by Noel Loomis
Immediately her whisper came to him across the waiting dark: “Go ahead—you must light the lamp.”
He knew that she was right. If he was to simulate that he was alone, as Sally Major evidently wished, he must light the lamp, move aimlessly about the room, and so make his way to her side, where they might perhaps talk in whispers without being heard. The next match broke in his fingers, but the third flooded the room with its sharp yellow flare.
The lamp was never lighted. Something like an angry hornet zinged past him, so closely that he imagined he felt the breath of its flight against his ribs, to spatter into the adobe wall behind him in a manner not hornet-like at all. Simultaneously with this phenomenon the crash of a gun came to them from somewhere in the darkness beyond the barred window.
The match went out as Hughes dropped to his hands and knees. Somehow the lamp chimney slipped from his grasp and crashed upon the floor, adding to the sense of instant confused disaster in the dark. He heard the girl gasp; and then he felt the quick grip of her hand upon his shoulder as she dropped to her knees beside him.
“Are you hit?” a tense whisper in the dark.
“No,” he answered, whispering also. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“I had to talk to you. The only chance seemed to be to wait for you here.”
There was an instant’s pause, and then she added—and he would have sworn that she smiled quizzically in the dark—“It begins to look as if that might have been a mistake.”
“It begins to look that way,” he agreed.
Hurrying boots sounded in the hallway outside like a sudden scurry of rising wind. Then the latch jerked and somebody flung his weight against the locked door. “Clay! Clay Hughes!” It was the voice of Tom Ireland. “Are you there?”
And another voice said, “I heard his lamp bust on the floor. Smash in the door.”
Chapter Three
To Hughes it seemed that his irrational situation had now become completely incredible—the more so because he was acutely conscious of the nearness of Sally Major, kneeling beside him in the dark. All day long his eyes had followed her whenever she was in sight. Her quick clean-limbed stride, the live warmth of her grey eyes—the least tones of her voice, the least movements of her hands—had held his acute attention from the first moment he had seen her. And whenever his eyes were upon her he had been aware of an unaccustomed sense of humbleness, as if the distance between them was very great and would take a long time to cross—if it were ever to be crossed at all. Yet this was the girl whom the unpredictable turn of events had now imprisoned beside him.
The voice that was raised beyond the door was hard with the pressure of an imagined quick necessity. “That feller may be dying in there!” came the voice of Tom Ireland. “What you waiting for? Set your shoulder to this here door! We got to smash it!”
“What with, you damn fool?” demanded a younger voice, high-keyed with excitement. There was a heavy thud as somebody charged his weight against the planking of the door. The hasp rattled violently, but the door did not appear to strain.
There was an electric tremor in the quick pressure of the girl’s hand upon his arm. Reassuringly he covered her hand with his own. “Set easy,” he whispered. He raised his voice, putting a tone of impatience into an unexcited drawl. “What’s the matter with you blame fools out there?”
“Hughes, you all right?”
“Hell, yes,” Hughes growled back. “But it’s no fault of yours if I am. What kind of a rat trap are you running here, anyhow?”
“Well, heck,” said a voice outside, “if he’s all right, I suppose we may as well leave him in there.”
“Leave him in there, hell! I’ve got to find out what’s going on here, don’t I?” said Ireland’s voice. “Where’s Art French with that key? Go out and find him.” There was a sound of departing footsteps, and a shouting for Art French.
“Wait a minute, Hughes!” Ireland called, unnecessarily; “we got to get the key.”
Hughes chuckled as he answered, “I won’t go away.”
Sally Major leaned against Hughes’ shoulder to whisper intensely in his ear. “Listen!” Her fingers pressed his arm sharply. “Can you hear what I’m saying? They mustn’t know I’ve been here—do you understand?”
“Why, of course—”
“It isn’t for me. You can’t possibly understand! But”—her words, tumbling over each other nervously, were no louder than the faintest breath, close to his ear, yet they were distinct and clear—“you have to do what I ask you—right away—tonight—do you hear? You must believe me: I know what is happening here better than you—maybe better than anyone else. I—”
“Then, this shot they just took at me—”
“I don’t know—I don’t know anything about that. There’s no time to think of it now.” The whisper became suddenly impassioned. “I can only tell you what I came here to tell you: you must get away from here at once, without talking to anyone. I’ll help you get your horse out; and then you must break clear, and get out of this valley, and lose yourself, until this whole thing is over and forgotten. Will you?”
“You’re the first person,” he whispered slowly, “who hasn’t asked me what I heard Donnan say in Crazy Mule Canyon.”
“Have you told anyone?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Then I don’t want to hear! God knows, I know too much of this already. They’re saying that you won’t tell what you heard because you don’t know yet what it meant. I hope you’ll never know. Promise me that you’ll tell no one, not now nor ever!”
“I’ll promise this:” he answered, “that I’ll tell no one until I tell you.”
“Good boy.” She paused, and he turned his face toward her. She was so near that he was aware of the faint fragrance of her hair, but he could see nothing. Then her whispered words came tumbling over each other again. “Here, I brought you a gun.” She found his hands in the dark and pressed the weapon into them. “Now you’ll try to get away? Now—tonight? You’ll do your best to—”
He knew that he could not do as she asked; but so intense was her urgency that he was uncertain what to say. “Did it ever occur to you,” he asked her, “that you might need me here?”
“No. No!” Her words were breathless with a quick panic. “You—”
Her sentence was not finished. Now there were voices again beyond the padlocked door, and he could hear a key chattering its way into the padlock.
“Where the devil have you been?” Tom Ireland was demanding of French.
French mumbled something unintelligible as they heard the padlock snap. Hughes flung an arm about the girl and lifted her to her feet as he rose. “Behind the door,” he whispered, guiding her. Silently she obeyed. He jammed the six-gun she had given him into his waistband, and with his fingers made sure that his open canvas vest concealed the butt. Then the door swung open, and a tall shaft of yellow light flooded his prison.
Hughes lost no time in stepping out. “You’re a fine bunch,” he told them; and shut the door behind him with an exasperated slam.
That was a bad moment. It was in his mind that if Sally Major wanted her presence in that room to remain unknown, he was going to keep it so, at whatever cost. Right now if one of them should decide to probe the darkness within—
“I don’t know what goes on here any more than you do,” said Tom Ireland. The big man seemed at once angry and at a loss. He turned to the cowboys who filled the narrow hall. “Anybody know who thrun that shot?”
A bow-legged man with a square muscular face started toward the outer door. “I bet if I go out and look around by the—”
“Come back here, Dusty! There’s enough fellers trampling round out there now.” In the absence of the old man and of Bob Macumber, Ireland seemed to be straw boss. “Now the whole passel of you fellers go on in the mess hall, and stay there! Go on, now! You too, Hughes.”
Dusty Rivers led the way down the hall toward the inside of the hou
se, the others trailing after him uncertainly. Hughes followed last of all, except for Art French, who stood aside for Clay to precede him.
Outside they could hear Ireland and a couple of others shouting back and forth. There is a hollow-sounding strangeness in the voices of men who seek the unknown in the night; their voices carry a necessity for action oddly frustrated by the deceptive emptiness of the dark. Hughes heard someone call out: “I seen the flash of the gun, somewheres here!” Then Tom Ireland’s answering bellow, “Then stay away from there, you damn fool, and get hold of a light!”
The random shouting became fainter, muffled by the massive walls.
The mess hall was in the main adobe house, a long trestle-tabled room which seated forty riders, during roundup time. Peeled twelve-inch logs supported the flat roof, and the floor was of ten-inch plank, worn hollow in the doorways by a generation of high heels. The nine or ten cow hands now gathered here kept questioning each other, and repeating details of scanty information. “I was just turning in when I hears the shot—”
Those were not men who would have waited indoors for long; but now the big straw boss came clumping in after them, his chunky face as red as a peck of apples.
“Harry’s casting for sign with a pump-gas lantern. I don’t want no more of you busting out there and milling around on top of what little sign he’s got. Hell’s fire! I wish the old man would get back.”
“What busted, Tom?”
“Somebody let fly at this feller,” Ireland jerked a thumb at Clay Hughes perfunctorily, as if this phase of the matter were the least of his troubles.
“Miss him?” demanded a stripling called Rowdy Lee.
“No—they killed me,” Hughes answered.
“When the gun spoke,” Ireland went on, “I seen his light snuff out and heard his lamp fall down and bust. That’s all I know.”
“Where was you, Art? I thought you was on lookout.”
“I know it,” said French. The unusual opaque eyes in the undistinguished face stared dreamily through the wall. “But I figured that he wouldn’t whittle out of them oak bars in two minutes, nor five. I was in the kitchen bumming a cup’a coffee when the gun blew.”
“That is so,” said a thick-tongued voice from the kitchen door. The Lazy M cook was standing there, a tall, lank Mexican in a filthy apron. “He was drinking coffee by my stove.”
“Of course it’s so,” said Tom Ireland testily, “if he says it is. I’m asking simple questions, and I don’t want anybody to think I’m doing anything any different.”
“I didn’t think nothing of it,” Art French added; “I drunk my coffee.”
“Anybody else see anything?” Ireland asked.
There was a silence. “I heard the shot, and the lamp bust,” said the stripling called Rowdy Lee at last.
“I guess we all heard that,” said Ireland. His eyes were watching his hands on the table before him as they tore the butt of a cigarette into minute fragments. “Now I expect there’s a couple of things I ought to ask you fellers. I’m not prodding anybody about this. We all know each other here.”
It occurred to Hughes that he, alone, was the unknown factor here, a stranger to them all. Yet none seemed to question the logic of the attempt upon Hughes’ life by parties unknown. He had told his story to none of them, but information sifts rapidly through a close-knit group. Apparently there was no one there who did not know already why he was here, and how he had come, and that he was believed to conceal the single essential fragment of information which was the key to the fate of Hugo Donnan.
“But the old man is going to want to know a couple of things when he gets in,” Tom Ireland went on. “One thing, he’ll want to know where all of us was. Art was in the kitchen. Dusty was sitting by the bunkhouse door. I was coming round the corner of the stable. Harry Canfield was in the old man’s office squaring up his calf tally.” He looked around at the others, waiting.
“Me and José was turning in, or fixing to,” volunteered Rowdy Lee.
Two Mexican wranglers, looking more worried than seemed necessary, now stated that they had been in one of the more remote stables together, fussing over a couple of thoroughbred colts. A big blunt-faced Norwegian admitted with evident reluctance that he hadn’t been any particular place; that he had been on his way to the bunkhouse from one of the corrals when he heard the shot, and had just stood around waiting to see what would come off.
This left only one, a wiry, hawk-nosed man, so dark of skin as to suggest Indian blood. He smoked slowly, studying his cigarette with an intimate interest; apparently unaware that all eyes had turned to him. “Well, Walk?” said Ireland at last.
The man called Walk looked up and Hughes saw that in his dark face his eyes were a startlingly light grey, like bits of shell, making him look lynx-eyed. It was a curious effect.
“Me?” he drawled. His eyes dropped to study his cigarette for a moment more but rose again to meet those of Ireland. “I reckon I was in the nigh corral. It’s in line,” he added, the words slow and distinct. There was a silence.
“I don’t suppose you seen nothing, Walk?” said Ireland at last.
“No.”
Once more silence seemed to close upon the group in the mess hall, while slow curls of smoke rose from half a dozen cigarettes, and from somewhere outside in the night came one of those brief scuffling tramples of hoofs that forever keep the night awake, wherever many head of saddle stock are held.
Tom Ireland stirred uneasily, his big bald head dully reflecting the gleam of the overhead lamp. His eyes were still on his hands as he spoke. “You’ve took this mighty well, Hughes, I think,” he said. “You got plenty right to holler, you being locked up and your guns rustled, and then shot at from outside. I ain’t saying I would have tooken it so quiet as you’ve done.” His words sounded idle, as if his mind was really hunting for a clue as to what he ought to do next.
“The old man,” he went on, “isn’t going to take it so quiet, I’m afraid. What you fellers don’t realize,” he accused his slow, restive hands, “is that we’ve come pretty close to being made a damn fool of around here. When it gets so that anybody can come pounding into the layout, and pretty near kill a man, and high-tail again without anybody hardly knowing the difference—that’s a hell of a note, that’s all I’ve got to say. I only wish to hell—”
Whatever it was he wished to hell was interrupted as Harry Canfield came in. Canfield’s gasoline pressure lantern filled the whole room with a blaze of white light until he turned it out, leaving the mess hall dimly yellow and smoky again.
“It beats me,” said Canfield grumpily, sitting down on the edge of the table.
“Nothing out there, Harry?”
“Hell, I was a fool even to look,” said Canfield. “Everybody and his damn brother has boot tracks over every foot of this place, and their horses too.”
“If once we get Grasshopper Tanner and his lion dogs—” began Rowdy Lee.
“Yeah, that’ll fix everything,” said Canfield. “Them hounds will jump that trail, and foller it twice around the barn, and three times into the kitchen, and out again, and down a well, and up a tree, and end up by biting the old man.”
Chris Gustafson, the man who had been no special place when the shot was fired, now opened a suggestion. “I been figgerin’,” he said in his slow, deep voice. “If you want to know exactly where that shot come from, we can narrer it down by lookin’ at the place the bullet went in the wall.”
“It came from right in the window,” said Hughes.
“Maybe you just thought that.”
“I’ll go take a line on that bullet hole now, if you want,” said Canfield, getting to his feet.
“No hurry, Harry,” Ireland answered disconsolately. “We can just as easy wait for daylight.”
“Well, it won’t take but a minute to get a general idee,” Canfield insisted. He moved toward the door.
“Wait a minute, Harry,” said Ireland again. “You can’t get in there anywa
y.”
“Can’t get in?”
“I padlocked the door again,” Ireland explained, “after Hughes come out.”
Some turned their eyes to Ireland, mildly curious over what seemed a reasonless act. But to Hughes the information had the stunning effect of a thunderbolt. If this was true, it meant that Sally Major was still imprisoned in the room in which she had so astonishingly waited for him.
Red anger exploded in Clay’s head. He could picture her sitting on the window ledge in that little room; and he knew that she would be resting there passively, relaxed, her hands folded in her lap, and her head leaned back against the white-washed adobe as she watched the stars. She would never be the one to fret or fuss, or storm against the actual. It was hard to imagine her under restraint, unable to come or go as she pleased; but probably there would be a quizzical smile on her lips, half mocking, half rueful, for that would be like her, too. The lifted poise of her head would always be dignified, and sweet, somehow above the ugliness of common things; and there would be humor in her smile, and the suggestion of something warm and human beneath, whatever situation the bungling of iron-headed cowmen might bring her to.
Hughes blamed himself—without knowing exactly why—for her position now. At best it was awkward, surely; but her warning suggested that more might hang in the balance than he could know.
“You locked it up?” Harry Canfield repeated. His long horse face was pitying as he stared at Ireland. “Well, for the—love of—”
Ireland did not rally. He was studiously marking slow, laborious squares upon the table with a burnt match. “I’ve read too many detective stories, I guess,” he mumbled sheepishly, without looking up. “It seemed like a good idee at the time.”
“He was scared somebody would get in there and move the bullet hole,” Dusty suggested.
“‘Never raise hell with the scene of no crime until the coroner blows in’,” quoted Canfield, facetiously. “Oh, good lord, Tom!”
“It’ll be all right,” Hughes assured them. “I reckon when you come down to it, I’m the scene of the crime myself. Say—I guess it’s all right if I go and get some tobacco out of my bed-roll, isn’t it?”