, their horses close together. Ahead winked the lights of Redregon.

  "But you should have told me," said Kit.

  "Told you what, honey?"

  "That your name was Slade."

  "Child, it never occurred to me."

  "Never occurred to you? But didn't you suppose...?"

  "Of course, I've heard of Slade Tucker, but seeing that I've never actually been in the same county with him, so far as I know...."

  "But the horse...?"

  "1 bought him from the Indian, just as 1 said."

  "But you let poor old Uncle think.. .Tip Roddy, you might at least have told him the facts."

  "What would have been the use, honey, if he had his mind set to something else?"

  "Tip, that's no reason."

  "Well ...you see...Kit, 1 figure it doesn't matter what a man did, for that might mean anything. What he is...is all that counts. 1 couldn't bring myself to lift a finger to defend myself to anyone, in a case like that.. .not even to you."

  "Just the same," said Kit, "not that it makes any difference, but it is kind of nice to know what's my new name...."

  The rumor about High Wind's statue of himself has been spiked at the source. "The trouble with this county," High Wind told Hep Blades, the concrete man, "is they ain't got any appreciation of art."

  "Art? Art who? I thought this was going to be a likeness of your...."

  "Go to hell," said MacDowell. "Anyway, 1 can't afford it. Didn't I have to drive off a thousand head of blooded stock, as a wedding present for my darned niece?"

  Sad Harry an' me was in the bunkhouse when we heard Bellerin' Bill tellin' it to Elmer. We could have heard him if we'd been in Jerusalem. I knew that Bill understood a few o' the finer p'ints of the art of cussin', but this time he dug clear down into the cellar for words that anyone ought to have forgot long before he learned 'em.

  "Elmer," he bawled, an' he was jest a-boilin', "it ain't them wishy-washy blue eyes an' that `Baa-baa, 1 want Mary' expression on yore ugly, freckled mug. Mebbe 1 could stand yuh if yuh could lay up that danged gun an' forget where yuh laid it. But when yuh shoot the heels off a man's best boots when he's standin' in 'em, knock the ashes off his cigarette when he's smoking it, make a sieve out of a water tank when he's under it, and then miss a wild skunk when a man is within six feet of it, 1 claims it's time to put in a few innercent remarks.

  "Yuh put my saddle on Baldy with sandburs under the blanket," he howled on. "Disgraced me before a whole herd o' women, too, when 1 lit on my ear in the dirt. Yuh went out after mavericks an' put my brand on a dozen Circle-Y calves, an' danged near got me strung up by the neck. Neighbors 1'd known for thirty years, too. An' that's the end. Yuh can git off this ranch an' stay off!"

  The of man stopped to spit and then started in again like the crack of a gun: "An' what's more, Helen's comin' home next week with a fine-lookin', refined, edicated chap from the East fer a husband, an' 1 don't want no sech lookin' animule as you around the place. A woman's first child is apt to take after anything unpleasant she sees, an', believe me, I don't want no wishy-eyed, freckled-faced, yaller-headed, simplookin' grandson. Not me!

  "Now git goin'!" Bill bellered. "Yuh ornery, lazy, idiotic, simple-minded, good-fer-nothin' ignoramus. Yuh flop-eared, bandy-legged, mutton-headed, frog-footed son of a cross between a turkey-buzzard an' a fried mud-turtle. Git out of here an' don't yuh ever come back. 'Cause if yuh do, 1 might get mad an' say something mean."

  I never said nothin' when Elmer come into the bunkhouse with tears runnin' down his nose. I knew it wasn't my ante, an' left it to Sad Harry to hand out the consolation, that bein' right in his line. Sad was the dolefullest creature that ever forked a broncho. He had only laughed once since he came to the Griddle Ranch eight years before, an' that was when Highpockets Hicks fell off the windmill tower an' busted his leg.

  Elmer was near heart-broken as he packed up an' got ready to go. He had been on the Griddle ever since he was a little chap, an' he loved every inch of it. And as fer Helen, why ever' time he saw her, he got down an' groveled.

  He almost cried when he was ready to leave. "1 dunno what's got into the of man," he groaned. "I thought those calves were ourn, an' the posse really didn't hurt him very much when they started to hang him. Only stretched his neck a little an' that ain't very long, anyway. It wasn't anything to git mad about."

  "Well, good bye, an' take care of yoreself, Elmer," says Sad Harry as they shook hands. "We sure miss yuh, an' mebbe some of the boys will be sorry to see yuh go."

  "Don't you worry, Harry," Elmer flares up. "1'm comin' back some o' these days."

  "Well, that's all right with me. We'll bury yuh over in that purty little glen where the wind sighs an' moans through the
pine trees. An' we'll come and set there when we want to think about how awful the world is, and how downright ornery an' mean the people are. An' we'll put vi'lets on yore grave in the spring, an' roses in the summer and cockleburs in the fall, an'......

  "Oh, shet up!" Elmer growls as he climbs on his little pinto. "1'm comin' back to the of Griddle, an' 1 don't care what you half-wits say."

  "By the way," called Harry as he put his hand in his pocket, "how are you fixed for money, Elmer?"

  Elmer's face lit up like the sunshine comin' through the rain. "Well, that's mighty kind of yuh, Harry," he says, "an' to tell the truth, 1 ain't got but four dollars an' thirty-seven cents."

  "Well, yuh want to take good care of it," Harry answers, "'cause that won't get yuh very far in a world full of wickedness like this. Don't spend it on ticker an', above all, don't do much gamblin'."

  "Thanks, Harry. 1 don't hardly ever drink anything stronger than Body-pop an' it's a cinch 1 ain't going to do much gamblin' on four dollars and thirty-seven cents."

  He rode out a mile or so and then stuck around till evening, thinkin' the of man might change his mind. He stayed all night in Crow Butte an' then started out the next day for Dry Valley 'cause all the nearby ranches was full up with waddies. And, besides, the foremen all knew Elmer too well to hire him on.

  Elmer was the beatin'est specimen that ever struck Dry Valley county. He was so kind of innercent-like, and yet he was all-fired with a six-gun. He could hit anything he could see, an' he always hit something whether he could see it or not. His idea of a joke was to shoot the cigarette out of a man's mouth, or to knock the heels off a new pair of boots.

  He was always blundering and always having accidents, an' always doing the right thing at the wrong time. An' he always had an excuse for it that would drive a man crazy when he come out with it so innercent-like. When he missed of Sorg Baxter's cigarette and nicked the end of his nose, Elmer said it was a blessin' in disguise, an' if he could shoot off an inch or two more, it would make of Sorg look almost human.