They and sundry others arrived at the scene of action just in time to see two men, gripped in each other’s arms like two wrestling bears, burst out of Bundy’s old cabin, trip at the threshold, lunge staggeringly and fall to roll almost into the creek.
What had happened before any witnesses arrived had occurred in a space of time in which a wide-awake cat might have blinked its eyes twice. Dorn sat there waiting for Bundy, perched on an uncomfortable stool to keep from nodding, lighting no lamp, since he saw wisdom in taking the other man by surprise. As Bundy came into the dark room, Dorn spoke, saying simply: “Bundy, this is Bill Dorn. I want a word—” Save for a rip-snorting oath from Bundy, that was as far as any talk was to go just then. Bundy was all set to go for his gun, and went for it in a flash. Dorn, too, was alert, and brought his fist smashing down on Bundy’s wrist. The weapon exploded harmlessly and flew out of Bundy’s hand; Bundy leaped for it; Dorn grappled with him—the rest happened out in the open. It wasn’t that either consciously made for the door; the place was simply too small to confine them and they shot out through the most convenient opening.
They broke free from each other, got to their feet, and Bundy made a lunge back toward the cabin door, headed toward his gun. Dorn roared at him: “Damn you, Bundy—I just want to talk—” and then made a lunge as wild as Bundy’s to grapple with him again, to keep him from the cabin.
Bundy’s answer was the grunt of effort accompanying a fist swung like a mallet into Dorn’s face. Men already gathering, some demanding, “Who are they? What’s the trouble?” heard the impact of the blow. Dorn went reeling backward and Bundy plunged into the cabin again. But in the dark there, not knowing exactly where his weapon had fallen, he could only grope, and before he found it Dorn came leaping in on him.
MacArthur said to Martinez, “If you don’t want one of those men killed heap quick, you’d better step in pronto.”
Martinez shot back at him, “It’s your job, not mine.”
“I wish they’d come outside to finish it,” said MacArthur, trying to peer into the darkened room. “I’ll bet Bill Dorn knocks hell out’n him.”
“Bet you ten dollars,” said Martinez.
Then the two men, after wrecking the cabin’s interior as sounds of crashing and splintering amply testified, did emerge again. This time they did so because, while Bundy was stooping, still groping with both hands, Bill Dorn caught him by the middle, lifted him clean off the floor and hurled him through the door. Where his enemy was flung ahead of him Bill Dorn followed like a lean mountain cat making its deadly pounce.
They stood up to each other then and slugged. Those who watched could not see everything that happened, could judge best of blows by the sounds of fists on muscle and bone, for the night though starry and cloudless hid more of all this than it revealed. But Dorn and Bundy seemed to see well enough. There were men who, after that fight, swore that they could see the two men’s eyes gleaming like cats’ eyes!
Twice, between blows, Dorn tried to gasp out that he came just for a talk. Bundy roared him down and landed another good smashing fist into his face and made a wild grab at the gun at Dorn’s belt. Bundy’s fingers closed on it, yanked it away, jerked it up as he whirled on Dorn and roared, “Take that, you—” But Dorn again had leaped swiftly after him, was pressing so close that Bundy was thrown off his balance, and before Bundy could make any use whatever of Dorn’s gun, Bill Dorn used his own and most effectively. He brought it down forcefully on Bundy’s head, then stood back grimly satisfied with the result.
When Bundy came to, he lay on his own bunk to find a lamp burning, his head and shoulders sopping wet and Bill Dorn sitting on the stool and leaning close over him.
“You—” began Bundy, and tried to surge to his feet. But Dorn shoved him back, flat on his back and menaced him with a Colt 45, clubbed by the barrel. Bundy looked beyond him, saw that there were many men just outside, peering interestedly in at the open door. His face reddened with shame to be seen like this.
“Shut up and lie still!” Dorn commanded him angrily. “I didn’t come here tonight to fight with you. I told you at the beginning I had something I wanted to say; now you are going to listen. If you make a stab at getting up or if you open your trap, I’ll bat you over the head again.”
Bundy lay quite still, but Dorn could see that he was only gathering his forces, getting his thoughts in order. After a blow like the one he had so recently taken, though consciousness had fully returned, a moment or so was required to pull himself together. Dorn took advantage of the brief quiescence.
“We got burnt-out at Palm Ranch,” he said slowly, making sure that Bundy got every word he had to say. “The crowd that gang-jumped us left us pretty much in ruins, buildings gone, freight wagons burned, dam blown up. I naturally supposed I had you to thank for that. So I hotfooted over here to do the thanking while my gratitude was still warm. You know what hell I raised here with you, and you know what I did to your freighters. Then, the first thing I learn is that it wasn’t you at all who raided us at Palm Ranch.”
“It’s pretty damn late now—”
“Shut up! It was my mistake, my blunder. I like to pay for my own damfoolishness. I came over tonight to pay you for the damage I’ve done.”
A curious gleam came into Mike Bundy’s eyes. Suddenly he let his taut body go limp on the bunk and burst into laughter.
“Damfoolishness is the word, and of all the damn fools—”
“Shut up!” roared Bill Dorn. He yanked his pencil and blank check out of his pocket. “Up to twenty-one thousand dollars I can pay you whatever you say your junk was worth—”
“Make it exactly twenty-one thousand and we’ll call it square!” Bundy said promptly. “My losses, as anyone will know, are a lot more than that. Not counting wagons and freight.”
CHAPTER XVII
It was just sun-up when Bill Dorn came back to Palm Ranch. He saw the little procession, looking infinitely small with the wide sweep of hill and desert and soft green fields extending into such remote distances, as they came slowly up the slope. He joined them there at the open grave. There were flowers, all the prettiest, gayest flowers Lorna and Josefa could get.
Lorna knelt and murmured, so low they could scarcely hear her, the twenty-third psalm—“The Lord is my shepherd.” There was a silence. Old Cap Jinks cleared his throat and started singing, the best he could, “Nearer My God to Thee.” The others joined in. Some of the men had fine, clear voices; the others, though they did not sing so well, sang louder. Before they were done every face was unashamedly wet with tears for good old Curly O’Connor—every face except Bill Dorn’s. His eyes were dry and hard; they looked as though a desert wind were blowing across them; inside, too, he felt dry and hard.
When Lorna and Josefa went back to the house the men congregated in the now dismal barnyard, a place of black char and wreckage and ruined hopes. They were all there, even to Wong; Stock Morgan, John Sharp, Middleton and Ken Fairchild were among them. Bill Dorn said: “Boys, I’ve got something to tell you. When I’m done you can line up and take your turns kicking me if you’ll feel any better. I wouldn’t feel any worse.” Then he told them of his payment to Bundy. “I’ve been doing damn fool things all my life,” he admitted at the end. “I can see that plain enough now. If this is just another of my damn fool plays, well anyhow it’s done. I played it low-down on Mike Bundy when I said, ‘Come along; let’s burn him out.’ Now I’ve done what I could to play square. The result is that I’m busted flat. If there’s going to be any rebuilding here, any new string of wagons, somebody besides me has got to do the job.”
Then, his face still stern and grim, his eyes still hot and harsh, he went straight to the house. Lorna was in the front room, lying back listlessly in a big chair. Dorn scarcely glanced at her; he went on into the kitchen where he found Josefa starting breakfast.
“Never mind breakfast for a while,” he sai
d tonelessly. He took the coffee pot out of her hand, set it down and escorted her to the back door. “You go outside somewhere and don’t come back until I call you. I want to talk to Miss Lorna, Josefa, and I don’t want you close enough to hear what I’m saying. Understand?”
Josefa looked at him in dull amazement, muttered, “Si, Señor,” and went out. Dorn closed the door after her.
Returning to the living room he found Lorna sitting bolt upright, staring wonderingly at him. He had not lowered his voice; she had heard not only the emphatic closing of the back door but every word he had said to the Indian girl as well. She couldn’t but wonder what on earth Bill Dorn had to say to her that he didn’t want Josefa to overhear.
Instead of waiting to learn from him she jumped to conclusions. There was such an air of gloom about the man, a most unaccustomed thing with Here-We-Go Dorn, and his face was so stern with a sort of sternness that suggested a relentlessness of solidly taken determination, that she was sure she read his thought aright and knew perfectly well what he was going to say. A sudden deep pity surged up within her for the man. She knew so well his strength of will, she so well understood how his whole heart and soul had gone unreservedly into this long-waged battle with Mike Bundy, that suddenly it dawned on her that defeat meant far, far more to him than to her! And here all along she had been thinking only of Lorna, poor little hurt Lorna who had lost her pretty playhouses and a lot of newborn dreams.
Of a sudden too she snapped out of her listlessness. She sprang to her feet, on the instant become the old impulsive Lorna, and a flush came into her cheeks and her eyes grew sparklingly bright. Astonishing him she caught his hand in hers and gave it a good hard squeeze.
“Bill Dorn!” she exclaimed excitedly as though she had just chanced upon some glittering discovery, “I’ve called you all the things I could think of—a brute and a beast and a fool. And it just dawns on me you’re magnificent!”
Never did a man’s facial expression present a stranger study in contrasts. Stamped as it were on top of the look he was wearing was a new one of profound puzzlement. What the devil was this girl saying anyhow?
Considering that he had made all arrangements, even to the evicting of Josefa, to get something said the straightest, swiftest way, it is not without interest that he got never a single word in edgewise until Lorna had said her say. She ran on swiftly: “When you started out to give that money—all the money you’ve got—to Mike Bundy I could have killed you! And do you know it’s not until this minute that my own personal feelings in the matter have stood aside long enough for me to see that—that you did the only thing a gentleman—yes, darn it! a real gentleman like Sudden Bill Dorn—could do; that you did the—the most splendid act I ever heard of!”
“Forget it!” said Dorn, and snapped the words at her so that she jerked her hand from his and was for a second afraid of him. “I did that because I had to; think I wanted to? And after a while, I suppose, I’ll see I was just a jackass for doing it. I do everything wrong-end-to, but at last anyhow I know it. And now are you going to keep still and listen to what I am saying to you?”
“I’ll listen,” said Lorna, and went back to her big chair. “But I know ahead what you’re going to say.”
“The devil you do! And what is it then, Miss Know-It-All?”
“It’s what you’ve said already. I didn’t have sense enough to see the truth of it then; rather, I was just too pig-headed to let myself see the truth—that we’re done, finished, licked. That all we’ve got to do is clear out and let Mike Bundy do what he likes. That—”
“What do I care about all that!” cut in Bill Dorn, almost shouting at her. “I wasn’t even thinking of it. I tell you, as long as I have been a fool all my life anyhow, I’m going on being consistently a fool, and right now I’m going to do the damnedest fool thing even a man born a Dorn ever did! I’ll be on my way somewhere else before long, but before I go, you listen to this: I don’t care a tinker’s dam who you are or what you are or where you came from or why. I love you! Hear me?” He came to stand towering over her, glaring down at her. “Dammit, I love you!”
He turned to stalk to the door. The last thing he had expected was that she would laugh at him. And when out of a startled silence all of a sudden Lorna’s laughter burst forth merrily, Bill Dorn’s face went brick red and his teeth were set hard and the hand he had lifted to the door knob showed knuckles gone white. He didn’t turn. There wasn’t anything else to say—That is he thought there wasn’t! Lorna jumped up and ran to him and, still laughing as he had never heard a girl laugh before—for that matter, neither had she!—she caught his rigid arm with both hands and began shaking him.
“The funniest part of it, Bill Dorn,” she gasped, “is that I—I love you, too! W-with all my heart; with all my soul; w-w-with everything that’s in me! And I have loved you like that—you great big lummox—ever since the night we fought each other like cat and dog at Nacional! And if you don’t k-kiss me before you growl another growl—I’ll bite you!”
Bill Dorn kissed her.
“Oh, Bill!” gasped Lorna.
After that the world was altogether a different sort of place.
Breakfast was late that morning. Josefa, forgotten, sat with her back to a rock in the sun and gave over wondering what was happening there in the house. Once a loud voice had startled her; after that, though she listened with all her ears, she couldn’t hear a sound.
Lorna said after a while, a perfectly radiant Lorna: “That if w-e are done, finished, licked? Who cares a hoot, Bill Dorn?”
Then he amazed her a second time. He swept her off her feet, high from the floor, and, as Lorna vowed later, “brandished her!”
“We’re nothing of the sort!” an amazing Bill Dorn flatly contradicted her. “And if you want to know why, I’ll tell you in plain logical terms that a child could understand—”
“I’m no child,” said a squirming Lorna. “You put me down, Bill Dorn, or—”
“Or you’ll bite me? Go ’head and bite.” She nibbled at his ear and he laughed at her and put her down, but kept both her hands locked tight in his. “Here’s the why of it, Miss Lorna: You say you love me? Bueno, Señorita! If that is possible, then I tell you anything is possible! What can you think of more wonderful than that Lorna Whatever-her-other-name is—and it makes no difference because I’m going to change it quicker than a cat can wink its eye—loves old Bill Dorn? Now if a thing as wonderful as that can happen—Pshaw, girl, to lift ourselves up by the bootstraps and lick the stuffing out of Bundy would be the minor sort of matter you’d stick in a postscript. You love me? Come ahead then; we can lick the world.”
“Oh, Bill, you are crazy! And I love you for it. But how?”
He grinned at her. “I haven’t the vaguest idea. Who cares how we do the job, just so we do it? Come on!”
“Where?” He had started drawing her along in his wake toward the front door. “Where are we going?”
“The boys have been loafing on this job long enough,” he told her vastly good-humoredly. “They’re going to start cleaning up the mess, and they’re going to start now. And do you know, I, for one, haven’t even walked over to the dam to see whether it’s a total loss or only half of that! We’ll have it looked at. Then we’re going to scare up some wagons and start freighting again.”
“How can we?”
“I don’t know,” he laughed at her. “What do we care how, just so we do it? And later I’ll pop in for another visit with Rutherford. There should be a few hundreds left anyhow; maybe, he said, a thousand or even more. We don’t want any more until after we’ve shot that, do we?”
“Bill, don’t you dare get my hopes up again!”
He looked at her in a brand new way, such a way that it made her blush. His eyes worshiped her.
“Listen you to me, Lorna girl,” he told her in the tone of a man who knows what he is talking about.
“Your hopes are already up so high that they’re shining out of your eyes right now—and we’re back in the fight to stay, in spite of hell and high water, until we get what we’re after. And now—”
“Now,” cried Lorna happily, “I am going to tell you something, Mr. Bill Dorn. It is something I vowed I’d never say another word about—that is, to you; I have already told dear old Cap—”
“Jinks has been going round looking ready to burst, stuffed so full of your secrets. From now on, young lady—”
“Do you want to hear or don’t you? You said just now you didn’t care a tinker’s dam who or what I might be, so maybe—”
“I said I’d love you no matter who or what—”
“You were an old darling to say that, too! Now listen: I told you who I wasn’t; I’m not Lorna Kent. That’s just because—and I told you that too at the same time—there really isn’t any Lorna Kent. You see if there were a Lorna Kent, then that’s who I’d be. But—”
“Whoa!” said Bill Dorn, and began to laugh. “To make a fellow an explanation of some sort do you have to start in getting him all mixed up? After all, if I asked you anything about yourself—and mind, I’m not doing anything of the sort!—I’d not ask who you’re not, but who you are.”
“And that, I’ve told you already. I’m Lorna Brown. And—”
There was the sound of heavy boots coming flying up the steps; the door was flung open so heartily that it banged back against the wall and Cap Jinks burst in on them like a shot out of a gun.
“Talk about the devil and here he comes,” said Dorn as he and Lorna fell apart. “Just a minute ago, Cap—For the love of Heaven, man, what’s happened? You look—” Jinks came cavorting down upon them like an Apache on the war path; his first vocal utterance might have been that same gentleman’s war whoop; he carried his disreputable old hat in his hand and in one flourish managed to wave it high over his head and bring it slapping down on his dusty thigh. In his eyes was such a gleaming as no one had ever suspected Cap Jinks’ eyes could harbor.
The Sixth Western Novel Page 19