Coroner Creek

by Short, Luke;

  Ernie Coombs was grinning faintly as he looked up at Bill. “Where’d you pick ’em up?”

  “They built a fire on the trail about a quarter mile below the forks,” Bill said, a quiet scorn in his voice.

  Ernie looked first at Andy, and Andy looked at the ground like a child reprimanded by a mere look. Then Ernie’s attention shifted to Chris, and he was still smiling. “Come to have a look?”

  Chris nodded, saying nothing, not liking the way this was shaping up.

  “Take a good long look,” Ernie said quietly. “You won’t want to see it again.”

  Something in his tone warned the crew. They had been clustered around Ernie; now they scattered, a couple of them drifting behind Chris. Bill reached down for the reins of Chris’ sorrel and led him away. Andy, puzzled still, looked from one to the other of the crew.

  Ernie said, “You damn tough drifters, you never learn, do you? You been everywhere, you can lick anybody, and you’re pretty handy with a six-gun. You can even back down a sheriff once in a while if you find the right sheriff, can’t you?” He pulled his gun from its holster and tossed it aside.

  Chris saw the anger in Ernie’s pale eyes and thought bleakly, I’m due for a beating.

  He waited until Ernie stepped before him, feet planted wide, and he let Ernie say, “You think you—” before he hit him. Ernie went down and Chris landed on top of him, arms sledging, but it didn’t last. Two of the Rainbow hands were on him instantly. They held his arms and wrestled him off Ernie, who scrambled to his feet now, his eyes blazing.

  Ernie said, in a shaking voice, “That does it! That’ll—”

  Ernie ceased talking, his big fists clenched at his sides. He turned his upper body as he looked at Andy West.

  “Get on your horse and go home, Nellie,” Ernie said sharply.

  Andy glanced at Chris, and there was unbelief in his eyes. Chris thought bleakly, No witnesses, but he did not speak to Andy. He had tried Andy and found him useless, and his pride held him silent.

  “Look here,” Andy said. “We didn’t do nothing. We—”

  “Get your horse!” Ernie said savagely.

  Andy gave Chris one despairing look and walked quickly to his horse. He mounted him and turned him and rode into the timber without looking back. Bill drifted his horse over to look down the road, and then turned and nodded to Ernie, who was watching him.

  “Get a good hold,” Ernie said then to the two men holding Chris.

  Chris struggled and Ernie, patient, waited for the two men to wrestle him into submission. Chris stopped presently, breathing hard, his face flushed with the exertion and his gray eyes murderous. Ernie swung then with all the great power of his thick sloping shoulders. Chris saw it coming and turned his head, but Ernie’s great sledging blow caught him flush on the jaw hinge. His knees buckled and he sagged in the arms of the two men holding him, dragging them forward to keep their balance.

  “Hold him up, hold him up!” Ernie said angrily.

  “Hell, he’s out,” Stew Shallis panted. He stumbled a little on his fat, short legs, and then tripped and fell, and Chris fell slackly with him.

  Ernie’s eyes were wild now. He stepped forward and grabbed Chris’ shirt and lifted, but the shirt tore away in his fingers.

  “Damn him!” Ernie said in a whispered, raging voice. “Tough, cocky gun hand!”

  His very inability to hurt Chris more held him frustrated and motionless a moment, and then he said savagely, “Get out of the way!” to the man standing beside Chris. He brushed Stew aside roughly and, grasping Chris under the arms, he dragged him over to a nearby log.

  Then he looked up at the watching, silent crew, “Come here, Tip. Come here!”

  A plain-faced puncher stepped over to him, and Ernie reached down and lifted Chris’ arm so that his right hand lay atop the log. “Hold it that way,” Ernie said.

  Tip, bewildered, knelt and held Chris’ hand as he was instructed, and when the hand lay flat on the log, Ernie raised his foot and stamped savagely on Chris’ hand.

  Tip dropped Chris’ arm as if it were hot and looked up, and Ernie said wrathfully, “Put it back! Put it back!”

  Tip did, and Ernie stamped three more times, the sharp high heel of his boot thudding with a thick muffled sound on Chris’ hand and skidding off each time, ripping a great furrow in the skin.

  He paused then, his eyes still bright with fury, and looked down at Chris. Then, slowly, he lifted his gaze to the silent sober crew.

  Tip stood up, watching Chris’ arm slide off the log and flop across his belly. It was bleeding freely now.

  Ernie said, “That’s the way to treat these tough drifters, break their gun hand. Watch him dog it out of the country now.”

  He made it ound as if only bare justice had been done, and it took the crew scarcely a moment to adjust their beliefs to his. They came up and looked at Chris, and Ernie quietly rolled a smoke, not taking his eyes from Chris’ face.

  “You must have broke his hand,” one man observed. “He never moved.”

  “He’ll move,” Ernie said grimly. “Throw him in the shack where we can watch him, and then get to work.”

  A scalding, formless abasement that he didn’t know was anger built up in Andy as he rode down the wagon road. Something was happening back there, something they didn’t want him to see, and it was happening to Danning. The very violence of what he tried to imagine sickened Andy for a moment. He didn’t try to define his feeling toward Danning, but behind his anger and loyalty now was a deep sense of guilt. Danning had trusted him, and he had blundered them both into a stupid trap. And Danning was taking his medicine. What were they doing to him that they didn’t want him to see? Shooting him? Maiming him? In the past few minutes, the world Andy had always shut his eyes to lay naked and fearful before him. He longed for the gun that he carried only because everyone else did, with a passion that made him reach for his empty holster.

  And then the thought came to him. Bill Arnold hadn’t picked up their guns; they were still at the camp. Andy spurred his horse and went straight to his gun lying in the brown-black humus of pine needles. Turning, he ran back toward his horse, and then hauled up and looked about him. If one gun was good, two were better. He found the second six-gun and rammed it in the waistband of his pants. Mounting now, he turned his horse and again put him at a run up the trail.

  At the forks now, he had cunning enough to rein up and plan his course, haste or no haste. He rode on a ways, and when he could hear the clean chunk of ax blows in the air, he pulled off the road and tied his horse to a tree and went on afoot, circling through the timber until he reached the creek.

  They were working. What had happened to Chris? Walking as silently as he could, half running when he thought the sound of the chopping would cover the noise he made, he came to the edge of the clearing, and halted some feet back in the timber. He could see the crew now.

  Bill Arnold and chunky Stew Shallis had just laid down a log and were still bent over, listening to Tip Henry who stood in the doorway of the half-raised cabin. Ernie and Ed Rossiter were seated on a log, their backs to him. Now they rose and went over to Tip, and Bill and Stew tramped over, too. Was Danning in there?

  Andy noted carefully that only Ernie wore his gun. He walked softly toward the camp and, leaving the trees, stepped over the first log as he heard Ernie say loudly, “Like your neighbors, hardcase?”

  Andy halted, raised both guns hip high, and said in an angry, choked voice, “The whole lot of you turn around!”

  They all turned to look at him now, unmoving in their surprise; Bill Arnold, after a moment’s puzzlement, accounted for the guns and said softly, “Well, I’m damned!”

  Ernie Coombs said mildly, “Be careful of those things, Andy. They go off.” And he started for Andy, a smile on his long face but a look of caution in his eyes.

  Andy tilted one gun a bare half inch and let the hammer off. The slug slapped into the top log of the shack. Ernie stopped cold in his track
s, the smile fading from his face.

  “You damn fool!” Ernie said. “We can get a U. S. Marshal on you for that. This is a Government homestead!”

  “Bill,” Andy said, “throw Ernie’s gun away.”

  Bill Arnold was scared, Andy saw, and it gave him a sense of confidence and power as Bill came up beside Coombs and threw Ernie’s gun in the grass.

  Ernie said thinly, “Go on, go on, get yourself in some real trouble.”

  Andy didn’t answer him. He circled Ernie and Bill, waved Shallis and Tip and Ed over beside them, and then briefly looked in at the chip-laden, grassy floor of the shack. Chris was on his hands and knees, trying to push himself to his feet. Andy saw his bloody hand, and a hot anger boiled up in him.

  “You! Tip and Stew! Help him down to the creek!”

  The two came forward and got Chris. As they passed him on the way to the creek, Andy noted Chris’ head hung deep on his chest and his lagging directionless step, and he said with the slow-forming decision of a man who seldom has to make one, “I think I’m goin’ to shoot you, Ernie.”

  Ernie laughed, and Bill Arnold stepped carefully away from him. He had seen the mule look in Andy’s face, and did not like it. Ernie said now in a bold and confident voice, “Go ahead, make yourself trouble, Andy. Get hung on account of a tough drifter.”

  Andy’s glance shuttled to the creek. Chris was on his knees in the water, clumsily scooping water with his good hand onto his face and his hair and onto the back of his neck. His other hand lay in the water.

  Ernie’s speech was a little hurried now—smooth and persuasive and softly Texan and reasonable. “Andy, you don’t know what you’re doin’. This is land protected by the law. You and that saddle tramp are as good as in the pen now if we want to report you. Now take him and get out of here, and I’ll tell Miles to forget it.”

  Andy still watched Chris. He saw him come to his feet, shake the water from his hair and then turn to face them, and his wet and shining face held a look that made Andy afraid again. Chris walked out of the creek, his wet clothes clinging to him. Then his pace increased, and he was heading straight for Ernie. There was a kind of indomitable fury in him as he stumbled once and caught himself and then broke into a run.

  When Ernie swung at him as he came on, Chris did not even pause. He butted Ernie in the face with his head and kneed him savagely in the groin, and Ernie went over backwards, tripping over a log. Chris, too, tripped on the log and sprawled, face down, but even as he fell his feet were driving him forward, always forward. Ernie yelled and rolled over, and Chris came at him with the ferocity of a demented animal. Ernie struck at him and kicked at him, wild in panic, but could not stop him.

  When Chris hit him with his body and wrapped both arms about him and lifted him up, Ernie smashed down at his head with fisted hands as if he were driving nails with a hammer.

  Chris threw him forward and followed him down, and they fell on a log which caught Ernie in the small of the back. His breath was driven from him in a great shuddering cough.

  Chris had never let go of him; now he pulled himself astride Ernie and put his right forearm under his chin and bent Ernie’s head back and down, so that Ernie’s back was bowed over the log. Again and again, Chris drove sledging, wild blows at his face and Ernie struggled convulsively, kicking wildly. Suddenly his struggling stopped.

  Then Chris took the pressure off his chin and slugged again, and this time, because Ernie’s face was where he could hit it and he was still blind with his fury, Chris forgot and drove his right hand into Ernie’s face.

  The shock and pain of it brought a low groan from him and, still astride Ernie, Chris hugged the hand to his chest and bent his head, waiting for the pain to go. It was then Bill Arnold broke for the brush, and Andy let him go.

  All of them now, Andy included, walked slowly toward Chris. His hand still hugged to his breast, Chris turned and came off Ernie, who slid to a sitting position on the ground and fell over on his side.

  Chris’ face was bloodless with the pain, but his eyes, Andy noticed, were still crazy mad.

  Chris held his hurt hand out and looked at the Rainbow men, and he swayed unsteadily on his feet as he asked, “How’d he do it?”

  Stew Shallis tried to speak and no words came out. He cleared his throat and said in a thin phlegmy voice, “Stomped on it.”

  Chris turned back to Ernie then and pulled him over so he was on his face, arms outflung. He put his foot on Ernie’s right wrist, and with his left boot he stamped solidly time and again on the back of Ernie’s hand. Ernie jerked convulsively, soundlessly, and subsided.

  Chris lifted his wild gaze again now to the Rainbow crew, and was silent a moment as he carefully cradled his crippled hand against his chest.

  Presently he said, “Which one of you is Tip Henry?”

  There was a long pause and Tip Henry said, “That’s me.”

  Chris slowly extended his injured hand now and pointed at Tip, his arm straight and unwavering and sighted like a gun. “You homesteaded this place for Miles, Tip,” Chris said. “You’ll live on it a year, and half those nights I’ll come back here and shoot it up until you move or I kill you. Get off it!”

  His hand fell to his side, and was drawn up against his chest immediately. Cradling it thus, his eyes now sought Andy. “Andy, find me my horse.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  When Miles left the hotel dining room after dinner that noon, Big Ben Lavendar beckoned him from one of the lobby chairs where he was talking, and Younger went over. He shook hands with Ben, who had a ranch out north by the dune country, and said hello to Travis, a small scholarly looking man who did surveying work at the mines up around Petrie in the Blackbows. Waycross, who owned the hardware store and was postmaster, winked solemnly at him. They were competitors, but Younger had made it a point to keep his friendship.

  Ben Lavendar said, “Sorry to hear about Sam. Truscott showed me the letter.” His broad, wind-ruddied face showed a concern that Younger tried to match in his own expression. Ben Lavendar, with Truscott and Walt Hardison, made up the board of commissioners.

  “A rest will do him good,” Younger said soberly.

  “I’m glad you can spare that young redhead,” Ben went on. “Good man. Wish he’d marry my daughter, if I had a daughter.”

  Younger laughed with the rest of them and went on out. Crossing over to the store, he smiled faintly. Mac was in, as O’Hea’s deputy. The talk this noon in the dining room had confirmed Lavendar’s opinion. Only Walt Hardison was against it, and he, Younger reflected, couldn’t do anything about it. He tramped back through the main aisle of the store, pausing only to speak to a couple of punchers from Crowfoot, his neighbor to the west.

  Back in the office, he shucked out of his coat and stretched lazily. The flat ropes of muscle across his shoulders stretched his white shirt almost to the tearing point. He saw the stack of ledgers MacElvey had set on his desk for the monthly review of the status of his affairs, which were prospering.

  Closing the door he sat down, half turned his chair to the window and began going over the books. This, after all, was the deepest pleasure he knew. In them he could read a story that was completely personal and delightful, the story of his own wisdom and shrewdness. For instance, he saw now where the sum he had spent setting up the tie-cutting camp over on the south slope of the Blackbows was going to be sufficient, according to Mac’s report. The crew was ahead of schedule, and his contract with the railroad for several thousand ties would be met well within the deadline and he could clear close to eighteen hundred dollars. He thought of that with pleasure and tried to remember the exact sum of the original investment.

  Minutes later, he mentally hauled himself up; he hadn’t been thinking of Mac’s figures, he’d been thinking of Danning. Shaking his head, as if to reprove himself, he turned now to Mac’s estimate on the Sulinam job. It was in a separate folder, its pages well thumbed, its contents known to him by heart. For this was his boldest gamble, and it
involved his whole future. A stamp mill was being built in Case Valley out on the flats thirty miles to the west of Triumph to service the dozen mines scattered nearby in the Blackbows. The Sulinam mine above Petrie was in an almost inaccessible spot high in the Blackbows, perched on a big deposit of only medium-grade gold ore, and with the building of the Case Valley stamp mill, Sulinam had seen the possibility of working their medium-grade deposits. Accordingly, Sulinam had asked for bids on the moving of 175,000 tons of ore from its mine to the Case Valley stamp mill. Whoever got the contract would have to build a road and haul out over it, in big ore wagons. The outlay of money for the wagons, for the teams, for the blacksmith shops, for the buildings, for the crews, for the feed, for the commissary, the road crews, the tools, the surveying and maintenance, had at first disheartened Younger. It was too big for him to handle, he had believed, and the time limit to completion too short. But Mac, who seemed to know something of everything, had broken down the cost figures, and had shown Younger how it could be done. By sending his own man south into good horse country and by paying cash for horses, he could get his teams cheaply. By paying cash for secondhand wagons, he could get the wagons at a bargain figure. By using his tie-camp crew for cutting the road, he could pare the cost of the road down to a fraction of what other contractors would have to spend, and be well within the time limit.

  And Younger, in the end, had decided to gamble. He had mortgaged Rainbow to get the cash, and borrowed steeply, but if he got the contract Mac had shown him that he would be a rich man. The bid would be let next Monday morning, now, and Younger, with Mac’s figures memorized, knew for certain that his bid would be low. If it was not, nothing was lost. Already, Dan Fairshine had the horses chosen, and Sholtz had found the wagons; they only awaited telegrams that Miles’ bid was low to put down the cash and quickly start in motion the whole machinery which, when it was finally working smoothly, would mean Younger was on his way to becoming a rich man.