Claim Number One

by Ogden, George W

  When morning began to creep in it brought with it a certain assurance that all was well with her, as daylight often brings its deceptive consolation to a heart that suffers the tortures of despair in the dark. Sleep caught him then, and held him past the hour that he had set for its bound. When he awoke the sun was shining over the cold ashes of his last night’s fire.

  Slavens got up with a deeper feeling of resentment against Boyle than he ever had felt for any man. It seemed to come over him unaccountably, like a disagreeable sound, or a chill from a contrary wind. It was not a pettish humor, but a deep, grave feeling of hatred, as if the germ of it had grown in the blood and spread to every tissue of his body. The thought of Boyle’s being so near him was discordant. It pressed on him with a sense of being near some unfit thing which should be removed.

  Dr. Slavens never had carried arms in his life, and he had no means of buckling Hun Shanklin’s old revolver about him, but he felt that he must take it with him when he left the tent. Big and clumsy as it was, he thrust it under the belt which sustained his trousers, where it promised to carry very well, although it was not in a free-moving state in case an emergency should demand its speedy use.

  There would be no time for breakfast. Even then he should have been in Comanche, he told himself with upbraidings for having slept so long. His horse had strayed, too. Slavens went after it in resentful mood. The creature had followed the scant grazing to the second bench, an elevation considerably above its present site.

  Slavens followed the horse’s trail, wondering how the animal had been able to scramble up those slopes, hobbled as it was. Presently he found the beast and started with it back to camp. Rounding the base of a great stone which stood perched on the hillside as if meditating a tumble, Slavens paused a moment to look over the troubled slope of land which had been his two days before.

  There was Boyle’s tent, with a fire before it, but no one in sight; and there, on the land which adjoined his former claim on the south, was another tent, so placed among the rocks that it could not be seen from his own.

  “It wasn’t there when I left,” Slavens reflected. “I wonder what he’s after?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XIX

  CROOK MEETS CROOK

  Slavens was saddling his horse before his tent, his mind still running on the newcomer who had pitched to the south of him, evidently while he was away. He was certain that he would have seen the tent if it had been there before he left, for it was within plain view of the road.

  Well, thought the doctor, whoever the stranger was, whatever he hoped or expected of that place, he was welcome to, for all that Slavens envied him. As for Slavens himself, he had run his race and won it by a nose; and now that he was putting down the proceeds to appease what he held as blackmail, he had no very keen regrets for what he was losing. He had passed through that. There would be the compensation––

  But of that no matter; that must come in its time and place, and if never, no matter. He would have the ease of conscience in knowing that he had served her, and served her well.

  His horse was restive and frisky in the cool of the morning, making a stir among the stones with its feet. Slavens spoke sharply to the animal, bending to draw up the girth, the stirrup thrown across the saddle.

  “Now, you old scamp, I’ll take this friskiness out of you in a minute,” said he, giving the horse a slap under the belly as he reached to pull the stirrup down.

  He drew back with a start as his eyes lifted above the saddle, and his hand dropped to the butt of the revolver which he carried so clumsily in his belt. Hun Shanklin was standing there facing him, not above a dozen feet away, grinning dubiously, but with what he doubtless meant for an expression of friendliness.

  The old gambler threw out his hands with a sidewise motion eloquent of emptiness, lifting his shoulders in a quick little jerk, as if to say, “Oh, what’s the use?”

  “Kind of surprised you; didn’t I, Doc?” he asked, coming nearer.

  “What do you want here?” demanded Slavens harshly.

  “Well, not trouble,” replied Shanklin lightly. “If I’d come over for that, I guess I could ’a’ started it before now.”

  “Yes, I suppose you could,” admitted Slavens, watching him distrustfully and feeling thankful, somehow, that the horse was between them.

  “I saw you up on the hill after your horse, so I thought I’d come over and let you know I was around,” said Shanklin. “Thought I’d tell you that I ain’t holdin’ any grudges if you ain’t.”

  “I don’t see where you’ve got any call to. I never took a crack at you with a blackjack in the dark!”

  “No, you didn’t, friend,” Shanklin agreed in his old easy, persuasive way. “And I never done it to you. You owe the honorable Mr. Jerry Boyle for the red mark you’ve got on your forrid there. I’ll own up that I helped him nail you up and dump you in the river; but I done it because I thought you was finished, and I didn’t want the muss around.”

  “Well, it will all come out on the day of reckoning, I suppose,” said Slavens, not believing a word the old scamp said.

  He knew that minute, as he had known all the time, that no other hand than Shanklin’s had laid him low that night. Of this he was as certain in his own mind as if he had seen the gambler lift hand for the blow. Boyle had no motive for it up to that time, although he had been quick to turn the circumstance to his advantage.

  “I thought Boyle’d dickered you out of this claim before now,” said Shanklin, looking around warily.

  “He’s down the road here a little piece,” replied Slavens testily, “in company of another friend of yours. You could have seen his tent as you came over if you’d looked.”

  “I just put up my tent last night,” Shanklin explained.

  Slavens took hold of his saddle-horn as if to mount, indicating by his action that the visit should come to an end. Shanklin, who was not in the least sensitive on the matter of social rebuffs, did not appear to be inclined to accept the hint. He shifted his legs, thrusting one of them forward in a lounging attitude, and dug in his trousers pockets with his long, skinny hands.

  “Well, spit it out and have it over with!” snapped Slavens, feeling that there was something behind the man’s actions to which he had not given words.

  “That was a purty good coat I left with you that night,” suggested Shanklin, looking up without the slightest stirring of humor in his dry face.

  “You’re welcome to it, if that’s all,” said Slavens.

  “That’s all. I was kind of attached to that coat.”

  Slavens left him standing there and entered the tent, feeling that Shanklin was as irresponsible morally as a savage. Evidently the inconsequential matter of an attempt at murder should not be allowed to stand between friends, according to the flat-game man’s way of viewing life. It appeared that morning as if Shanklin had no trace of malice in him on account of the past, and no desire to pursue further his underhanded revenge. Conscience was so little trouble to him that he could sit at meat with a man one hour and stick a knife in his back the next.

  The coat was under a sack of oats, somewhat the worse for wrinkles and dust. Slavens gave it a shake, smoothed the heaviest of the creases with his hand, and went out to deliver it to its owner.

  Shanklin was facing the other way, in the direction of his own camp. His attitude was in sharp contrast with the easy, lounging posture of a few moments before. He was tense and alert, straining forward a little, his lean body poised as if he balanced for a jump. There was a clattering on the small stones which strewed the ground thickly there, as of somebody approaching, but the bulk of the horse was between Slavens and the view, as the doctor stopped momentarily in the door of the low tent.

  Clearing the tent and standing upright, Slavens saw Boyle and Ten-Gallon coming on hurriedly. They had been to Shanklin’s camp evidently, looking for him. From the appearance of both parties, there was something in the wind.

  Boyle was approaching r
apidly, Ten-Gallon trailing a bit, on account of his shorter legs perhaps, or maybe because his valor was even briefer than his wind. Boyle seemed to be grinning, although there was no mirth in his face. His teeth showed between his parted lips; he carried his right arm in front, crooked at the elbow, his fingers curved.

  Slavens saw that all thought of the coat had gone but of Shanklin’s mind. The old gambler did not so much as turn his head. Slavens threw the coat across his saddle as Boyle came up.

  “Well, what have you got to say to it, you dirty old thief?” demanded Boyle, plunging into the matter as if preliminaries were not needed between him and Shanklin.

  “You seem to be doin’ the talkin’,” returned Shanklin with a show of cold indifference, although Slavens saw that he watched every movement Boyle made, and more than once in those few seconds the doctor marked Hun’s sinewy right arm twitch as if on the point of making some swift stroke.

  Boyle stopped while there was yet a rod between them, so hot with anger that his hands were trembling.

  “That don’t answer me!” he growled, his voice thick in his constricted throat. “What have you got to say to the way you double-crossed me, you old one-eyed hellion?”

  “Talk don’t hurt, Jerry, unless a man talks too much,” Shanklin answered mildly. “Now, if I wanted to talk, I could mighty near talk a rope around your little white neck. I know when to talk and when to keep still.”

  “And I know how to jar you loose!” threatened Boyle.

  Shanklin leaned toward the Governor’s son never so little, his left hand lifted to point his utterance, and opened upon Boyle the most withering stream of blasphemous profanity that Slavens had ever heard. If there ever was a man who cursed by note, as they used to say, Hun Shanklin was that one. He laid it to Boyle in a blue streak.

  “What do I owe you?” he began.

  Then he swung off into the most derogatory comparisons, applications, insulting flagellations, that man ever stood up and listened to. His evident motive was to provoke Boyle to some hostile act, so that twitching right arm might have the excuse for dealing out the death which lay at its finger-ends. Every little while the torrent of abuse broke upon the demand, “What do I owe you?” like a rock in the channel, and then rushed on again without laying hold of the same epithet twice. If a man were looking for a master in that branch of frontier learning, a great opportunity was at hand.

  Boyle leaned against the torrent of abuse and swallowed it, his face losing its fiery hue, blanching and fading as if every word fell on his senses like the blow of a whip to the back. The Governor’s son watched every muscle of Shanklin’s face as if to read the gambler’s intention in his eye, while his hand, stiff-set and clawlike, hovered within three inches of his pistol-butt.

  Presently Shanklin stopped, panting like a lizard. Both men stooped a little lower, leaning forward in their eager watchfulness. Neither of them seemed to be conscious that the world held any other object than his enemy, crouching, waiting, drawing breath in nostril-dilating gasps.

  Boyle moved one foot slightly, as if to steady himself for a supreme effort. A little stone which he dislodged tumbled down the side of a four-inch gully with a noise that seemed the sound of an avalanche. With that alarm Shanklin’s arm moved swiftly. Like a reflection in a glass, Boyle’s arm moved with it.

  Two shots; such a bare margin between them that the ear scarcely could mark the line. Then one.

  Shanklin, his hands half lifted, his arms crooked at the elbow and extended from his sides, dropped his pistol, his mouth open, as if to utter the surprise which was pictured in his features. He doubled limply at the knees, collapsed forward, fell upon his face.

  Boyle put his hand to his breast above his heart, pressing it hard; took it away, turned about in his tracks as if bewildered; swayed sickly, sank to his knees, and fell over to his side with the silent, hopeless, huddling movement of a wild creature that has been shot in the woods.

  Ten-Gallon came from behind the tent, where he had been compressing himself into a crevice between two boulders. His face was white, and down it sweat was pouring, drawn from the agony of his base soul. He went to the place where Dr. Slavens knelt beside Boyle.

  “Cra-zy Christmas!” gasped he, his mouth falling open. Then again:

  “Cra-zy Christmas!”

  Slavens had gone to Boyle first, because there was something in the utter collapse of Shanklin which told him the man was dead. As he stripped Boyle’s clothing off to bare the wound, Slavens ordered Ten-Gallon to go and see whether the old gambler had paid his last loss.

  “I won’t touch him! I won’t lay a hand on him!” Ten-Gallon refused, drawing back in alarm.

  Boyle was not dead, though Shanklin’s bullet had struck him perilously near the heart and had passed through his body. With each feeble intake of breath blood bubbled from the blue mark, which looked like a little bruise, on his chest.

  “Well, see if you can make a fire, then, and hurry about it! Get some water on to boil as fast as you can!” Slavens directed the nerveless chief of police.

  Ten-Gallon set about his employment with alacrity while Slavens went over to Shanklin, turning his face up to the sky. For a little while he stooped over Hun; then he took the gambler’s coat from the saddle and spread it over his face. Hun Shanklin was in need of no greater service that man could render him.

  Dr. Slavens took off his coat and brought out his instrument-case. He gave Boyle such emergency treatment as was possible where the gun-fighter lay, and then called Ten-Gallon to help take him into the tent.

  “Lord, he’s breathin’ through his back!” said Ten-Gallon. “He’ll never live till we git him to the tent–never in this world, Doc! I knew a feller that was knifed in the back one time till he breathed through his ribs that way, and he––”

  “Never mind,” said Slavens. “Take hold of him.”

  Ten-Gallon’s fire burned briskly, and the water boiled. Dr. Slavens sterilized his instruments in a pan of it, and set about to establish the drainage for the wound upon which the slender chance of Boyle’s life depended. Boyle was unconscious, as he had been from the moment he fell. They stretched him on the doctor’s cot. With the blankets spread underfoot to keep down the dust, the early sun shining in through the lifted flap, Slavens put aside whatever animosity he held against the man and went to work earnestly in an endeavor to save his life.

  Ten-Gallon showed a nervous anxiety to get away. He wanted to go after his horse; he wanted to go to Boyle’s tent and get breakfast for himself; and then he pressed the necessity of his presence in Comanche to keep and preserve the peace. But Slavens would not permit him to quit the tent until he could no longer be of assistance.

  It was not the wounded body of Jerry Boyle that the pot-bellied peace officer feared, but the stiffening frame of Hun Shanklin, lying out there in the bright sun. Every time he looked that way he drew up on himself, like a snail. At length Slavens gave him permission to leave, charging him to telephone to Meander for the coroner the moment that he arrived in Comanche, and to get word to Boyle’s people at the earliest possible hour.

  There seemed to be nothing for Slavens to do but to forego his trip in quest of Agnes, and sit there in the hope that she would come. Boyle could not be left alone, and Shanklin’s body must be brought up out of the gully and covered.

  This ran through his mind in erratic starts and blanks as he bent over the wounded man, listening to his respiration with more of a humane than professional fear that the next breath might tell him of the hemorrhage which would make a sudden end of Boyle’s wavering and uncertain life.

  Ten-Gallon had been gone but a little while when Slavens heard him clattering back in his heel-dragging walk over the rocks. He appeared before the doctor with a lively relief in his face.

  “Some people headin’ in here,” he announced. “Maybe they’ll be of some help to you. I hated to go and leave you here alone with that feller”–jerking his head toward Shanklin’s body–“for I wouldn’t
trust him dead no more than I would alive!”

  “All right,” said Slavens, scarcely looking up.

  Ten-Gallon appeared to be over his anxiety to leave. He waited in front of the tent as the sound of horses came nearer.

  “Stop them off there a little way,” ordered the doctor. “We don’t want any more dust around here than we can help.”

  He looked around for his hat, put it on, and went out, sleeves up, to see that his order was enforced. Agnes was alighting from a horse as he stepped out. A tall, slight man with a gray beard was demanding of Ten-Gallon what had happened there.

  Relief warmed the terror out of her eyes as Agnes ran forward and caught Dr. Slavens’ hand.

  “You’re safe!” she cried. “I feared–oh, I feared!”

  A shudder told him what words faltered to name.

  “It wasn’t my fight,” he told her.

  “This is Governor Boyle,” said Agnes, presenting the stranger, who had stood looking at them with ill-contained impatience, seeing himself quite forgotten by both of them in that moment of meeting.

  “I am sorry to tell you, sir, that your son is gravely wounded,” said Dr. Slavens, driving at once to the point.

  “Where is he?” asked the Governor, his face pale, his throat working as if he struggled with anguish which fought to relieve itself in a cry.

  Dr. Slavens motioned to the tent. The old man went forward, stopping when he saw his unconscious son and the bloody clothing beside the cot. He put his hand to his forehead and stood a moment, his eyes closed. Then he went in and bent over the wounded man.

  A sob of pity rose in Agnes’ throat as she watched him and saw the pain and affection upon his face. Presently Governor Boyle turned and walked to the spot where Hun Shanklin’s body lay. Without a word, he lifted the coat from the gambler’s face, covered it again, and turned away.