Novel 1965 - The Key-Lock Man (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  Hardin had been feeding twigs into the fire. Now he stood back and looked carefully around, measuring what he saw against what he had heard in the towns and the cow camps. Towering cliffs on three sides of a bowl, the clustered trees, the meadow. “Yes, I think you’re right,” he agreed. “It could be.”

  “Now, why d’ you suppose he led us here?” McAlpin asked.

  Neill glanced from face to face. “What’s Mormon Well, I never heard of it.”

  Nobody replied, but Short walked around the pool. “Why, the damned fool!” he said. “He’s led us right to it! I’d lay a dollar to a doughnut he’s never even heard the story.”

  Hardin’s eyes were grimly amused. He repeated McAlpin’s question. “Why do you suppose he led us here?”

  Chesney was sour. “That Mormon Well story is just whiskey talk.”

  “Like hell it is!” Short’s temper flared. “I’ve seen gold from that cache—seen it with my own eyes! Held it right in my hand!” He thrust out an open hand, then closed it to a hard fist. “Within a few miles of this place there’s more gold than a man’s likely to see in a lifetime!”

  “Gold?” Neill’s voice was startled.

  “You know the story better’n any of us, Bill,” McAlpin suggested. “You tell him.”

  “I ain’t about to. Damn it, can’t you see what he’s tryin’ to do? If we start huntin’ that gold we’ll split up and forget all about him, then he’s gone scotfree.”

  “A dozen men have died huntin’ for this well, and here we are, Johnny-on-the-spot.”

  Johnny…

  They fell silent, but after a while Short said, “Well, we can always come back to it. We can hang him and then come back.” There was an obvious lack of enthusiasm in his tone.

  McAlpin stirred. “You ever heard of anybody who left this place and ever found it again? Not even the ones who hid the gold. This here Mormon Well has always been the joker in the deck.”

  “Use your heads!” Chesney was irritable. “Who would lead us right to the gold when he could have it all for himself?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Neill said. “Is there gold buried somewhere about?”

  Hardin chuckled ironically. “He’s going to get clean away. He surely is.”

  “What are you?” Chesney demanded angrily. “A passel of youngsters who’ll go chasin’ after any red wagon comes along? We started out to hang a man!”

  “I wish somebody would tell me the story,” Neill protested.

  “Bill,” Hardin suddenly said to Chesney, “do you remember Gay Cooley?”

  “What about him?”

  “Gay knew this country, and he spent years huntin’ the Lost Wagons. He knew this country better than the Navajos did. Now, if this here is Mormon Well, then right over there is Marsh Pass.” Hardin drew a rough pattern on the sand with a twig. “If this Key-Lock man is going east or northeast he will head for that pass. Otherwise he has to cross the river, and there’s only two places he can do that, both of them west of here.

  “Lee’s Ferry,” he went on, and indicated it on the map, “is away over northwest, and the Crossing of the Fathers is northwest, too, only not so far. My hunch is he’s about to double back and make for the Crossing of the Fathers.”

  Neill started to interrupt, then held his peace, watching Chesney, who was studying the sand map. Either way, their man was reaching for the wildest kind of country, but he was hemmed in by the canyons of the Colorado and the San Juan.

  “We might head him off,” Short suggested.

  “In this country?” Hardin said. “We lose his trail and we’ve lost him entirely.”

  “Maybe not,” Neill suggested. “I’m thinking of that comb.”

  “Comb?”

  “Sure…the one thing he took out of all those supplies he had to leave behind so’s he could run. The one thing he chose to take was that fancy comb. Seems to me that means he’s got him a woman somewhere, and that he figures to see her, chased as he is, or not.”

  Hardin looked at Neill. “Now, that’s a good thought. You’re right, Neill.”

  Neill was embarrassed, but he was pleased. Chesney was staring at the map, but now a new thought was in his mind. Hardin hunched over the map, too. “If he has a woman cached up here somewhere, he’ll surely go to her. Now, where would a man be likely to have a woman? One who would treasure a fancy comb?”

  “That’s any woman, Hardin.” Neill had gained courage. “Womenfolks have a liking for fancy things. Some woman set her heart on that comb, you can bet, or else he set his heart on giving it to her.”

  “I don’t agree,” Kimmel said. “No man in his right mind would leave a woman alone in this country. Not if he had to leave her for maybe a week or more.”

  “What else could he do?”

  They were thinking now. They knew the problems of a man with a woman on a lonely ranch. They understood his problem, but with them it was different—they had each other. If one of them had to leave the ranch there was always a neighbor to stop by and see that all went well. They were together even when alone, for they shared their dangers, their emergencies. But what of this man? Who was there in the country ahead who might stand by in case of need?

  Reluctantly each one of them began to harbor the thought that if this man was alone he was no ordinary man; and if he left his woman alone, she was no ordinary woman, either.

  “When we find him,” Hardin suggested, “he may not be alone. Maybe he’s leading us right into an ambush. Maybe that’s why he ain’t worried.”

  Short looked up at Hardin, his face revealing his shock. The same thought was suddenly in the minds of all. They had started out to hang a man—suppose all of them were killed in the process? Neill felt a queer coldness in his belly at the thought of his wife back there alone on the ranch. What had he gotten himself into, anyway?

  After a while Chesney spoke. “Boys, we’ve got to look at it this way. We’ve got to have law in this country. We’ve got to serve notice that we take care of our own. If we don’t, there ain’t no one of us going to last out the year.”

  Neill’s mind had slipped away from the chase, seeking refuge in a dream of what might be, when he knew he could not escape what was. He was thinking of those wagonloads of gold. Why, with his share he could build a fine house, buy fine furniture. They could have sugar in the house, and tea. Emma felt the need for tea—tea was elegant, to her way of thinking. Out here a body had mighty little that was nice, let alone elegant; and Emma was forever talking of how her Boston ancestors had done things.

  “I wonder who he is—the Key-Lock man?” Neill said.

  “It don’t make a passel of difference,” Chesney said. “Far’s I’m concerned, he’s just a man we’re fixin’ to hang.”

  Chapter 3

  SHE CAME UP from the water and stopped at the edge of the pool to wring out her long blonde hair. She moved with a natural grace and with no shrinking at her nakedness. Her body was white, and unbelievably lovely in the cool morning air.

  Never had she known such stillness. Even the waterfall seemed only to rustle faintly as it dropped into the pool and lost itself in widening ripples.

  It was music she missed most of all, but music of the kind she wanted to hear was gone from her life. She had left all that behind in that other world that seemed so far away, almost as if it were on a distant star. Music was gone, unless she learned to listen as he did.

  “Listen, Kristina,” he had said, “you have only to listen. There is music on the wind.”

  One heard it best on the high plateaus, on Skeleton Mesa or over by Tall Mountain. The canyons had music of another kind. And wherever the winds blew, they smelled faintly of cedar or sage, but sometimes only of heat.

  All this land, she felt, was haunted by memories; not memories of her own, for she had come only lately to this region of stark and lonely cliffs, nor were they memories of his, for he had been here only once before. The memories were those of the long-vanished people who h
ad lived in this place, whose dwellings lined each almost inaccessible crack in the canyon wall. She thought of them often, and felt somehow akin to them. What would he say when she told him that?

  She had been a silly fool, a wild, silly fool to go riding off with a man she knew not at all, into an utter wilderness. With a man who had come in out of the night and the storm, and had merely looked at her across the room and claimed her for his own.

  “Who are you?” she had asked that night.

  His eyes never wavered from hers. “That is a foolish question,” was his answer. “You have known for two minutes who I am, and what you are going to do.”

  “And what am I going to do?”

  “Ride away with me before the sun rises,” he said, “and be married when we find a minister worthy of the name.”

  He had shouldered past her, so close she could smell the woodsmoke that clung to his buckskins, the woodsmoke of cedar, mingled with the smell of pine and horse.

  He had crossed to the fire and held out his strong brown hands to the flames, and she had seen Neerland look at him with a cold, still attention, and she had been afraid.

  Afraid not for herself but for this stranger, who could not know Neerland, as she herself had not known him when she came west to meet him.

  She had crossed the room then, and sat down behind Neerland’s shoulder, telling herself that this was the man she had come to marry. Yet although her eyes were cast down toward the flames, her mind followed the movements of the stranger.

  Behind her someone asked, low-voiced, “Who’s that?”

  “Never saw him before. Horse wears a Key-Lock brand.” And then after a moment, “Never heard of that, either.”

  Her eyes lifted her heart from the lonely place where it had held itself during these past days. Her heart in her eyes, she looked at the Key-Lock man, his hands reaching toward the flames.

  He was tall, with powerful shoulders. She was a girl from a land of strong men, and she knew the bodies and the movements of men from seeing many at work or climbing beside her in the mountains. She looked at him, appraising the strength of him. He was not so big as Neerland, but he would be strong, she knew, very strong. She noted the way the muscles of his shoulders bulged the buckskin jacket. He wore a gun, but so did they all, and a bowie knife. Both knife scabbard and the gun holster were tied down.

  There were nine men in that room, and three women besides herself, and she knew the men stared at her, but she was accustomed to that. She was pure blonde, and taller than many men. Her body was lithe and strong, for since childhood she had climbed mountains, skied down the long mountain slopes in her own northern land, and ridden horses in every country of Europe, even with the fine horsemen of Hungary.

  She knew what she was and who she was, but she did not know where she was going, nor what was to become of her. And the life from which she had come was a far cry from this one into which she was going.

  These people had their pride, a pride of being and of doing, a pride of having chosen to go west, to challenge the country, the Indians, and the wilderness. Her pride was an ancient one, so much a part of her being that she was not even conscious of it. She was of the nobility…how foolish that sounded here!

  Her father had been a diplomat, a man known and respected both for his ancient lineage and his own abilities, a man of importance in all the capitals of the Continent. And now he was dead, and the fault lay with her, if fault there was.

  Of course, it was a man. She had met him in Vienna, and again in Paris, and she had fallen in love with him. Or she thought she had, which amounted to the same thing. The trouble was, the man was married, but this she did not know. He had spoken of her in a slighting manner and her father heard. A challenge followed, and her father was killed.

  It was then that she fled Europe, fled all she knew and loved. There was no more family, although there were estates. She had fled…but not before she had gone to see her lover one last time.

  She had gone to him, and she had entered by the door he often left open. He was standing there at the sideboard.

  “Kristina!” He was amazed, and turned slightly toward her, holding a bottle and a glass. He started to speak again, but she interrupted.

  The night was bitter cold, and she closed the door behind her. She held her head high and looked at him across the room.

  “My father had no son to horsewhip you as you deserve,” she said, “and my father was an old man, whose hand was not steady.”

  “Kristina!” he exclaimed again, staring at her.

  “Mine will be steady,” she said; and raising the pistol, she looked coolly down the barrel, and shot him. She threw the pistol on the floor and left.

  A friendly fisherman, with whom she had often gone on the sea as a child, carried her across to the coast of Denmark. And from Denmark she had sailed to America.

  And now she was here in this strange place. She was here at this stage stop where she had come to meet the man she had agreed to marry. She had first met Oskar Neerland in the East; he had spoken her language, guessed what she might have been; and, with her money gone, she had accepted his proposal. He must go west first, he said, then she would come to join him and they would be married.

  The room they were in now was long and low, with a fireplace at one end. The room had a stuffy warmth. In here there was a crude bar, and in the two adjoining rooms were a few beds…one room was for women, one for men. Out back were corrals and a lean-to stable.

  She had turned her eyes away suddenly from the back of the Key-Lock man, and Neerland was watching her. She had seen that same look in his eyes that afternoon, shortly after her arrival. She had seen that expression when he battered his horse with a gauntleted fist, striking it cruelly while he gripped the bit tight in his hand.

  He looked at her, then looked away, his eyes going to the stranger who now turned and walked to the bar. For an instant she had believed Neerland would speak to him.

  “So you like his looks, do you?” Neerland said with a sneer. “He’s nothing. Just a drifter, a saddle tramp.”

  She kept silent, and her silence angered him.

  “When I get you out to my place I’ll knock some of that fancy feeling out of you,” he said, “and take pleasure in it.”

  “I may not go.”

  He laughed. “You’ll go, all right. You came here to marry me, and there’s nobody to stand between us. Not even if they wanted to…nobody.”

  She looked at him directly with her wide blue eyes, and she said quietly, “I can look after myself. I need no help.”

  “You?” The word was contemptuous.

  She merely continued looking at him, her smooth face revealing nothing. Then she turned her back on him and went over to the fire.

  He lunged from the bench where he sat and grasped her shoulder, spinning her hard around, his hand drawn back.

  “Leave her alone.”

  Neerland’s hand held, and slowly lowered. Then he turned, his eyes holding a hot eagerness. The Key-Lock man was turning toward him, but Neerland realized with a shock that it was not he who had spoken, but the manager of the station.

  He was a slender man, no longer young, with a face in which only the eyes seemed to live. A shotgun lay across the top of the bar, and one hand rested on it.

  “You talking to me?”

  “To you. I said leave her alone. No man mistreats a lady on these premises.”

  Neerland shrugged contemptuously. “She won’t be here long. I am taking her with me.”

  The station manager’s eyes did not leave Neerland when he spoke to her. “Ma’am, if you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. Is he your man?”

  “No.”

  “Ask her how she got here,” Neerland said.

  “I came to marry him. I did not know he was the way I saw him today, and a man who beats a horse would try to beat a woman.”

  Neerland turned his eyes on her. “Try?”

  “You would try, I am sure, and then I woul
d kill you.”

  There was silence in the room. Something in the way she spoke told everyone present that she meant exactly what she said.

  Though she continued to look at Neerland, her words were for the man in the buckskin hunting jacket. “I am a stranger to your country, and I have never known hardship, but for a man who would love me and be gentle, I would face anything. You, Mr. Neerland, are not that man.”

  The stranger straightened from the bar and swept off his hat. “Ma’am,” he said quietly, “if you’ll ride with me in the morning, there’s a sky pilot—a minister—about sixty miles west. I should be most honored.”

  Across the room their eyes met and held for a long moment of silence, and then she said, “I will ride with you, sir. I will ride beside you in the morning.”

  Neerland started to speak, then was silent, and turning abruptly away, he went outside.

  The station manager returned his shotgun to its place under the bar. “You’ve got a good woman there, mister,” he said. “Give her time to know the country.”

  Suddenly embarrassed, the Key-Lock man crossed the room to her, and the others turned away, granting them what little privacy the room allowed.

  “I am going into new land,” he said. “I have no ranch, no home. I am going to a place I know, a place where a man can build.”

  “All right.”

  “You have your things with you?”

  “Yes.” She gestured to the pile in the corner. Surreptitiously the eyes of the women followed her hand’s movement. “It is too much, I am afraid.”

  The Key-Lock man looked at the expensive valise, the small trunk, the other things. “We will manage,” he said.

  THAT WAS GOOD advice,” he said, as they rode westward. His eyes were on the trail before them. “To give you time to know the country.”

  He gave her time, and she needed it, for everything was strange. There was nothing here that in any way resembled the life she had known, that in any way reflected what she had been. These stark and lonely mountains were not like the mountains of her own beloved north country.