“Where’s Rosa Jean?” he said.
Charlie and Wirt looked up, indifferent and uncomprehending. “Huh?” said Charlie.
“I asked where Rosa Jean is,” said Quincy, coming a step nearer the table and pulling one of his gloves off. “Have you seen her?”
“Ain’t she in the house?”
“No, she’s not,” said Quincy. “There’s no fire in the stove and her horse and saddle are gone.”
Charlie looked puzzled. He looked across at Wirt, whose face was a blank, and screwed his own face into a hard-thinking squint. “Maybe,” he said—”no, she couldn’t a’ done that. But she’s crazy enough for it sometimes.”
“For what?” said Quincy, his voice sharpening.
Charlie flapped one hand dismissively, trying to return his attention to the checkerboard. “Nothin’. I just thought she might a’ got an idea, from what I told her about you, but it’s no account anyway.”
A clipped tension had come into Quincy’s voice, a tension of foreboding, and he felt it tighten his jaw and stiffen along his shoulders. “What’s no account? What’d you tell her about me?”
“About Dugan,” Charlie explained, trying to seem as if he were not paying attention, “and the mountain. Rosa Jean’s got her own ideas about that. But I told her—”
Quincy’s hands jolted on the edge of the table and all the checkers jumped halfway into the next squares. “What about Dugan? Where did she go? Charlie, you start making sense or so help me, I’ll—”
“Hey, look what you done,” said Charlie. “I just thought she might a’ got an idea, is all. But I didn’t—”
Quincy twisted both hands in the front of Charlie’s shirt and hauled him up out of his seat, pushed him stumbling back over the clattering upset chair, and shoved him hard against the bunkhouse wall. “Where is she?” he shouted, his face only inches from Charlie’s. “What did you tell her, and where did she go? You tell me or I’ll beat it out of you!”
It took a few seconds for Charlie to form the words, for his lips were shaking and Quincy’s hands grasping his twisted collar were at his throat. His face was a sickened pasty white. “She told me—you were a bounty-hunter,” he said, “and I—I said that—explained some things. I said was you—l-looking for Dugan—and maybe that’s why you was so interested in old man Sullivan’s place—” Quincy gave his collar another angry twist as if in test of truthfulness, but Charlie winced and gulped and went on, “—Sullivan’s place. That’s all. Honest. Th-that’s all I told her.”
Quincy let go of him roughly, and Charlie stayed wilted against the wall, his hand creeping up shakily to rub his neck. Across the table Wirt was on his feet, staring at them. Quincy drew a deep, unsteady breath—he looked from one to the other of them with an expression of fury and incredulity, and then he turned and slammed out of the bunkhouse.
He ran to the barn as thunder boomed menacingly again, hauled his saddle out, and took it over to the corral. Raindrops were beginning to spatter across the dusty yard. His own horse was played out after the long climb from the canyon; he would have to take one of the mustangs. Quincy got his rope, shook out a loop, and sent it sailing over the head of one of them; the other horses bunched and circled nervously around the corral, set on edge by the thunder. He snubbed the mustang up to a post, bridled it, and slapped on his saddle, mentally calling Rosa Jean all the non-profane names he could think of in a fit of near-panic that answered all his questions once and for all. Now, in the hour when she was in danger, she was no longer just a lonely girl who needed a friend—she was his girl, his heart and soul, everything he ever wanted. How could he have been such a fool not to know it sooner? Now it might be too late.
Thunder rumbled again and echoed off the rocks—to Rosa Jean the sound seemed to circle all round her, growling off ledges overhead and from the narrow trail behind her like a pursuing beast. Pheasant climbed steadily, at little faster than a walk despite the effort put into it; occasionally bits of rock came loose under his hooves and slid rattling down the trail behind them.
Alone—alone. The dusk and storm blotted her surroundings so that not even a companionable bit of brush or stunted scrub pine was visible; there were only great lumps and towers of rock looming against the swift-moving dark clouds of the sky. The only thing human in the landscape was the shack perched high in the mountains that was her goal—and even that was only in her mind’s eye, the light from its window an imagined beacon and a half sinister one.
Hours ago she had crept past Joyman’s unobserved—picked her way through the canyons of mustang country she had ridden through with Bruce long ago. She was on the exposed upper slopes of the mountains now, where the winds cut colder and the storm’s thunder seemed to strike and recoil loudly all around her. And suddenly a wolf’s howl pierced clearly through the gloom, from somewhere above and to her left.
Rosa Jean half unconsciously tightened her hand on the reins, and Pheasant’s steps slowed and halted for a second—the actions seemed almost independent of each other, as if they had both reacted to the sound. Then she tapped the horse’s side with her heels and urged him forward, in a whisper that came dry from her throat.
Another howl came from somewhere on the right, and this time Rosa Jean distinctly felt the horse’s muscles tense beneath her. Her own heart was beating thickly against the basket held close to her breast. These were the haunts of wolves, wolves both human and animal, who came out to strike and devour and then vanished again, taunting their victims with their inviolability. To invade their precincts unadvisedly meant death.
A turn in the rock wall ahead seemed familiar. It was the last climb toward Sullivan’s. Pheasant threw his shoulders into the climb, and Rosa Jean held tight with her knees and her hand on the horse’s tensed withers and kept the basket held tight against her side, the rain pattering on the damp kerchief tied over her head. Irregular ribbons of rain had been flung down at them on the gusting wind from time to time, and now another gust brought more wolves’ howls, rising from everywhere across the mountains. Pheasant balked in mid-stride, shuddering and shying sideways, and came to a halt trembling all over. Rosa Jean nudged him with her foot and twitched the reins on his neck, trying in vain to start him forward. “Come on, Pheasant, come on!” she begged him, hearing the shaking in her own voice and wondering if it was fear, or if she was almost crying at the awful aloneness.
Pheasant backed a step, stumbling on the steep trail, his ears flat and his tail clamped down tight. Rosa Jean slid from the saddle, clinging awkwardly to the basket hooked on her arm, and moved up alongside the horse to lead him, keeping a tight grip on his bridle. Pheasant whinnied and pulled back, and Rosa Jean braced her feet—still with desperately irrelevant visions of jars of blackberry preserves smashed on the trail. She knew what was more vital, that if she lost her grip and her horse bolted and left her there she was in a very bad spot indeed.
“Come on, Pheasant!” she half sobbed. “Don’t you desert me now… I’ve got to get there… got to…”
Slowly, a step at a time, he came, still bobbing and shaking his head in protest. They were in between steeper rock walls now, where the buffeting of the wind was less, and the sounds of the wolves seemed to have ceased. Were they watching from ledges above, waiting until their prey was fully in their reach?
Pheasant came without pulling now, and Rosa Jean had only to look to her own climb up that final steep-pitched, scrambling hump of trail. She drew breath as the gaping black opening of the mine loomed up on the left. What she would have given to step straight in there and put her theories to the test at once—! But she had to go up to the shack first to see if anyone besides Sullivan was there, or else they might easily come down to the mine while she was inside and take her unawares.
Rosa Jean took a final, shaking breath, nearly of exhaustion, as they crested the slope. The shack was there against the dark cliff, a light shining from its single window just as she had imagined it. And yet unreality still clung round her. Had s
he really done this—had she really climbed all this way alone? And with this accomplished, what was she to do now? She began to have an inkling of why Quincy had been so outraged.
But she was here—and this was her moment.
She led Pheasant over to the pole corral and tied him there. It was too dark to see far in front of her; a humped shape that must be Sullivan’s mule—or mules—was huddled in the lean-to against the cliff. Rosa Jean pulled her braids forward over her shoulders, wiped the rain from her face with her sleeve, and adjusted the basket on her arm, then climbed the stone steps to the shack. She knocked at the door.
A moment’s pause—a slight noise inside—and she heard the latch being undone. The door creaked open. Rosa Jean’s eyes drifted up from where she had expected to find the face of the little old man on a level with her own, to the face of the dark-haired younger man who stood looking down at her, and in that moment Rosa Jean knew she was looking into the face of her brother’s murderer.
He was younger-looking than she had thought, but there were hard lines in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. His face was tanned brown and his thick black hair fell in a rough, boyish way over the side of his forehead. But there was nothing careless or young about the attentive night-black eyes fixed on her—those eyes were capable of everything she had ever heard about him.
All this Rosa Jean saw and thought in seconds, but she did not lose her composure. She looked up at him, letting frank surprise come into her face, and said “Oh,” and then, “Who are you? Where’s Grandpa?”
Ralph Dugan’s glance skimmed over her from head to foot—a slightly lifted dark eyebrow the only change in his expression. “Grandpa?” he said.
“Yes. Mr. Sullivan. He’s my grandfather, you know. Isn’t he here?” Rosa Jean stood on tiptoe and leaned to look past him, and Dugan drew back a little as if to let her enter. She walked in as if quite accustomed to it and looked round the room—empty but for the disordered bunk, a table, chair, and little tin stove—and looked innocently back to Dugan for explanation.
He pushed the door shut with one hand, a casual gesture that spoke of nothing more than keeping the rain out—but she saw his right hand slip away from the holster at his hip, where it had doubtless been as he opened the door to her. “No, he wasn’t home when I got here. Probably out scrounging firewood or such like.”
“Oh, bother,” said Rosa Jean, setting her basket on the table with a thump. “I hope he gets back soon… I wanted to get back home before Ma starts to fuss. I didn’t tell her I was coming up here; I wanted to surprise Grandpa and I didn’t know if she’d let me come. See, I brought him some of Ma’s blackberry preserves, and vegetables, and part of a pie. I made that myself.”
The one sliver of truth at the end seemed to return her to some form of reality, from which, for a moment, she felt herself floating free. It seemed she was not really here in the shack; it was this other girl, this chattering creature she had created out of old clothes and imagination.
“You know the way up here yourself?” said Dugan, with another slight lift of his brows that seemed as careless as she was.
Rosa Jean took the cue. “Oh, sure, I’ve been up here with Ma before. Grandpa don’t always remember us, though. He probably won’t know who I am even if I tell him and tell him.” She laughed, and was amazed at how natural it sounded.
She let her glance travel half curiously, half indifferently round the shack—over the jumble of ropes and lanterns, tools and coal oil cans against the foot of the lefthand wall, the shelves above them with their dusty cans and jars and limp half-filled sacks of flour and meal. Then she came back to Dugan. “Who’re you—anyway? Do you know Grandpa?”
“Sure,” said Dugan lightly. “I’m a sort of friend of his… I stop in for a jaw with him whenever I come this way.”
It was nothing like she had pictured—this being here, being in the same room with him. She had no chance to watch him, to see what he was really like, because he was always looking at her without seeming to put any special effort into it.
He turned and picked up a half-smoked cigarette, giving her five seconds’ opportunity. His black head was bent a little—the tiny glow from the cigarette tip threw his eyes into shadow, like a mask. Rosa Jean tried to swallow a queer metallic taste in her mouth. In fancy she felt the heaviness and coldness of a revolver in her hand, felt her finger tighten on the trigger. A kind of fascination dragged her eyes to the front of Dugan’s shirt—pictured it torn and crimson-stained like her brother’s. She stood six feet from him, and the gun was in reach of her hand.
But then—what? What was left her after that—except an empty cabin inhabited by a dead man?
Dugan was near the table; he looked at her basket—idly, it seemed, he turned back the napkin to look at the food inside, and for one breathless second Rosa Jean’s vision wavered at the thought of the gun. But Dugan let the napkin fall, and investigated no further. She began to breathe again.
She swallowed his last speech without comment, because it seemed the only thing to do. Would this talkative child she had invented allow sort of a friend to pass without further curiosity? Dugan’s casual manner gave her no clue as to whether he accepted her in the role she was playing. She must look bedraggled and childish enough, anyway, with her pigtails and the few wisps of damp hair draggling over her forehead from under the red kerchief, but that was not what counted.
Thunder rumbled overhead, sounding very close to the mountain. Rosa Jean looked up. “Oh, golly,” she said. “If I’ve got to wait for Grandpa I’d better take care of my horse. He can’t stand in the rain all this time. I’ll be back in a minute—”
Dugan turned swiftly, smoothly for the first time. “I’ll do it. I’ll put him around in the lean-to with my horse; you stay inside.”
He flicked her a brief lazy smile, which Rosa Jean felt go through her in a queer way. He opened the door with one hand in his unhurried way; she noted the athletic swing of his body as he stepped out into the night. Then the door closed and she was alone in the dim shack.
Rosa Jean stood still in the middle of the room, aware for the first time of her heart’s beating. She did not know why he had gone outside, but with Ralph Dugan nothing was done by accident. Either there was something outside he did not want her to see—or it was a test, to see how she behaved herself while he was gone. What would the old man’s grandchild do? And where was the old man, on a night like this?
Rosa Jean shivered and rubbed her arms; the shoulders of her blouse were damp from the rain. She would put a piece of wood in the stove; that was natural enough. She moved toward the woodbox, a big deep thing almost as tall as the stove, which must take many hours of foraging for the old man to keep filled. It was full now, heaped over in fact. The first branch Rosa Jean touched was hooked with others—she tried to untangle it and half the pile shifted, exposing a gap in the next layer. There was something else beneath the wood—it looked like cloth.
Rosa Jean’s lips parted with a quick breath. She leaned over and put her hand down into the woodbox—pushed a piece of wood aside. She saw a faded, twisted brown suspender—a mottled bald head with a wisp of white hair trailing from it—and she knew why the old man was not at home on this inhospitable night.
For a moment Rosa Jean stood perfectly still. Oddly enough she did not feel frightened, or sick; it seemed as if the whole world had come to a stop for that moment. She thought and realized very clearly: that Quincy had been on the right track, and that Ralph Dugan had suspected, and that this was what happened when Ralph Dugan suspected.
Then she moved. She pushed some branches down in the hole, and shoved the top layer back as close as possible to how it had been, keeping back just one crooked stub which she put in the stove. She turned and looked around for something else the assayer’s child might be expected to do. She would fix the rumpled bunk, no doubt. Rosa Jean bent over it and began to shake out the soiled and tattered quilt, and was busily engaged with it when Ralph Dugan cam
e back in.
He closed the door. Rosa Jean glanced up. “It’s awfully untidy here,” she said. “Ma says Grandpa lives up here just because he can’t abide proper housekeeping. It looks like he never does any, anyway.”
She did not dare look directly at Dugan yet, but from the attitude in which he leaned back against the wall by the door she thought he seemed amused. He never stopped looking at her. She could not look up at him unless she could be sure her eyes were clear and her expression unsuspecting. And fear had begun to beat in her breast and to be a hot little pulse in her throat.
Rosa Jean tucked in the end of the quilt and left the bunk alone. She came and sat down in the single chair, tucking her feet under it and putting her hands in her lap like a little girl on her best behavior. Ralph Dugan had taken papers and tobacco from his pocket and was building a cigarette. Outside it thundered again suddenly, and then on the heels of it came muffled howls—quite nearby, sounding as if they were just on the other side of a wall. Both of them lifted their heads to look in the direction of the sound.
“They sound pretty near,” ventured Rosa Jean. She sighed. “I hope Grandpa comes soon… I sure can’t sit up all night waiting for him. Took me longer to get up here than I thought—Ma and Pa’ll both be crazy. I guess… if he doesn’t come soon I should just start home.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Dugan briefly, the cigarette in one hand as he reached in his pocket for matches. “You can hear those wolves out there. You might not want to go down that trail in the dark.”
Rosa Jean was thinking of the ride up. Unconsciously she stiffened her back and spoke as herself, with a certain determination in her voice. “I’ll be all right. I’m not afraid of any wolves.”
There was a pause—she realized the slight unintended emphasis she had put on a word. She looked at Ralph Dugan. He was looking at her in a curiously meditative way—his black eyes seemed clearer and deeper, more alert in the tanned and hardened face that still kept its youthful features. He had noticed too. And Rosa Jean realized that she was seeing that same expression Charlie had told her about—the expression that had been on Dugan’s face that night in the saloon when he caught the implication in Bruce Kennedy’s ill-considered speech. Whatever he might have thought of her before, she had his attention now.
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