“I see,” Woodbine answered. “Nice holding pen you’ve got here.”
“Do you think of any particular reason why I shouldn’t have a holding pen?”
“Why, no,” Woodbine admitted.
“Well, was there anything else that you wanted on my land?”
“Yeah. Didn’t happen to have seen Moody Shay lately, did you?”
“No, and I’m not likely to. I don’t care much for the color of his shirt.”
“I thought he was a friend of yours.”
“Not me. Why do you say that?”
“You missing any stock lately?” Woodbine countered.
“Not that I know of. Why? You think he’s been using a long loop?”
“Somebody has, Ambler. I just happened to pick up some stock with a road brand on it. Some of it was mine, some belonging to various neighbors. But none of yours, Ambler. Only the saddlehorse Moody was riding while he was driving the stuff. Drop down to my house some time and pick it up.”
Woodbine turned his horse and started to ride away. Ambler called after him.
“Wait a minute. You say you caught Moody?”
“You don’t think we’d let him ride on with it, do you?”
“You don’t say,” Ambler said with a show of surprise. He tapped his saddle horn with his fist speculatively. Then, “What did he have to say for himself? Tried to lie out of it, I bet.”
“Well,” Woodbine said slowly, watching Ambler’s face, “you know how Moody is. Pretty rough customer until he gets scared, then his jaws work on ball bearings. Drop down and pick up your horse some time, Ambler.”
Woodbine turned his back to the man and rode down the trail. Ambler sat gazing at him, mouth turned down at the corners, until the woods swallowed him up. Then Ambler’s fist pounded down hard on the saddle horn.
“God damn that big loose-mouthed ox,” he swore. “I should have closed those jaws of his for keeps last night. What could he have told them?”
Woodbine rode out of Ambler’s and along the creek trail to Enos Churchill’s place, where he found the old man out at a corral watching a couple of his hands breaking a colt to ride. Woodbine told him about his visit to Ambler the night before, about the fight with Shay, and about the things that had happened this morning, including his back-tracking the calves to Ambler’s place and his talk with Ambler.
The old man sat down on a stump and thought this over for a long moment, and his shoulders seemed to sag. “So Ambler’s a thief,” he said wearily. “Well, I’m not surprised. I never did like the look of his eyes. He’s too brazen in the face.”
“It’s not hanging proof against him,” Woodbine admitted. “But it ties in. Some of the stuff is yours. I’m holding it down at my place till it’s over. I thought you’d like to know.”
The old man was silent again, and then he said, “I’m an old man, and I’d hoped to live the rest of my days in peace, but it don’t seem like I’m going to get the chance to. If you need me, Jim, call on me.”
“I don’t know of anything you can do right now, thanks. We’re trying to clear it up.” Then after a thoughtful moment he repeated, “I thought you’d want to know.”
“Yeah,” the old man said absently. “Amy has been seeing him. I didn’t want her to, but she did, anyway. I know she did. Poor kid, she hasn’t got any mother, and she’s lonesome. I’ll have to tell her.”
“If you don’t mind,” Woodbine said, “it might be just as well if you didn’t say anything about this to her at present. Until it’s proved one way or another it wouldn’t help us for him to know we were too interested in him. I want to find out about his Deerlick activities. That might tell us more about him.”
The old man got to his feet with all the signs of age, and moved towards the house. “She just can’t see him any more,” he repeated. “I can’t have my daughter seeing a man like that.”
Woodbine mounted and rode out towards his own place.
* * * *
After Woodbine left him at the hidden corral, Hugh Ambler sat his horse a long time, one leg hooked over his saddle horn and his mind revolving about the thing he had heard. Knowing that Moody Shay was inclined to talk too much, he accepted Woodbine’s statement about Moody Shay’s weakness at face value and assumed that, upon his capture, Moody had told Woodbine of their deal. But thinking back over the conversation, he saw that he had failed to get very much information out of Woodbine. Woodbine hadn’t said what had led him to capture Moody, nor who else was in the party with him, nor what they had done with Moody after catching him.
Ambler considered himself to be a careful and farsighted man, and he did not lay this lapse to carelessness, but to the fact that the news had surprised him so much that while he was trying to adjust himself to it, Woodbine had turned and left him. Not knowing whether Moody was alive to stand witness against him or not was bad business; it was a threat to his safety. It was imperative that he manage to close Moody’s mouth as soon as he could safely do it.
Thinking further on the conversation, it suddenly dawned on him that Woodbine had caught him in an outright lie when he had claimed that he had not missed any of his stock. People would know that he would have known it if his saddle horse had been taken from his barn lot, and the lie would go against him. He could not claim that he had innocently lent the horse to Moody, for he had already said that he had not seen the man and did not like him. His instinct and his knowledge of the fact that Woodbine and Fry, for whom Moody had been working, were at each other’s throats, warned him that there was more to this than appeared on the surface, and he was not a man to see a storm cloud rise without preparing for it.
He looked at his watch, then turned his horse and rode about two miles to a small clearing in a clump of pines a little distance from the creek bank, and here he found Amy Churchill, as he had met her one morning some months ago, and afterward by appointment or common expectation of the meeting, many mornings and afternoons since.
She had a habit of riding here with her twenty-two rifle and leaving her horse in the clearing while she hunted squirrels in the pecan and hickory trees, and then coming back here to rest. Ambler found her sitting on a log with her morning’s bag of three squirrels lying on the ground and the rifle leaning against the log.
He dismounted and sat down beside her, fashioned a cigarette for himself and smoked it through before either spoke. Then she said:
“You act as though the mountain had fallen on you, Hugh. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. Sorry. I was just thinking, I guess. I’ve been thinking a lot lately.”
“So have I,” the girl smiled. “But thinking doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s bad for the digestion.”
Ambler did not acknowledge the attempted humor of her statement, but lapsed into his silence again.
“Well, say something,” she urged. “Get it off your mind.”
“There’s trouble coming to this range,” he said, “and it makes me sad. I don’t like to see it.”
“It might not amount to anything,” she answered.
“But it will! Woodbine has come to me twice to get my help, but I’ve had to turn him down. I don’t like bloodshed.”
“You’re like my father, Hugh. He turned him down, too.”
“Did he?” Ambler asked without apparent interest. “I guess that leaves Woodbine just about out on a limb by himself, and Fry ready to saw the limb off behind him. It’s not right.”
“I feel sorry for him, too.”
“You think a lot of Woodbine, don’t you, Amy?” He eyed her shrewdly, and she met and weighed the meaning of his gaze.
“Oh,” she said with a hint of coyness, “he likes me pretty well. He’s not bad.”
Ambler recalled Woodbine’s warning about the girl, and he turned this over in his mind and weighed it, and he did not like the result.
&n
bsp; “There will be war,” he said, “and men are going to die. Nobody can remain on the sidelines. Fry has a lot of gun-hands, and for all I know, Woodbine may have some of his own, or intend to get them. They will kill each other off until there won’t be much left of either one of them. Then somebody will step in and take over the land they fought about.”
“Is that what you want to do, Hugh?”
“Somebody will take it. Your father doesn’t want to expand, and that girl across the creek from me couldn’t take it and hold it, and the little fellows farther away couldn’t do much about it. I need more land. Why shouldn’t I take it?”
The girl studied the man before her and saw new things in him, for there was a burning and eager glow in his eyes as he pictured this thing to her.
“Why are you telling me these things?” she asked.
“You have told me how lonely and bored you were, how dull it was for you. Well, I’ve got a way for you to see life, to be mixed up in it, part of it. Life is always a fight, a battle in which the strong man wins. I’m going to join in this fight at the right time, and I want you by my side. Amy, I’ve been slow to mention this, but I would like you to marry me. Now, tonight. You must have known for some time how I feel about you.”
The proposal came as somewhat of a shock to the girl. Hugh Ambler had made himself attractive to her, and she was not without knowledge that his kisses had been able to thrill her, for he had kissed her frequently of late. She had pictured him taking her in his arms in the moonlight and whispering his proposal between his kisses. Instead, it had come like some business offer in a cattle deal, and she saw instantly that it had come this suddenly not out of his love for her, but directly as a result of the trouble brewing on the range. Hugh Ambler, she saw, was carefully laying his plans to profit by the bloodshed he expected, and he wanted to recruit the strength of her father’s house to his side. His proposal of marriage was merely a means to this end. She was furious with him, but she tried to keep her anger hidden from him.
She got to her feet, and her lips trembled. “Thank you for the offer, Hugh, but I will have to talk it over with my father.”
Hugh got to his feet, and tried to take her into his arms, but she put her two hands against his chest and pushed him away. He held her tightly. “You’re angry,” he said. “I know what you think, but don’t judge me yet. Let me finish what I intended to say. I know that your father doesn’t particularly like me. That is why I suggested our eloping and being married tonight. I know that once he gets to know me, he’ll change his opinion of me. And it will give me a chance to stand by his side and fight to protect him if the trouble spreads.”
She struggled out of his arms. “And it will give you the moral backing of his good name, and it will give you hope that you can use him to help you loot your neighbors when they’re whipped enough for you to step in.” The reins with which she had tried to hold in her anger were slipping from her grasp.
Hugh Ambler smiled at her and shook his head sadly. “Amy, you’re excited. I’m not so poor that I’m picking dead bones, as you seem to think. I was expecting to buy from the side that lost and might want to move out of the country. I haven’t told you this, because I wanted to think that you loved me for myself alone, but the fact is that I’m not a poor man on a little shirt-tail ranch. I’ve got other property, a big place down at Deerlick. I bought in up here as part of a program of expansion, if I liked the country. You want to get out of the loneliness you suffer here. Marry me and we will go and live at Deerlick. There you will find people, dances, society and the things you long for. How about it, Amy? We will have lots of land; we will be big people, important people.”
“And my father being old, you will have three ranches, anyway, even if you don’t profit by Jim Woodbine’s trouble. It would be beautiful to you, wouldn’t it? I’m sorry, I’m afraid you and I never did understand each other, Hugh.”
She turned and picked up her rifle and caught up her grazing horse. Hugh Ambler saw that she had read his scheming through his words, and that he had misjudged this restless and unhappy girl. He knew now that he had failed in his plan to marry Enos Churchill’s twenty sections of land. And he knew still further that he would be unable to force Enos Churchill to stand behind him as he had planned, if trouble struck him. These things were not his fault, he was convinced, but were just an unfortunate turn of the cards at a bad time. Such a bad break could be remedied by a man as smart as himself.
He watched the girl mount and turn her animal without looking back at him. He picked up the three dead fox squirrels and called after her. “You left your game, Amy.”
“Take it,” she flung back over her shoulder. “You can probably find some way to use it.” Then the woods swallowed her up.
Hugh Ambler returned to his own horse and headed it for his home, where he knew he would have to busy himself with a new set of plans. Things were moving fast here now, and he had no intention of being left out of the race.
The girl rode in her own direction with her thoughts turned upon herself, and they were not lovely thoughts. She was afraid that she was becoming bitter, for she knew that she was lonely, and she was genuinely afraid for herself. Her mistake in her judgment of Ambler was a warning to her that her loneliness could easily lead her into an infatuation for the wrong man.
She had liked Hugh Ambler, who had come out of a world which she, who hardly had seen anything of the world across the Ashfork Mountains, had longed for. He had told her of all the fun and the excitement and the people, and he had built her longings up almost to the bursting point.
He had made love to her, and she had enjoyed the experience so new to her, and she had convinced herself that she was almost in love with the man. She knew that within the last few years she had grown into a beautiful woman, and she had been unable to resist trying her wings in the presence of the only man who had spoken words of love to her.
And yet with it all, she had not entirely given her love to this man who was surely ten years older than herself. Jim Woodbine stood between her and that last step. She had seen Woodbine much in her life, for he was a neighbor with only the creek separating their two ranches, and she had long carried a childish love for him. When she was six years old she had resolved to marry him, but he had never suspected it. And now that she had become a woman, she was convinced that Jim Woodbine still thought of her as a child. She had tried to remedy this, and only last night she had felt that she had made him see that she was now grown and attractive. Jim Woodbine had seen her in this new light, and he had almost taken her in his arms.
She rode through the trees with her horse at a walk, and she sorted her thoughts and found that things were not so bad. She had discovered her mistake in judgment about Ambler, and she had shown Jim Woodbine that she was an attractive woman. This gave her mind direction, for now she was free to give her attention to Woodbine and set about accomplishing the thing she had decided upon a dozen years ago.
And thus she rode up to the barnlot with a lighter heart than she had known for some time. She turned the reins over to one of the men coming out of the breaking corral, and walked to the house with her father who had come to meet her.
“Amy,” the old man said gravely, “I’ve got to ask you to do something for your own good, and I would like it if you would not ask me my reasons for what I have to say.”
“What is it, Pops?” she asked, taking his arm. “Anything for you.”
“I’d rather you wouldn’t see Hugh Ambler. I have my reasons.”
“All right, if it will please you, I’ll promise,” she said. Then she added, “I mean, I’ll make a deal with you on it. If you’ll buy me a new dress, and a complete new outfit of clothes for Easter—”
The old man grinned ruefully. “I should have known you’d have to have something in return. You’re a shrewd girl, Amy, and shrewd women sometimes get hurt. But it’s a deal.”
“It’s a deal, Pops,” she assured him as they went into the house for dinner.
CHAPTER 11
The Fly-by-Nights
It was about noon when Woodbine pulled out of the creek bottom and rode across his back ranch yard. At the corrals he saw Slim Longfellow and Dutch Karlton working on the mowing machine while Boots Wilkerson and his brother were patching up the hay frame on one of the wagon beds. Jess Hardracker, with his moustaches at an unusually mournful droop, was repairing the set of team harness.
Two wagons with the kegs of staples, post hole diggers, stretchers and other gear, stood without their teams under the shed. Leaning against the barn where Jess worked, there were a shotgun and two rifles.
Woodbine got down and came over and squatted by Jess. “Didn’t get started fencing?”
“I didn’t want to risk it,” Jess said. “Your gunnies flew the coop. I paid ’em off out of my own pocket.”
“What got the matter? Didn’t like the cooking?”
“That wasn’t it. One of ’em didn’t show up last night when the rest come from town, but he came riding in a little after daylight. Seems he bumped into a friend of his in Fry’s bunch of gunnies, and went home with him. Fry sends him over to offer them all more pay if they’d come over and work for him. They came and demanded their money, and all moved over to Fry’s. I didn’t want to send Slim and them out there in the open to build fence with no protection. It would be too much of an invitation to Fry to start shooting.”
Woodbine took this intelligence without comment for a while, and then said, “You were right, of course. I never liked the idea of gun-hands, anyway. We’ll have to settle this ourselves.”
“Where do we stand?” Jess asked.
Woodbine went over the happenings of the night and morning, and they discussed them for a while.
“Looks like you got Fry and Ambler both pushed in a corner,” Jess observed. “They can’t very well let things drop till it’s settled. I don’t see no use in building fence in the face of bullets, just to see it cut between every post the minute we’re through—if we was lucky enough to get through with it.”
The Sixth Western Novel Page 52