Dude said, “How come Wheeler gave you the package instead of Carlos?”
“It’s Consuela’s birthday present. He was afraid she’d see it.” It was queer to remember back when such things were normal and important.
“Fine time to be running errands,” Dude said.
“Ran one for you this noon—lunch. Did you eat it?”
Dude grunted. They had reached the steps of the hotel porch now. “I’ve kind of got out of the habit of eating,” he said.
Chance watched him sourly as he got into the saddle. “Better get back into it.”
Dude’s mouth got ugly. “Don’t prod me,” he said, and kicked his horse into a lope.
Chance watched him go. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. The place where Dude had laid the chair across his head began to pain him exceedingly. “My mother raised a born fool when she raised me,” he thought savagely. “Just a plain born fool.”
He stamped up the steps and almost fell over a man who had come out of the hotel apparently on purpose to speak to him.
FIVE
Harold Royce was the man’s name. He had been a crony of Gurney Hayes and he was the same type, a little run to fat and softness, solid, amiable, decent and dull. He ran the general store and was by way of being a leader in town affairs. Any time the citizenry needed prodding up you could find Harold Royce somewhere making a speech about it.
This time he seemed to be not quite so sure of himself as usual. He said, “Evening, Sheriff,” and Chance said, “Evening, Harold,” and then he hemmed and hawed around while Chance waited with no patience at all. But when he did speak he sounded completely sincere.
“You’re going to need some help, Sheriff,” he said. “Some of us have been talking the situation over and we feel we ought to …”
Chance said, “How good are you with a gun, Harold?”
Harold looked surprised. “Well, now, I’m no professional, you know that. But I—”
“Seems to me I’ve never seen you carrying one.”
“Well, I don’t. No reason to. But there is now, and …”
Chance was touched. But he shook his head. “I’m going to ask you a question, Harold. Are you good enough to go up against Matt Harris, all by yourself? Nobody to back you. Just you, against Burdette’s top gun?”
Harold sighed. “You know damned well I ain’t. Nobody in this town is, any more. The good guns are all working for Burdette.”
“Yeah,” said Chance. “So you’d just be someone I’d have to look after and take care of. Wouldn’t you?”
Harold looked at the ground. “Fighting ain’t my business, Chance. It never was.”
“Then leave it alone.” He put a hand briefly on Harold’s shoulder. “I appreciate the offer. You can tell the others I do. And then I wouldn’t talk about it any more, in case somebody hears you and gets the wrong idea.”
Harold gave him a look of mingled alarm and relief. He nodded and went off, walking fast. Chance looked down the street again after Dude. He had disappeared into the yard of the old stable. In a minute he came back in sight on foot and sat down on a big rock at the side of the road. The broad brim of the Mexican hat shaded him like a broken but still serviceable roof. Chance turned and went into the hotel.
It was quiet inside. There was one languid game of monte going on at one of the tables, and two men drooped over the bar talking to Carlos and the bartender. The long bar and the tables filled most of the big room. The reception desk was close by the door at the right and there was a stairway beyond it leading up to the second floor. Between the desk and the stairway the door to the dining room and kitchen quarters was open, and through it Chance could hear thumpings and stirrings and female voices going sixty to the dozen in Spanish.
Carlos left the bar and came to meet him. “Juano amigo—I have a message—” His eye lit on the package Chance was holding up and he stopped, breaking into a broad smile. He appeared small beside Chance’s tall height. His face was high-boned, his gaze quick and humorous and very shrewd. A drooping black mustache hid the lines of middle age around his mouth so that he looked younger than he was, with his smooth cheeks and flat belly. He said eagerly, “What is this?”
“The package you’ve been waiting for.” Chance handed it to him.
Carlos made a long sound of joy. “Just in time. Consuela, she …”
Consuela’s voice, which had been rattling on in the next room, suddenly sounded louder, and it was calling Carlos’s name. Carlos shoved the package hastily back to Chance.
“You keep it,” he whispered, and composed his face. “A great crisis has come,” he said loudly, nodding toward the door. “A spoon has been lost, or the frijoles have been cooked too long or not long enough.” He made an expressive gesture timed exactly to catch Consuela as she came in.
She made a face at him and laughed. She was very young. Carlos might or might not have been married before. He had never said and Chance had never asked him. But Consuela was the pride of his heart. He had been married to her now for almost two years, and he still thought that she was the most beautiful thing that ever stepped. Chance thought he was not far wrong, and he also thought that Carlos was a very lucky man, because Consuela felt exactly the same way about him.
She said several uncomplimentary things to him in Spanish, and then she said to Chance,
“Everything he leaves to me, while he sits all day over the cerveza and makes talk.” She turned again to Carlos. “Carlos, I must ask if you will—”
She broke off, looking at him.
“If I will what?” asked Carlos.
“What is wrong with you?” said Consuela. “You look like the cat who swallows the chicken. What have you been doing?”
“What have I been doing?” Carlos cried. “Madre Mia! I talk to my friend the sheriff, that is what I have been doing. We have important business to discuss, and you say I look like the cat who eats too much. Look at me!” He placed his hands on his waist and turned this way and that. “Am I fat? No!” He shook his head. “I do not know why you say such things.”
Consuela took a deep breath. Chance watched this with pleasure, because her camisa was cut low and when she got excited and breathed hard she showed a good deal of creamy white bosom. She had a superb figure, freer and finer than the corseted overdraped monstrosities the American women were so proud of. Chance thought fleetingly, as he had many times before, that if he ever did get married, God forbid, it would be to a girl like Consuela. At least you would know what you were getting. The others had to be peeled down in layers like onions, and when you got to the ultimate woman you were likely to find that she bulged in all of the wrong places and none of the right ones.
Consuela had opened her mouth to make words out of that deep breath, but Carlos flung up his hand in a lordly gesture.
“No, no, please do not say more, Consuela. You have already said too much.” He took Chance by the arm and moved him toward the stairs. “My friend and I will make our business alone. Come, Señor Sheriff.”
Chance went up the stairs with Carlos. Halfway up he glanced back and saw Consuela still standing there, staring after them, her hands on her hips, her red mouth not exactly smiling. When he got to the top of the stairs and was walking down the hall with Carlos he said,
“You take chances, friend.”
“Because I know women.” Carlos chuckled. “She will be mad at me or she will be sorry she provoked me. If it is mad it will be much pleasure to make right. If it is sorry—bueno! It will be the same pleasure. If you wish to know about women, come to me, Carlos Remonte.” He laughed again, taking the package from Chance and fondling it. “Wait until you see what is here, and then tell me whether I know women.”
Chance said to him in Spanish, “It is your hair that will be pulled, my friend. But Consuela’s fingers are very strong!”
He unlocked the door to his room and pushed it open. There was not much in the room and practically no place for anyone to hide, so he could see at once t
hat no one was there waiting for him. Again he felt foolish and after that he felt furious that he was forced to have all these ideas of constant danger. Damn it, if Nathan Burdette was going to make trouble over Joe, why didn’t he come ahead and do it? Then they could get it over with, and whoever was left could relax and enjoy life.
He went over to the window and looked out, making sure no one was staked out on the roof across the street, and Carlos swung the door shut behind him. It did not latch, but Carlos was too intent on his package to notice. He put it down on the bed and cut the twine with his knife. He folded the stout brown paper back carefully, ignoring the dust that fell out of the creases.
“If I had bought these myself,” he said, “everyone in town would have known, and it is not the sort of thing Consuela would wish to have known by everyone. So I arrange with Señor Wheeler—ah!” He had arrived at the heart of the package. “Ah-h!” he said again, and lifted up the thinnest, laciest and brightest red female underdrawers Chance had ever seen.
Chance whistled and came closer.
Carlos shook the drawers very carefully, so that the lace ruffles flounced up and down. A little dust came out of them, legacy of the long road they had traveled, probably in the chuck wagon with the bedrolls and personal belongings of the teamsters. Chance squinted. The red material was so thin you could see right through it.
“Are they not beautiful?” Carlos said. He shut his eyes. He smiled. “Can you not make the picture, how she will look?”
Chance said seriously, “You right sure you want me to do that?”
Carlos opened his eyes in a hurry. “No,” he said laughing. “Better to leave that to me.” He held the drawers out at arm’s length, admiring them.
Somebody said from the doorway, “I hate to interrupt but—”
In a blurred split-second of startled reaction, Chance reached for his rifle, saw that the figure in the doorway was female to match the voice, stopped reaching for his rifle, and realized that from where she stood it would look as though Carlos was holding the damned lace drawers up to him.
“—they don’t seem to be just the right thing for you,” the girl said, and smiled, and Chance moved, turning almost as red as the lace ruffles. Carlos stared at the girl, holding the drawers stiffly in front of him like a flag.
Practically snarling, Chance said, “What are you doing here?”
“Just looking.” She leaned against the door frame, peering judiciously at the bit of flimsy lace. “They have great possibilities, Sheriff, but not for you. Really.”
She grinned, not a simpering smile but a real honest grin. She was wearing a pale-blue silk wrapper thing all edged with feathers and her dark hair was caught up loose and curly on top of her head. One bare knee showed where the skirt had parted slightly at the front. It was a very nice knee, and the clinging shimmery stuff she was wearing made it clear that the rest of her was pretty nice too. It was crazy to be mad at a girl like that before you even knew her name. But Chance was mad. Partly because his nerves were bad, partly because he had been caught looking foolish, but mostly because this particular girl should not have been here at this particular time, and her appearance gave him a sharp pang of alarm.
“I asked you why you’re here?”
She said easily, as though it was none of his damned business but she had no objection to answering, “I’m after a towel. I’d like to take a bath and I couldn’t find any in my room.”
“You came in on the stage,” Chance said. “You were supposed to go out with it.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, why aren’t you on it?”
She gave him a blue, wide-eyed stare. “Whoever heard of a stage having a bathroom?”
Carlos clapped his hand to his head. “Juano, I forget! I started to tell you and then the package—I forget. The stage will not go.”
Chance turned and stared at Carlos. Suddenly his eyes were very cold. “Why not?”
“Something happen to the wheel. I do not know.”
“Where’s Jake?”
“With the stage.” Carlos nodded toward the back wall of the hotel, by inference at the stable yard outside. “He must have the wheel fixed before he can go.”
Chance picked up his rifle and went out the door, so fast that the girl had to jump to get out of his way. She called after him, something about a towel, but he did not hear what it was. A black anger was building up in him, making him indifferent to a lot of things. He went down the steps three at a time, through the bar where the customers turned startled heads to look at him, and out the back door.
Heat and sun hit him their familiar hammer blows. He squinted against the glare. Across the wide space the livery-stable corrals were filled with Wheeler’s mules. The smell of them was strong on the hot air, a clean animal smell. Wheeler’s wagons, the five he had put here, were drawn up neatly in line at one side. The stagecoach was in its usual place, but the fresh team had been unhitched and taken back to the stable. Martin the smith and Finch the wheelwright were standing beside it along with a little group of idlers and Jake Myers the driver.
Chance strode over to them, his boots kicking up the white dust. He said to the idlers, “Either put your backs into it and help, or clear out.” They cleared out. He turned to Jake. “What happened?”
“Couple of broken spokes, that’s all.” Jake was long and thin and tough as the rawhide thong on his whip. The points of his mustache hung down almost to his collar, white on the outsides and brown on the in, where the tobacco had stained them. He pounded the butt of his whip in the dust, not hard, but using it to emphasize every word as he repeated it. “A couple of broken spokes.” His mustache bristled. Jake was mad. “Look here.”
He pointed with the whip, flicking it lightly against the off front wheel. Then he walked around the back of the stage and flicked at the rear one on the nigh side.
“And here. Somebody used a crowbar. Must of done it while we was all in the hotel having dinner.”
Chance looked at the broken spokes. He swore, not very loud nor very long.
Jake said in a low voice, looking around, “Is it on account of that letter to the U.S. Marshal you gave me?”
“Not much doubt.” Chance had been as careful as he could about giving Jake the letter, knowing that he was watched—a hateful feeling, and one he had never had occasion to get used to. But even a stupid man, which Nathan Burdette was not, would have been able to figure that Chance was bound to send out word of what was going on by this stage, which carried the mail and was not likely to be permanently stopped—unless Nathan Burdette wanted to be in trouble with the government. Apparently he did not want to be, so he had done the next best thing and gained himself some time. And of course there was no way of proving that Nathan had had anything to do with it.
Chance looked up at the silent horsemen on the cliffs, symbols of Nathan’s power. He fought down a fierce impulse to start shooting at them. Then he went back to Martin and Finch, who were still looking wisely at the wheels. “How long will it take to fix ’em?”
Martin scratched his head and Finch said, “Well, now …”
They looked at him. Then they looked at each other.
“Fast,” said Chance.
Martin said, “Finch’ll have to turn some new spokes while I sweat them bands off, and then …”
“And then if you worked straight through, all night, you could have the stage out of here by morning, couldn’t you?”
Any other time he would have laughed at the way their faces sagged down. But he was not in a laughing mood.
Martin said, “Aw, hell, Chance. All night?” He peered at Chance, hoping for a sign of softening.
There was none.
Finch cleared his throat. “Official business, Sheriff?”
Chance said, “You better get moving. You got a lot to do.”
Martin said a string of words under his breath, but he went off toward the forge yelling for his boy. Finch bent over the wheel. Jake bit furio
usly on a plug of tobacco as though it was somebody’s neck.
“They’ll get an extra day but that’s all,” he said. “I’m going to stay right here all night, with one hand on my mail pouch and t’other on my shotgun. Don’t worry, Chance. Your letter’ll get where it’s going, and I’ll have some words of my own to add to it.”
“Thanks, Jake,” he said, and turned away.
One extra day was all Nathan would get.
It might be all he would need.
Chance felt very tired and discouraged. Too much had happened, too fast: Dude, the killing, the arrest, and all of a sudden he was into a thing that he could not see any way out of unless he backed down and turned Joe loose. He was damned if he would do that, and his reasons were only partly those of a conscientious lawman. Chance was not particularly conscientious but he was awfully stubborn. Furthermore, he had a clear idea that Joe Burdette was a hateful bastard who needed to be stepped on, and a less clear but nearly as strong idea that Nathan Burdette was getting to be a danger much more serious than Joe. He thought of a prairie river that starts small and then grows bigger and bigger with the rains, spreading wider and swallowing up the land until finally it has driven everyone else away. Natural causes stopped the river in time but it didn’t look like anything was going to stop Burdette. Chance had an instinct about a man getting too big. Now he was having a personal demonstration to prove he was right, and it was making him madder by the minute.
Besides, if he did let Nathan scare him into turning Joe loose he would have to leave Rio Bravo in a hurry, and he would be through as a lawman anywhere. He liked Rio Bravo. It wasn’t much, maybe—hot as the hinges of hell in summer and never enough rain—but a man has to settle down somewhere, and Chance was used to it and the people. Let the kids like Colorado do the roving and the drifting. He had had his share of them. He was going to stay.
He had not had much sleep last night, between Dude and Joe and Stumpy and their various emotions, and expecting every minute that Nathan Burdette would come in. His eyes felt red and gravelly and his head ached—goddamn Dude!—and he had not shaved. Maybe if he went and got cleaned up he would feel better.
Rio Bravo Page 4