Free Winds Blow West

by L. P. Holmes

  In a way, Bruce was happier than he’d been for a long time. Looking back at the tough days he’d known in Rawhide and Ravensdale, he saw that while they had been a living, and a good one, yet a man paid an inevitable price at that game, even though it left him unscarred physically. For it was a game that built a shell of solitariness about a man and left him lonely. It turned him in upon himself, turned others away from him. The high wine of excitement and danger was inevitably followed by the dark moods of letdown. And out of each successive one of these, a man emerged with an added burden of bleakness and grim visions of the future. A man forgot how to laugh, how to relax. He aged while his years were still young. He might gain stature of a kind, but this very stature squeezed certain human qualities out of him that no man could afford to lose. It had been a trail no man could travel too long without finding it was too late to turn back. Bruce’s hope was that he had stopped in time.

  It was good to ride this foothill range, under the towering shoulders of the Lodestones. It was good to move among cattle, to read their worth and know the need of the world for them. It was good to face a chore that did not mean throwing the weight of his personality and reputation against surly, hating men. Yes, it was good to work cattle, to know the smell of them and of dust and of sweat salting up the hide of the horse under him, and to feel his own sweat working down his muscles, oiling them and making them supple.

  It was especially good to come in at night, hungry and weary, to sit at the cook shack table with his crew, swap talk with them of the day’s affairs, to know that he was one of them and that they liked and respected him for himself. And then to dawdle an hour or two in the bunkhouse before turning in for the night. And then, in the soft dark, to think and dream a little.

  One thought always came, which was half pleasure and half a strange, irking pain. It was of Tracy Carling. He had not been near the Carling camp since that morning when Tracy Carling had ignored him so completely. A dozen times since, when on his way to or from town, he had been mightily tempted to turn off the trail and seek the Carling camp. Each time he had resisted the impulse. He wondered if this were pride or just plain damned stubbornness. Man, he concluded, was a queer brute and lucky to get along through life as well as he did.

  Several times he had dropped by at the Clebourne camp for an hour or two with Kip and Cadence and her father. Kip and Clebourne were already well along with the construction of a sizable cabin. It was, Kip declared, just a starter, enough to get them through the approaching winter. Next spring it would be added to, made into a real ranch home.

  On these visits Bruce studied his younger brother, afraid he might discover some sign of the return of the restlessness that had given him cause for worry over the kid’s future in the past. He found none. Kip’s feet were on solid earth at last and would stay there.

  * * * * *

  Hack Asbell returned from his ride across the basin just before dark. Bruce, watching for him, met him at the corrals. “You look,” he observed, “in as good health as when you left.”

  “What did you expect,” growled Asbell crustily, “that I’d be all clawed and beat up?”

  Bruce grinned in the dusk and ignored this. “Meet some good people?”

  “Nobody kissed me on both cheeks,” grumbled Asbell. “But at least they didn’t sick no dogs on me. Gimme time and mebbe I can get used to some of them. Talked to one family who asked about you … that is, some of the family did. Folks by the name of Carling. Seems like you did ’em the favor of cooling off Carp and the boys one evening, when they were riding and not using the best of judgment. There was a woman there with the nicest eyes I ever saw in a human being.”

  “Missus Carling, of course,” murmured Bruce. “One lovely lady.”

  “There”—Asbell nodded—“I agree with you. There was a young ’un there, too. Girl with the prettiest hair! Reminded me of … well, now—”

  “The color of aspen leaves after the first frost,” suggested Bruce gravely.

  “Hah!” snorted the cattleman, flashing a shrewd look at Bruce. “Darned if that ain’t it, exactly. Wish’t I’d had me a daughter like that. I’ve been looking at cows and plug-ugly ’punchers and at myself in a shaving mirror so long, is it any wonder I’m ornery as a egg-sucking ’coon? But if I’d had me a daughter like that yaller-headed girl, why then I might’ve put in my years living in a real ranch house instead of a danged two-three-roomed boar’s nest. Son, don’t you ever make the mistake I did.”

  “What’s that, Hack?”

  “Why, figuring you’re big and chesty enough to travel the trail by yourself. You may figure you’ve got someplace. But comes a day when you sorta cast up accounts, and then you realize all of a sudden that you ain’t got no place at all. What’s that young ’un miffed at you about?”

  “Is she?”

  “You know danged well she is.”

  “I doubt she’s interested enough to give a hoot one way or the other.”

  “That’s what you think. She didn’t ask about you, but I noticed that she sure listened close for my answer when the older folks did.” With that, Hack Asbell stamped away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The breath of fall was in the air. The nights had a bite to them, days bright but crisp. A certain mistiness lay over the world at morning and evening, bringing its own colors to fit the hour. At times gray, again purple, and by evening especially, a sad and haunting violet or mysteriously luring powder blue.

  A new vigor breathed from the earth. Not the warm, growing vigor of spring, but a certain lustiness, a marshaling of strength to meet the onslaughts of the coming winter. Far up in the Lodestones, bands and splotches of autumn brilliance stood out against the dark and eternal green of the conifers; a full moon rode in the night sky in solitary golden glory.

  Across the miles of Indio Basin settler camps became marked with more than just a gaunt wagon or two. Cabins began shouldering up. Many of these were temporary lath-and-tar-paper shanties, but in other camps, where men had thought and prepared ahead, more substantial structures rose.

  One of these was growing at the Carling camp, where Brink Carling labored with hammer and saw, with Ezra Banks helping. Ezra had already put up a one-room place at his own camp, enough for his solitary needs.

  Brink Carling broke off in his work long enough to help Tracy Carling hitch the heavy work team to the big wagon. He gave Tracy a lumber list.

  “Tom Nixon’s men will load this for you at the lumberyard,” he said.

  Tracy climbed lithely to the wagon box, gathered up the reins, waved to her aunt, and sent the big wagon creaking away. She wore a trim leather jacket, buttoned to the throat against the morning’s crispness, but her head was bare and the sunlight put a glow about it. Ezra Banks stared at her in frowning reflection.

  “She looks like laughter and bird song,” he boomed softly. “But the lass is troubled in her mind about something. What would it be, Brink?”

  “I’ve wondered that myself,” answered Carling.

  “I hope it’s no yearning for that Jason Spelle,” growled Ezra. “For I’ve come to see the man as a rascal. Had he any worthwhile business in this basin, then he would not have dropped from sight the way he has. And I would like to see Bruce Martell around more than he’s been.”

  “That Thorpe business was pretty rough,” said Carling. “I watched Tracy when the word came in. She went pretty grave. That sort of thing is hard for a girl like her to understand. She’s a gentle youngster.”

  “All of that,” agreed Ezra Banks. “But life, especially in a new land like this, is not always gentle. Tracy must come to understand that. What else could Martell have done than what he did do? The Thorpes started it, and they’d have done for him if he hadn’t done for them.”

  “I understand that,” Carling said. “But I don’t know that Tracy does. As for Spelle, I agree with you. I will not make the man
welcome in this camp again, should he ever come back.”

  Riding down the slow miles to town, Tracy had her own thoughts. They were interrupted when, where the Rocking A trail cut in to join with the one she was on, a big black horse came jogging, its rider grave and tall in the saddle.

  It was the first time she had seen Bruce Martell in weeks and weeks, and slow color ran across her face when he looked up at her and lifted his hat. The black’s swinging jog would have carried it quickly by the plodding wagon, but Martell pulled the animal down to a walk.

  “There’s a rope trailing behind your wagon,” he called up to her. “Pull in while I gather it up for you.”

  Tracy obediently reined in. Martell swung the black to the rear of the wagon, was busy there a moment. Then he came clambering up along the bed of the wagon and swung himself into place beside her. She looked at him accusingly.

  “There wasn’t any rope trailing. You just said there was so you could tie your horse at lead and get up here on this seat.”

  “That’s right,” he admitted cheerfully. “I lied like a trooper. But it worked.”

  He was freshly shaven, the line of his jaw clean and darkly bronze. It was a face much more mobile than when she had seen it last. The settled, almost bitter sternness that had been so characteristic of him was not nearly so much in evidence. He looked younger, more boyish, more carefree.

  “I think,” he said abruptly, “that you knew darned well there was no rope trailing from this wagon. Yet you stopped.”

  Color touched her checks again. “That is quite true,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  “Swell,” he enthused. “Start in. I’m yearning to listen.”

  “I was wrong about something. Believing what I did of the Rocking A, I mean. I’m quite sure now that Rocking A had nothing to do with the Hendee and Dopkins affairs. So, I’m sorry for the way I acted that day at Ezra Banks’ camp. You’ll accept my apology?”

  “Gone and forgotten. You never had cause to be sorry, anyhow. You couldn’t be blamed for being mixed up. A lot of people were. How did you like my boss, Hack Asbell?”

  She smiled. “I did. He tried to act such a crusty old scoundrel, but I saw right through him, and he knew I did. Yes, I liked him.”

  “An opinion returned, with interest. He asked me what color I thought your hair was. We finally agreed that it was aspen leaves, after the first frost. No other gold like it in all the world.”

  She looked away. “You’re a much happier man than when I first met you. There was a grayness in you then that isn’t there any more. Hack Asbell and his Rocking A must be good for you.”

  “They are.” Grave thoughtfulness stilled his features. “And you’re right. I’m happier than ever before in my life. The old trail was a very lonely one. I never truly realized how lonely until I got off it.”

  “What made it so lonely?”

  Bruce built a cigarette while he considered this. “The man behind a badge stands alone. Not willingly, but by necessity. On one side of the trail are those who hate him for what he is. They aren’t good people, or they wouldn’t hate him and … maybe their hate shouldn’t count. Yet, it does. It’s a friction that puts callouses on a man. On the other side of the trail are the better people who, though they may respect that man behind the badge—yet they walk around him. And so the man draws in upon himself, and is lonely.”

  “Why did you carry the badge, knowing this?”

  “I didn’t know it until I’d started. Then I was too proud to quit. Besides, there is always someone who has to pack that badge. It’s a job that someone has to do, man being the strange beast he is. It would all be much simpler if each man would be a stern authority over his own conduct. This being a state of affairs the world has never seen and never will, there will always be badges and men who must wear them.”

  “Would you go back to the same chore?”

  “Never!” The word fairly exploded from him. “I’ve served my time, done my stint. I want nothing better than what I have now. A good man to work for, good comrades to ride with, and good work to find comfort in.”

  “Where you carried the badge … they were rough times and places?”

  He nodded. “Rough.”

  “And times when you … you had to use that gun you carry?”

  “Yes. There were others besides Bully and Dyke Thorpe. Such things happen. A man can only play the cards dealt him. That doesn’t always mean he’s proud of the hand he holds. Didn’t I say men were strange brutes?”

  A harshness had crept into his tone, some of the old flinty grayness into the look of him. He was surprised when her slim hand dropped lightly on his for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I didn’t want to take you back to such days. But there were things I wanted to know. Now let’s talk of other things. Of today, for instance. Was there ever a more perfect morning, a more perfect world? Autumn. I remember it back home. So sweetly sad at times, yet so buoyantly wonderful. Out here it is no different, only bigger.”

  Nothing she might have said could have snapped him more swiftly back to his earlier mood.

  “Best season of the year,” he enthused. “Hack Asbell put it just about right the other evening when we were having an after-supper smoke out by the corrals. As Hack put it—the time of the year when the earth reaches up and the sky reaches down and a man can listen to the world sing.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “I like that. Imagine such a crusty old rascal having such nice thoughts! I’ll have to know him better.”

  “That,” said Bruce, “is a swell idea. If I should drop around with an extra saddle bronc’ someday, would you ride up to headquarters with me?”

  “I’d love it!”

  “It’s a deal. Hack will be tickled out of his skin.”

  From then on the bars were down. They talked of many things, impersonal things. But Bruce was hugely content. Just to sit there beside her, to watch the sunlight on her hair and the slant of it across her softly sunbrowned cheek and throat; to listen to the lilt of her voice and the bright cadence of her occasional laughter. These were things that pushed the gray bleakness of past years away from him.

  The miles to Starlight were all too short. She let him off in front of Donovan’s store, waited while he untied the reins of the black from the rear of the wagon. Then, with a tip of her hand and a smile, she drove on toward the lumberyard at the far end of town.

  Martell went into Donovan’s, whistling softly to himself.

  From the door of the Land Office, Cashel Edmunds watched all this, then turned and went into the back room of the place. In there was Jason Spelle, dusty and travel-worn, shaving before a small mirror.

  “The Carling girl just drove in,” Edmunds reported, a malicious glint in his eyes. “Martell rode the wagon with her as far as Donovan’s.”

  The rasp of Spelle’s razor paused just a moment. “You figure I’m interested there?” There was no urbanity in Spelle’s tone now—instead, a thin harshness.

  “Used to be, didn’t you?”

  Spelle whirled. “Don’t try and taunt me,” he snarled. “You’ll find I got answers to a lot of things … including you.”

  Edmunds shrugged in that backing-away, sulky manner of his. “You’re sure edgy. A man can’t open his mouth.”

  Spelle turned back, finished his shaving, wiped the remnants of soap from his face with a damp towel. He lifted his shoulder-holstered gun and harness from the back of a chair and buckled it on. He donned his corduroy coat.

  Watching him, Cashel Edmunds was uneasy in the change that had come over Spelle. Something that had always been held in check within this man, damped-down and hidden, now had broken loose and was rampant. It put a settled glitter in his eyes, loosened up his mouth, pulled lines into his face. In it was ruthlessness, wildness—and danger. Spelle pulled on his hat a
nd went out without another word.

  At the lumberyard, Tracy Carling had turned over her wagon and the list of what she wanted to one of Tom Nixon’s men, and now was perched on a pile of sawed lumber, waiting for the loading of her wagon to be done. She was brightly interested in the bustle and industry of the yard, which was a busy place indeed these days, what with all the cabin building going on across the basin. The air smelled of resin and piney sawdust and was a pleasant tang to the nostrils. She was unaware of Spelle’s approach until he was right at her elbow and speaking.

  “How are you, Tracy?”

  “Jason!” She looked at him with wide, startled eyes. “Where in the world have you been?”

  He shrugged. “Business. I had finally to look after some affairs of my own.”

  He looked at her intently, marking her slim grace and shining head with a boldness that made her shift restlessly. “Glad I’m back?”

  She stammered slightly. “Why, yes … of course.”

  “Worry about me any?” There was a slight roughness in the words.

  Her shoulders stiffened and her head lifted. She looked at him with a sudden cool directness. She did not answer his question. Instead she said, “You’ve changed, Jason. Your manner … your looks.”

  He laughed curtly. “Naturally. Nothing stands still. All things change, including men. And women.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You. Grown fond of saddle men … maybe?”

  She colored sharply, but her manner went cool and proud. “I like neither the tone nor the words,” she said stiffly. She slipped down from the lumber pile and would have walked away, but Spelle stepped in front of her, his pale brown eyes moiling. He knew she was angry with him, knew that every additional word he spoke now would make her more so. But the old suave mask was completely gone now, burned away by the wild ruthlessness that had broken loose in him. He caught her by the arm, roughly. “Not so fast, my lady. Nobody gives Jason Spelle the go-by for a drifting saddle pounder like that damned Martell, that cheap killer.”