“Don’t call me sis,” the girl said. “Anybody’s name I don’t know, I call him bub. No offense. I got that from pa, I guess.”
That’s likely, Johnny thought, and he said amiably, “Any girl’s name I don’t know, I call her sis. I got that from ma.”
The cheerful effrontery of the remark widened the girl’s eyes. She held out her hand now and said with dignity, “Give it to me. I’ll see it gets in next week.”
“That’s too late,” Johnny said. “I got to get it in this week.”
“Why?”
“I ain’t got money enough to hang around another week.”
The girl stared carefully at him. “What is it?”
“I want to put a piece in about myself. I’m a top hand, and I’m lookin’ for work. The fella over there at the saloon says why don’t I put a piece in the paper about wantin’ work, instead of ridin’ out lookin’ for it.”
The girl was silent a full five seconds and then said, “You don’t look that simple. Gus was having fun with you.”
“I figured that,” Johnny agreed. “Still, it might work. If you’re caught shorthanded, you take anything.”
The girl shook her head. “It’s too late. The paper’s made up.” Her voice was meant to hold a note of finality, but Johnny regarded her curiously, with a maddening placidity.
“You D. Melaven?” he asked.
“No. That’s pa.”
“Where’s he?”
“Back there. Busy.”
Johnny saw the gate in the rail that separated the office from the shop and he headed toward it. He heard the girl’s chair scrape on the floor and her urgent command, “Don’t go back there. It’s not allowed.”
Johnny looked over his shoulder and grinned and said, “I’ll try anything once,” and went on through the gate, hearing the girl’s swift steps behind him. He halted alongside a square-built and solid man with a thatch of stiff hair more gray than black, and said, “You D. Melaven?”
“Dan Melaven, bub. What can I do for you?”
That’s three times, Johnny thought, and he regarded Melaven’s square face without anger. He liked the face; it was homely and stubborn and intelligent, and the eyes were both sharp and kindly. Hearing the girl stop beside him, Johnny said, “I got a piece for the paper today.”
The girl put in quickly, “I told him it was too late, pa. Now you tell him, and maybe he’ll get out.”
“Cassie,” Melaven said in surprised protest.
“I don’t care. We can’t unlock the forms for every out-at-the-pants puncher that asks us. Beside, I think he’s one of Alec Barr’s bunch.” She spoke vehemently, angrily, and Johnny listened to her with growing amazement.
“Alec who?” he asked.
“I saw you talking to him, and then you came straight over here from him,” Cassie said hotly.
“I hit him for work.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Cassie,” Melaven said grimly, “come back here a minute.” He took her by the arm and led her toward the back of the shop, where they halted and engaged in a quiet, earnest conversation.
Johnny shook his head in bewilderment, and then looked around him. The biggest press, he observed, was idle. And on a stone-topped table where Melaven had been working was a metal form almost filled with lines of type and gray metal pieces of assorted sizes and shapes. Now, Johnny McSorley did not know any more than the average person about the workings of a newspaper, but his common sense told him that Cassie had lied to him when she said it was too late to accept his advertisement. Why, there was space to spare in that form for the few lines of type his message would need. Turning this over in his mind, he wondered what was behind her refusal.
Presently, the argument settled, Melaven and Cassie came back to him, and Johnny observed that Cassie, while chastened, was still mad.
“All right, what do you want printed, bub?” Melaven asked.
Johnny told him and Melaven nodded when he was finished, said, “Pay her,” and went over to the type case.
Cassie went back to the desk and Johnny followed her, and when she was seated he said, “What do I owe you?”
Cassie looked speculatively at him, her face still flushed with anger. “How much money have you got?”
“A dollar some.”
“It’ll be two dollars,” Cassie said.
Johnny pulled out his lone silver dollar and put it on the desk. “You print it just the same; I’ll be back with the rest later.”
Cassie said with open malice, “You’d have it now, bub, if you hadn’t been drinking before ten o’clock.”
Johnny didn’t do anything for a moment, and then he put both hands on the desk and leaned close to her. “How old are you?” he asked quietly.
“Seventeen.”
“I’m older’n you,” Johnny murmured. “So the next time you call me ‘bub’ I’m goin’ to take down your pigtails and pull ’em. I’ll try anything once.”
Once he was in the sunlight, crossing toward the Elite, he felt better. He smiled—partly at himself but mostly at Cassie. She was a real spitfire, kind of pretty and kind of nice, and he wished he knew what her father said to her that made her so mad, and why she’d been mad in the first place.
Gus was breaking out a new case of whiskey and stacking bottles against the back mirror as Johnny came in and went up to the bar. Neither of them spoke while Gus finished, and Johnny gazed absently at the poker game at one of the tables and now yawned sleepily.
Gus said finally, “You get it in all right?”
Johnny nodded thoughtfully and said, “She mad like that at everybody?”
“Who? Cassie?”
“First she didn’t want to take the piece, but her old man made her. Then she charges me more for it than I got in my pocket. Then she combs me over like I got my head stuck in the cookie crock for drinkin’ in the morning. She calls me bub, to boot.”
“She calls everybody bub.”
“Not me no more,” Johnny said firmly, and yawned again.
Gus grinned and sauntered over to the cash box. When he came back he put ten silver dollars on the bar top and said, “Pay me back when you get your job. And I got rooms upstairs if you want to sleep.”
Johnny grinned. “Sleep, hunh? I’ll try anything once.” He took the money, said “Much obliged,” and started away from the bar and then paused. “Say, who’s this Alec Barr?”
Johnny saw Gus’s eyes shift swiftly to the poker game and then shuttle back to him. Gus didn’t say anything.
“See you later,” Johnny said.
He climbed the stairs whose entrance was at the end of the bar, wondering why Gus was so careful about Alec Barr.
A gunshot somewhere out in the street woke him. The sun was gone from the room, so it must be afternoon, he thought. He pulled on his boots, slopped some water into the washbowl and washed up, pulled hand across his cheek and decided he should shave, and went downstairs. There wasn’t anybody in the saloon, not even behind the bar. On the tables and on the bar top, however, were several newspapers, all fresh. He was reminded at once that he was in debt to the Wickford County Free Press for the sum of one dollar. He pulled one of the newspapers toward him and turned to the page where all the advertisements were.
When, after some minutes, he finished, he saw that his advertisement was not there. A slow wrath grew in him as he thought of the girl and her father taking his money, and when it had come to full flower, he went out of the Elite and cut across toward the newspaper office. He saw, without really noticing it, the group of men clustered in front of the store across from the newspaper office. He swung under the tie rail and reached the opposite boardwalk just this side of the newspaper office and a man who was lounging against the building. He was a puncher and when he saw Johnny heading up the walk he said, “Don’t go across there.”
Johnny said grimly, “You stop me,” and went on, and he heard the puncher say, “All right, getcher head blown off.”
His
boots crunched broken glass in front of the office and he came to a gingerly halt, looking down at his feet. His glance raised to the window, and he saw where there was a big jag of glass out of the window, neatly wiping out the WICKFORD except for the “W” on the sign and ribboning cracks to all four corners of the frame. His surprise held him motionless for a moment, and then he heard a voice calling from across the street, “Clear out of there, son.”
That makes four times, Johnny thought resignedly, and he glanced across the street and saw Alec Barr, several men clotted around him, looking his way.
Johnny went on and turned into the newspaper office and pit was like walking into a dark cave. The lamp was extinguished.
And then he saw the dim forms of Cassie Melaven and her father back of the railing beside the job press, and the reason for his errand came back to him with a rush. Walking through the gate, he began firmly, “I got a dollar owed—” and ceased talking and halted abruptly. There was a six-shooter in Dan Melaven’s hand hanging at his side. Johnny looked at it, and then raised his glance to Melaven’s face and found the man watching him with a bitter amusement in his eyes. His glance shuttled to Cassie, and she was looking at him as if she didn’t see him, and her face seemed very pale in that gloom. He half gestured toward the gun and said, “What’s that for?”
“A little trouble, bub,” Melaven said mildly. “Come back for your money?”
“Yeah,” Johnny said slowly.
Suddenly it came to him, and he wheeled and looked out through the broken window and saw Alec Barr across the street in conversation with two men, his own hands, Johnny supposed. That explained the shot that wakened him. A little trouble.
He looked back at Melaven now in time to hear him say to Cassie, “Give him his money.”
Cassie came past him to the desk and pulled open a drawer and opened the cash box. While she was doing it, Johnny strolled soberly over to the desk. She gave him the dollar and he took it, and their glances met. She’s been crying, he thought, with a strange distress.
“That’s what I tried to tell you,” Cassie said. “We didn’t want to take your money, but you wouldn’t have it. That’s why I was so mean.”
“What’s it all about?” Johnny asked soberly.
“Didn’t you read the paper?”
Johnny shook his head in negation, and Cassie said dully, “It’s right there on page one. There’s a big chunk of government land out on Artillery Creek coming up for sale. Alec Barr wanted it, but he didn’t want anybody bidding against him. He knew pa would have to publish a notice of sale. He tried to get pa to hold off publication of the date of sale until it would be too late for other bidders to make it. Pa was to get a piece of the land in return for the favor, or money. I guess we needed it all right, but pa told him no.”
Johnny looked over at Melaven, who had come up to the rail now and was listening. Melaven said, “I knew Barr’d be in today with his bunch, and they’d want a look at a pull sheet before the press got busy, just to make sure the notice wasn’t there. Well, Cassie and Dad Hopper worked with me all last night to turn out the real paper, with the notice of sale and a front-page editorial about Barr’s proposition to me, to boot.”
“We got it printed and hid it out in the shed early this morning,” Cassie explained.
Melaven grinned faintly at Cassie, and there was a kind of open admiration for the job in the way he smiled. He said to Johnny now, “So what you saw in the forms this mornin’ was a fake, bub. That’s why Cassie didn’t want your money. The paper was already printed.” He smiled again, that rather proud smile. “After you’d gone, Barr came in. He wanted a pull sheet and we gave it to him, and he had a man out front watching us most of the morning. But he pulled him off later. We got the real paper out of the shed on to the Willow Valley stage, and we got it delivered all over town before Barr saw it.”
Johnny was silent a moment, thinking this over. Then he nodded toward the window. “Barr do that?”
“I did,” Melaven said quietly. “I reckon I can keep him out until someone in this town gets the guts to run him off.”
Johnny looked down at the dollar in his hand and stared at it a moment and put it in his pocket. When he looked up at Cassie, he surprised her watching him, and she smiled a little, as if to ask forgiveness.
Johnny said, “Want any help?” to Melaven, and the man looked at him thoughtfully and then nodded. “Yes. You can take Cassie home.”
“Oh, no,” Cassie said. She backed away from the desk and put her back against the wall, looking from one to the other. “I don’t go. As long as I’m here, he’ll stay there.”
“Sooner or later, he’ll come in,” Melaven said grimly. “I don’t want you hurt.”
“Let him come,” Cassie said stubbornly. “I can swing a wrench better than some of his crew can shoot.”
“Please go with him.”
Cassie shook her head. “No, pa. There’s some men left in this town. They’ll turn up.”
Melaven said “Hell,” quietly, angrily, and went back into the shop. Johnny and the girl looked at each other for a long moment, and Johnny saw the fear in her eyes. She was fighting it, but she didn’t have it licked, and he couldn’t blame her. He said, “If I’d had a gun on me, I don’t reckon they’d of let me in here, would they?”
“Don’t try it again,” Cassie said. “Don’t try the back either. They’re out there.”
Johnny said, “Sure you won’t come with me?”
“I’m sure.”
“Good,” Johnny said quietly. He stepped outside and turned upstreet, glancing over at Barr and the three men with him, who were watching him wordlessly. The man leaning against the building straightened up and asked, “She comin’ out?”
“She’s thinkin’ it over,” Johnny said.
The man called across the street to Barr, “She’s thinkin’ it over,” and Johnny headed obliquely across the wide street toward the Elite. What kind of a town is this, where they’d let this happen? he thought angrily, and then he caught sight of Gus Irby standing under the wooden awning in front of the Elite, watching the show. Everybody else was doing the same thing. A man behind Johnny yelled, “Send her out, Melaven,” and Johnny vaulted up onto the boardwalk and halted in front of Gus.
“What do you aim to do?” he asked Gus.
“Mind my own business, same as you,” Gus growled, but he couldn’t hold Johnny’s gaze.
There was shame in his face, and when Johnny saw it his mind was made up. He shouldered past him and went into the Elite and saw it was empty. He stepped behind the bar now and, bent over so he could look under it, slowly traveled down it. Right beside the beer taps he found what he was looking for. It was a sawed-off shotgun and he lifted it up and broke it and saw that both barrels were loaded. Standing motionless, he thought about this now, and presently he moved on toward the back and went out the rear door. It opened on to an alley, and he turned left and went up it, thinking, It was brick, and the one next to it was painted brown, at least in front. And then he saw it up ahead, a low brick store with a big loading platform running across its rear.
He went up to it, and looked down the narrow passageway he’d remembered was between this building and the brown one beside it. There was a small areaway here, this end cluttered with weeds and bottles and tin cans. Looking through it he could see a man’s elbow and segment of leg at the boardwalk, and he stepped as noiselessly as he could over the trash and worked forward to the boardwalk.
At the end of the areaway, he hauled up and looked out and saw Alec Barr some ten feet to his right and teetering on the edge of the high boardwalk, gun in hand. He was engaged in low conversation with three other men on either side of him. There was a supreme insolence in the way he exposed himself, as if he knew Melaven would not shoot at him and could not hit him if he did.
Johnny raised the shotgun hip high and stepped out and said quietly, “Barr, you goin’ to throw away that gun and get on your horse or am I goin’ to burn you
down?”
The four men turned slowly, not moving anything except their heads. It was Barr whom Johnny watched, and he saw the man’s bold baleful eyes gauge his chances and decline the risk, and Johnny smiled. The three other men were watching Barr for a clue to their moves.
Johnny said “Now,” and on the heel of it he heard the faint clatter of a kicked tin can in the areaway behind him. He lunged out of the areaway just as a pistol shot erupted with a savage roar between the two buildings.
Barr half turned now with the swiftness with which he lifted his gun across his front, and Johnny, watching him, didn’t even raise the shotgun in his haste; he let go from the hip. He saw Barr rammed off the high boardwalk into the tie rail, and heard it crack and splinter and break with the big man’s weight, and then Barr fell in the street out of sight.
The three other men scattered into the street, running blindly for the opposite sidewalk. And at the same time, the men who had been standing in front of the buildings watching this now ran toward Barr, and Gus Irby was in the van. Johnny poked the shotgun into the areaway and without even taking sight he pulled the trigger and listened to the bellow of the explosion and the rattling raking of the buckshot as it caromed between the two buildings. Afterward, he turned down the street and let Gus and the others run past him, and he went into the Elite.
It was empty, and he put the shotgun on the bar and got himself a glass of water and stood there drinking it, thinking, I feel some different, but not much.
He was still drinking water when Gus came in later. Gus looked at him long and hard, as he poured himself a stout glass of whiskey and downed it. Finally, Gus said, “There ain’t a right thing about it, but they won’t pay you a bounty for him. They should.”
Johnny didn’t say anything, only rinsed out his glass.
“Melaven wants to see you” Gus said then.
“All right.” Johnny walked past him and Gus let him get past him ten feet, and then said, “Kid, look.”
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 29