by Short, Luke;
It was at that moment that Bentham knew the answer. A man was a fool to gamble at those odds. A young and reckless man might, but he was old and tired. And afraid, he thought calmly. I’ve always been afraid, and I still am.
He lost track of the time he spent in pondering this. Only a sharp knock on his door brought him into the present. Rising, he moved over and opened the door to find the same cold-faced young guard standing before him.
“He wants you to bring him another pitcher of water, Pop.”
This was his last chance, Bentham knew. He could make his gamble and take the gun up to Dixon.
“All right, you take him one,” Bentham said, and he closed the door.
When he came downstairs an hour later, he complained to Sarita of a toothache. By noon, he was groaning in his room so that the Torreon hands could hear him.
By that evening, his cheeks were pouched out with wadded paper and he reeked of oil of cloves. Nobody thought it strange, least of all the two Torreon hands, that he should take the stage that night to Taos and a dentist.
Cass put up his tools in a corner of the livery office and then with only mild regret at leaving his farm, faced the day’s work. Sitting down at his desk, he fumbled around among the litter of papers, found a stub of pencil and, after some hunting, an envelope whose back was not scribbled on. Tilting back in his chair, he began to make a list of things he must do that day. There were oats to order and he’d be lucky if he found any between here and Vegas. There were two rental saddles that had to be taken to Burts for repairs. Who was it that had promised him a pair of kittens to help out old Benny, the stable Tom, with his mousing?
He was trying to remember this when, through the long-unwashed front window, he made out the figure of Fiske turning into the runway of the livery. Fiske halted at the door, said good morning and came in. Cass, glad of any interruption that would get a pencil out of his hand, threw his list on the desk and watched Fiske sink into one of the chairs by the door. Fiske was wearing his duck jacket and ancient derby but he had forsaken the laced boots today in favor of a pair of flat-heeled, wide-toed, and heavy farmer’s shoes that Cass silently admired.
“Seen Giff this morning?” Fiske asked.
“Nope. Are you after horses?”
Fiske shook his head and said idly, “Not today; tomorrow maybe.” He crossed his leg and felt gingerly the spot on his cheek where he had shaved too closely that morning. “It’s town work today.”
Cass laced his fingers, placed his hands on the back of his neck, tilted his chair back, swung his feet to the desk top and asked curiously, “What do you people find to do in town? Just peck at Deyo?”
Fiske smiled fleetingly. “No, it’s mostly dull stuff. This morning I’ll spend with the county clerk looking over the list of deeds recorded the last couple of years. Maybe for a drink and a cigar, the clerk will tell me which deeds were recorded by Sebree’s men.”
“I doubt that,” Cass said.
“So do I.” Fiske grinned again. “Funny how scared these county people are when you go to check on anything of Sebree’s. They know damn well you’ll find what you’re after anyway, but it’s surprising how short their memories for names and dates are.”
“Not surprising,” Cass growled. “They know who feeds them. Torreon does and Welling doesn’t.”
Fiske grunted agreement.
“How is Welling making out with Torreon?” Cass asked.
Fiske shrugged impatiently, “All right, I suppose. But as big as Torreon is, the way Sebree has covered his tracks and the way he’s trained his boys to disappear at sight of us, I might as well buy a horse here.”
Cass said nothing and the two men fell silent. Cass, looking out the window saw a passerby halt, then remove his hat and face the street. Curiously Cass came out of his chair, passed Fiske on his way to the runway. Fiske, curious too, rose and followed him out.
Coming down Grant Street was a black and dusty hearse followed by four or five buggies and surreys filled with mourners. The two men watched the procession until it was abreast of them and then they, too, briefly removed their hats.
“Who’s that?” Fiske asked after it had passed.
“Old codger named Miles, a clerk over at Edwards,” Cass replied. “Shot himself the other night. Funny thing,” he went on musingly, “he used to own Edwards’ store, but his real business was bucking the tiger at Henty’s. Joe Henty wound up with his store finally, and Edwards bought it from him for a dime on the dollar. This fellow went back to work as a bookkeeper in his own store and he’s never missed a night at Henty’s since.”
Fiske said without much interest, “That’s the way it goes.”
They talked a few moments longer about nothing in particular and then Fiske headed across the road toward the Plains Bar. To pick up Welling, Cass thought.
Cass went back to work. Before he was seated he suddenly remembered who promised him the kittens; along with that came memory of the small chore Giff had asked of him yesterday. Out in the stable, he picked up the two saddles, swung one over each shoulder and tramped down the alley, headed for Burts. After he had deposited them there, he walked up Grant Street in the warm midmorning sunshine. The sight of Welling and Fiske leaving the Plains Bar reminded him of Giff; he wondered if Giff had succeeded in placing the new reward notice in the paper that was to be out today. He doubted it, although Dixon was a lucky man. Or is it luck? Cass wondered. One thing sure, if Welling ever finished his investigation with solid proof that the government could use to prosecute Sebree and Deyo, it would be thanks to Dixon alone.
On the hotel steps Cass paused for a word with a rancher he knew from Isbell Canyon way. As he talked, he noticed the sign on the door of Edwards’ store across the street. Even at this distance, Cass could read, “Closed for funeral.” There was a bow of black satin tied to the door handle.
He crossed the lobby and went up to the desk. Arch Newson, the clerk, was a man Cass did not like and seldom bothered to speak to. Without greeting him, Cass turned the big ledger, which served as a hotel register and lay open on the desk, so that he could read its open pages.
Newson said, “Expecting somebody?”
“Uh-huh,” Cass said not looking up. “Drummer for an implement company.”
“What’s his name?”
“That’s it, I’ve forgotten. If I see it, I’ll remember it.” With a small feeling of pleasure Cass saw the name of James Archer on the register at the tail of the list. He murmured, “Archer—Archer—No, that’s not it. What’s this Archer look like?”
“He’s no drummer,” Newson said disdainfully. Then he frowned and thought. “Funny thing,” he said, “damned if I remember what he looks like. Cowman, though.”
Cass thanked him and went out. On the plankwalk he halted, remembering Giff’s further request. He supposed there was no immediate hurry to tell Giff of Archer’s presence but now that the man was here, Cass began to speculate in earnest as to Giff’s whereabouts. He wondered if it had occurred to Fiske to look in Giff’s room.
Backtracking through the lobby, Cass climbed the stairs to the second floor and halted far down the corridor before the door of room nine. He knocked and, receiving no answer, tried the door handle. The door was unlocked and Cass poked his head inside the room. The bed blankets were in mild disarray but the bed had not been slept in. What next caught his attention was the lamp on the dresser. It was alight.
For a puzzled moment Cass considered this, gently closing the door, and then he started downstairs. It was obvious Giff had left the room last night and had not yet returned. For a fleeting moment Cass wondered if Giff might still be in one of the saloons. It had happened to him a couple of times that late at night he had placed the change from his last drink on a bet in a gambling game only to find that he had started on a run of luck lasting well into the next morning. Accordingly, he tramped down to the Plains Bar, found it almost deserted, with no games in progress, and moved on to Henty’s. Giff was not there.
Cass
moved across the street and had a cup of coffee at the Family Cafe but memory of Giff’s room kept teasing at him. What had started out as innocent speculation was becoming a mild obsession. If Fiske was surprised enough at Giff’s absence to ask his whereabouts, it meant that he was not on a land office errand. Cass speculated on who else in town would know anything of Giff’s movements and he thought immediately of Mary Kincheon. So far as his own present knowledge went, Mary was the last person Dixon saw. Perhaps he could trace his movements from there.
He finished his coffee and went downstreet to the Free Press office. Stepping inside from the sunlit street, he halted in astonishment, his hand still on the door. Earl Kearie had cleared the big desk under the window of all its papers. Atop the desk was a foothigh pile of metal slugs that Cass only belatedly identified as type. Kearie was seated in a chair at the far side of the desk, beside him was an empty type stand. His coat was off and in his left hand he held a large magnifying glass; in his right was a piece of type. Propped against the window were two big type charts to which he was referring when Cass entered. Kearie’s expression, always surly, was one of wrathful exasperation. He glanced at Cass and then through the glass at the piece of type he held in his fingers.
Cass asked, “What’s the matter? Are they dirty?”
Kearie said almost snarling, “What do you want?”
“Mary Kincheon.”
“I fired her!” Kearie said in a shout of anger. “I don’t know where she is and I don’t give a damn!”
A sudden calculation came into his face as he looked at Cass and asked almost civilly, “Can you set type?”
Cass shook his head in negation.
“Do you know anybody in town that can?” Kearie persisted.
Again Cass shook his head.
Kearie, with a gesture of disgust, threw the reading glass on the pile of type and shoved his chair back. He started to rise, then settled back in his chair, put both hands on his knee and regarded the pile of type with a lost and baffled look.
Cass asked, “Where’s your printer?”
Kearie winced visibly. “I’ve sent for one,” he said shortly.
Cass looked at the heaping pile of type and was still uncertain as to what Kearie was attempting to do. “Why’ve you got all this stuff up here?” Cass asked. “Don’t that belong back there in the shop?”
Kearie’s look was murderous. He said, “You run your stables and let me run my newspaper.”
“This is your press day, isn’t it?” Cass asked shrewdly.
His question seemed to move Kearie to a decision. Kearie rose, put on his coat, clapped his black hat on his bony skull, booted the type stand aside and started for the door. Halfway there he halted and then returned to the desk. From a drawer on its near side, he lifted out a cube of cue chalk and slapped it into his vest pocket. Then turning to the door, he said harshly to Cass, “Step outside. I’m locking up.”
Cass stepped outside, watched Kearie lock the door with a savage impatience and then head across the street toward Henty’s saloon and its billiard tables. Turning, Cass went on down the street, headed for Mrs. Wiatt’s. Although he was uncertain as to what had happened at the Free Press office, memory of Kearie’s wrath brought a smile to his face. Mary Kincheon had quit him. Over what, Cass could not guess, but with her leaving, Kearie’s days of indolence were over. The whole town had wondered why she had worked for him in the first place and in the second place why she had tolerated the overwork and the drudging hours while he idled.
At Mrs. Wiatt’s Cass rang the bell. Mrs. Wiatt answered the door and told him Mary was in the back yard drying her hair. Cass walked around the house and found Mary sitting on the grass in the bright morning sunlight, and he sat down beside her. Being both a gregarious and curious man, Cass’s first impulse was to ask Mary why she wasn’t at work, thus getting the whole story of her dismissal by Kearie. But he remembered his errand and after they had exchanged the time of day, he asked, “Have you seen Giff Dixon this morning?”
Mary was running her fingers through her long hair that was already curling; her hand halted and she looked sharply at him. “No. How do you mean have I seen him? Is he hurt or something? Or do you mean has he been in to see me this morning?”
“That’s what I mean—the last,” Cass said. At his answer, he thought he detected a kind of relaxation in her manner.
“I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning,” Mary said. There was a special alertness in her eyes as she watched him. “Why? Can’t you find him?”
Cass said soothingly, “No. But it doesn’t matter; he’s around.”
Mary said, “It’s more than that. You wouldn’t have come clear here if you expected to see him on the street. Has something happened, Cass?”
Cass hesitated only a moment, then told her of his search for Giff. He tried to seem unconcerned but it did not come off.
Mary listened soberly, a kind of alarm rising in her. She remembered Kearie’s anger of yesterday and she thought immediately, No, Kearie’s afraid of him. Memmory leaped back to the conference in Sebree’s office and she remembered Sebree’s smug words—He’ll be taken care of.
She fought down a mounting panic and made herself consider this carefully. Her threat to expose Sebree if any harm came to Giff had been plain and unadorned. Sebree had understood it too. He wasn’t the sort of man who would let dislike of a person wreck his fortunes. He would hate Giff, of course, but not enough to risk ruinous exposure.
Mary said, not believing it, “Maybe he has friends. Maybe he’s just tired of town.”
“He didn’t take a horse.” Suddenly an expression of surprise came into Cass’s face. He looked sharply at her and then away.
Mary asked, “What are you remembering, Cass?”
Slowly Cass plucked a handful of grass, held it in his rough and callused palm and looked at it and then discarded it. “If he’s gone and he didn’t take a horse, maybe he took the night train. Can you give me one good reason why he should stay here?”
It was true, there was no good reason, Mary thought. He’d been picked up by Welling for a camp swamper with no responsibilities other than seeing to the horses and to feeding Welling and Fiske; but in the course of time, the whole burden of Welling’s investigation had fallen on him. He had done the work and he had taken the beatings. Why shouldn’t he decide in some lonely and discouraging hour of last night that it wasn’t his fight and that he had had enough of it?
It was plausible but somehow Mary did not believe that either. She said, “No I can’t, Cass, but you don’t believe he left either, do you?”
“No,” Cass answered in a low voice, “I guess I don’t, but where is he?”
“I can’t tell you, but he’ll turn up. I just know it.”
On that illogical and inconclusive statement, Mary took her stand. Cass, realizing that his visit had settled nothing and that he had only communicated his doubts and worries to her, came to his feet, a sudden discouragement within him, and took his leave.
Afterward she brushed her hair out, then went inside to her room. It was a big corner room across the hall from the parlor, the best in the house. Entering it, she closed the door behind her, wanting privacy.
She seated herself before the walnut vanity and began to do up her hair. The day had a strange Sunday-like quality about it and she realized it was because she was not working on a weekday—on a press day, she corrected herself. A year ago the thought of not working on a weekday would have terrified her. Now she didn’t care. There was Sebree’s money deposited safely in a Las Vegas bank to fall back on. Blackmail money, she thought, and for the first time naming it in her mind gave her a small feeling of shame.
It was a sensation foreign to her, and puzzled at it, she let her hands fall to her side and stared at herself in the mirror. Up to now, there had been no sense of guilt in her relations with Sebree. He was dishonest and a crook, and she had simply uncovered one facet of his crookedness that he could not afford to have kn
own. The day she had found the two copies of the April seventeenth issue of the Free Press tucked behind some ink bottles on a shelf high over Perry Albers’ cot in the back of the pressroom, she had counted the luckiest day in her life. Simple curiosity prodded her into examining them. When she found one issue contained six more final proof notices than the other, she compared them with the copy in the files. She copied down the names of the six extra entrymen and found in the courthouse records that they had deeded their homesteads to Sebree.
Staring at her image in the mirror now, she frowned, trying to recall what she had thought when Sebree’s swindle was uncovered. She had thought first of all of revenge—of getting even with the man who had so subtly corrupted her father, who had flattered him and loaned him money and neutralized him, and finally watched him drown in liquor. Mingled with that desire for revenge was a wild need to show that she was not weak and soft like her father, but tough-minded and hard. Last of all, she remembered, was the need for money.
She could have taken the papers and sent them in to the General Land Office as evidence of fraud, but there was a better way to get even. That way was blackmail, making Sebree pay her for silence, and always having Sebree in her power. The money was welcome, and Sebree could afford it. As for the ethics of it, weren’t Big Men stealing lands all over the West, sometimes with the collusion of the Land Office itself? Her evidence wouldn’t change this corruption, and she would have been a fool not to demand money from the corrupters.
But now she wasn’t at all sure she had been right, and she realized it was Giff Dixon who had bred that doubt. Her feeling of guilt was closely tied to him, too, for if she had turned over her copies of the Free Press to him at first, she wouldn’t be worried about him now. And she was worried, she told herself; she was slowly approaching panic. There was one thing she must hold to, though, and that was the belief that Sebree loved riches above revenge.
She busied herself the rest of the morning helping Mrs. Wiatt. In the back of her mind all that afternoon was the coming meeting with Sebree at Deyo’s office where she would receive the last of her blackmail money. Perhaps Sebree would let slip by a word or an expression that he knew of Giff’s whereabouts. A little before five o’clock, the hour that was set for the meeting, she put on a fresh dress and afterward called to Mrs. Wiatt and asked if she needed anything from the store. Then she let herself out into the warm late afternoon and made herself stroll the few blocks to the land office at a leisurely pace.