Ramrod

by Short, Luke;

  Frank Ivey turned and walked back in the direction of the blacksmith shop, his broad back to Walt Shipley. He had dismissed Walt from his mind.

  Walt Shipley stood irresolute for a moment longer, then mounted the steps and walked past Dave into the lobby. He did not look to either side of him, but headed swiftly for the stairs.

  A remote sadness stirred within Dave. An ordinary man could hide his weaknesses from his fellow men by a decent silence, but Walt Shipley’s weakness lay naked now before all men; it would ride him until it killed him. And it would kill him surely, Dave knew, for Walt Shipley was a coward.

  Wearily, then, Dave went into the lobby and the clerk came up behind the desk. They did not look at each other, as if the shame of watching this was somehow unspeakable.

  “Twelve suit you?” the clerk said.

  “Sure.”

  Dave took the key and went upstairs. Connie Dickason’s door was closed, and Dave speculated on that. Had Walt gone to her, who was stronger than himself?

  His room was on the front corner, small and hot and dark. He closed the door and did not light the lamp, but crossed to the windows and opened them, and threw his hat on the washstand.

  He paced once to the other window and then lay down on the bed and slowly fashioned a cigarette and lighted it. His time was up here, he knew. He owed Walt Shipley nothing, having paid his debt tonight. And if he remained he would be buying into a quarrel he had no heart for, a quarrel that was basically senseless. For nothing is more private than ambition; a rare man could share it and fire other men with his own, but Walt Shipley was not that man.

  Dave began to speculate with a faint interest as to Walt Shipley’s failure and its causes and he thought he understood them. The direct cause, of course, was Shipley’s tongue; he had made a wild brag he could not back up.

  After tonight, this country would turn on him, as both strong men and strong dogs turn on a proved weakling. They would trump up prior claims to his grass and his water, and his few cattle would vanish, and all the time they would bait him with a patient cruelty. Some day, Walt would decide he had taken enough, and on that day he was dead. So were the men with him.

  Dave put his cold cigarette on the marble-topped washstand and sat up on the edge of the bed. Tomorrow he would drift. It didn’t matter where, because he was rootless and one place was like another. He’d used up his luck and he’d made his fool drunken protest to whatever gods there were, and he was as right as he ever would be.

  Rising now, he walked to the window and stood looking at the night. The street below him lay almost in darkness. He had lived through his own private hell in this town and had come out of it, and in doing it he had made some friends. But Jim Crew didn’t need him, and Rose would forget him. Connie Dickason had got what she wanted out of him, which he had given in payment for Walt Shipley’s help. That left Walt, and he’d paid him back that debt. The slate was clean, and leaving would not be bad.

  A man came out from the shadow of the veranda below, heading downstreet. Dave followed his progress with a sleepy half attention, and then he came alert. He studied the figure closely, and then knew it was Walt Shipley. He stood there a full five seconds, speculating and rejecting. Shipley wouldn’t hunt up Ivey, who was probably at the Special, for a shoot-out. It would take longer than this for him to get his nerve back.

  Dave turned, swept up his hat and stepped out into the corridor. On the dark street below, he walked swiftly past Bondurant’s, and when he came to the Special, he moved close to the window. It was a big, many-paned window whose lower half was painted an opaque white.

  Standing on tip-toe, he looked over the painted section. Ivey and Red Cates, D Bar’s foreman, and Ed Burma, Ivey’s foreman, were all standing at the bar, and the poker game in the rear had been resumed. Everything was serene.

  Dave looked downstreet and then went on. He was almost to the entrance of the livery barn when he heard the booming racket of a horse coming toward him on the runway.

  Fading back into the deep shadow of the building, he waited a moment and presently Walt Shipley, riding a livery horse, came out.

  He did not turn toward the grade, which was the way home to Circle 66. He turned south, and presently, when he was in front of Rose Leland’s millinery shop, he lifted his horse into a canter and vanished south into the night.

  It occurred to Dave then that maybe he had missed the measure of Shipley’s determination. Perhaps Walt was going out for the sheep after all. And then Dave knew that was unlikely, and he turned back toward the hotel.

  Connie Dickason, he knew then, was not going to have a husband soon.

  2

  The morning came cold and gray. Dave got his breakfast at a restaurant down the cross street, which held a harness shop, a lumber yard, the bank, Bondurant’s big warehouse, and a barber shop before it petered out into a clutter of small shacks that stretched almost to Feather Creek and the far wall of the canyon.

  Afterward, Dave picked up the team and buggy at Lilly’s, hitching them himself, and drove over to the hotel. Tying the team at the hitchrail, he came up to the veranda and took a chair in the corner, and was smoking his second cigarette and watching the morning traffic of the town when Connie Dickason came out.

  Dave rose. She saw him and came over to him and said good morning. He observed her, and a slow shock came to him; she was deathly white, and as she sat down in the chair next to his own he saw that her face was utterly lifeless, without any expression at all.

  He was still standing some moments later when she looked up at him, and her gaze was so searching it made Dave uncomfortable.

  She said finally, “Walt’s gone. You know he is, don’t you?”

  Dave nodded. She reached in the bosom of her dress and brought out a piece of paper and handed it to him without comment.

  Dave opened it and read:

  Connie, that’s the kind of a beating I can’t take. The outfit was made over to you long ago. Take it, and luck. Forget me. Walt.

  He folded it and handed it back to her, and she said “Well?” and he knew suddenly that he must shock her out of this. It seemed to him that only a thin thread of will kept her from going to pieces, and he said roughly, “What did you expect him to do?”

  “Marry me!” Connie countered passionately, bitterly. “Not stick a note under my door and run!”

  The anger brought some color into her cheeks, but the cold mask of her face did not change. She regarded the street now, her eyes musing and bitter. Dave sat down on the veranda railing, watching her guardedly, wonderingly.

  “He wasn’t hard enough,” Connie said finally. “I made a lot of excuses for him last night, but this is the only truth. He wasn’t hard enough.” She glanced up at him. “Was he?”

  “No.”

  “And I am,” Connie said coldly.

  Dave didn’t say anything, but he felt an acute unease. This wasn’t the soft, sweet Connie Dickason that the whole Bench loved—or was it? He recalled last night, and how Connie had maneuvered several men, including himself, into positions that would help Walt Shipley. She was right; she was hard.

  “I’m hard enough,” Connie announced grimly, “to beat my dad and Frank Ivey both, and I’m going to.”

  Dave shifted his feet, faintly embarrassed, and his movement brought her glance around to him. “I want you to work for me, Dave.”

  “Work for you?” Dave asked blankly.

  “I’m through with D Bar,” Connie said flatly. “I’ve only wanted one thing in my life, and that was Walt Shipley. My father, with Frank Ivey, took him from me. All right, I can fight too. I’m going to take Circle 66, and I’ll make it into an outfit they’ll have to respect. I want you to run it.”

  “No,” Dave said immediately.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not thinkin’ straight,” Dave murmured. “Ben Dickason and Frank Ivey didn’t take Walt away from you. They’re fightin’ sheep, like any cattleman.”

  “Frank Ivey ha
s asked me to marry him once a month for two years. Dad wanted me to marry him. And if Dad wasn’t against my marrying Walt, why didn’t he help him long ago?” Her eyes were blazing with anger, but her voice was soft and controlled.

  “After last night, you think he was wrong about Walt?”

  “I don’t think that matters. What does is that any man I choose will be broken by my father and Frank Ivey. They’re big enough and they’ll find a reason like they found sheep a reason to break Walt. They hope that some day then I’ll turn to Frank and marry him.”

  Dave was silent, no longer surprised at her cold passionless anger, and Connie went on. “I won’t let them do it. I’ve got some money left me by my mother—enough to pay a woman to stay with me and buy some cattle and hire a crew.” Her voice altered, taking on an edge. “When I get through with them, they won’t be able to break anybody.”

  The sound of a rider in the street made them both glance in that direction. A big man on a big dun pulled up at the tie rail. It was D Bar’s foreman, Red Cates, and he touched the brim of his Stetson with a finger, and said, “You want me to drive you out, Connie?”

  The word had got around then, Dave thought, but Connie’s pleasant voice did not betray any knowledge of it. “I’ll drive out alone, Red. Thanks.”

  Red Cates’ glance shifted briefly to Dave. He had a long, heavy-boned face, with a great beak of a nose bisecting it, and there was the faintest of thin, sly smiles on his face as he nodded and pulled his dun around and started back for the Special.

  Dave surprised Connie watching Red, a hard amusement in her eyes. “Red, too,” she murmured. “Red especially.” She straightened up suddenly and said briskly, “What about it, Dave?”

  “No,” Dave said quietly. “If I can draw my wages from you today, I’m drifting.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not my fight.” Dave shook his head. “You want a man that don’t give a damn.”

  Connie looked searchingly at him. “And you do? I don’t believe it, because I watched last night from the lobby.” She stood up, and Dave rose too. “It’s too bad, because we’d make a pair. You tell Mr. Bartholomew at the bank I said to give you your wages.” She put out her hand, which, when Dave took it, seemed small and warm and dwarfed in his own. “If you change your mind, come back. As long as I have 66 you’ll have work—but not if you give a damn.”

  She went into the hotel, and Dave watched her straight proud walk. She’s an Injun, and she’s headed for trouble, he thought, and, oddly, he admired her. She had taken her beating without flinching, but she was going to fight back. Walt Shipley had been only the deciding factor in her decision, and the logical coldness with which she planned revenge was the measure of her spirit.

  Dave went down the steps to the corner. He saw Jim Crew crossing the street to the Special, and he waved and Crew waved back. Turning down the cross street toward the bank, he looked at the town with that feeling close to nostalgia which a man feels for a place that has witnessed a turn in his life. Signal was a drab little cow town, and yet it was more than that. He thought of Connie’s offer, turning it over once more in his mind. No, it wasn’t for him. Some obscure, unexpressed code of ethics had never let him admire a man who fought without passion behind him. And Signal Bench, after helping him, had let him alone. Even Frank Ivey’s cold epithet last night could be forgotten; a man up against three other men did not have to choose his words.

  At the bank Dave received his pay, and came back and crossed the street to Bondurant’s store and settled his bill for the dress goods.

  Again he was on the main street, and now he remembered Jim Crew, to whom he would say good-by. He turned into the Special and saw several men at the bar, among them Red Cates and Frank Ivey and Ivey’s foreman, Ed Burma. Jim Crew stood at the bend of the bar at its far end hunched over a drink. Burch Nellis was busy behind the bar, and when he looked up Dave nodded to him and Burch said “Howdy.”

  Dave passed a couple of men at the head of the bar and was almost alongside Frank Ivey when Red Cates, next to Ivey, half came around and drawled, “Hear your boss lit a shuck.”

  Dave halted and laid his slow gaze on Red Cates. Frank Ivey looked over his shoulder at him, his bold dark eyes arrogant and amused.

  “Did he?” Dave asked.

  Cates looked at Ivey and grinned and glanced back at Dave. “You’ll have to get a new sucker to pay for your drinks now, booze-head.”

  Dave regarded him mildly, said quietly, “I’d go careful, Red.”

  Red glanced over at Ivey and grinned. “Sounds like Shipley, don’t he?”

  “No,” Dave said gently. “He just talked.”

  “So do you.”

  Dave hit him. With his open palm he batted Cates across the mouth, and then stood there, watching the surprise and fury wash into Cates’ face.

  “I don’t even like to talk,” Dave murmured.

  For a still second, Red Cates stood rooted, his hand rising to his face in reflex action, and then he lunged at Dave in blind rage. They met with an impact that shook the room, and Dave slashed savagely at Red’s midriff. Red’s impetus carried them both back, and then Dave wheeled to one side and Red, still going, fell to his hands and knees on the floor.

  He came up, cursing, and Dave, hands at his sides, watched him coolly. Red came in slugging then, swinging great, rounding wild blows. Dave stepped inside his swing and hit Red once in the face, and then Red’s fist hit him in the neck. Red opened his hand and gripped Dave’s neck and spun him around and away from him. The chair tripped Dave and he went over backward into the table and upset it. A cascade of cards and chips showered down over him, and he scrambled to his feet, and this time he went in. It was a cold, savage stalking, and Red hit him twice in the head, and Dave took the blows, and when he was close enough he slashed Red in the face with a turning, driven fist. Red’s head went back and Dave hit him again in the face, and again, and then Red’s knees folded. He wrapped his arms around Dave’s waist and hugged him to keep from falling, breathing in great sobs of air.

  Dave brought up his knee savagely in Red’s chest, and still Red hung on, and now Dave buried a hand in Red’s copper-colored hair and pried his head back and then drove a wicked, down-driving smash into Red’s face. He felt the shock of the blow across his knuckles and he felt Red’s nose mash under his hand, and then Red’s hold loosened. Dave stepped back, and Red, with nothing propping him up, dropped on his face. The sound of his head rapping the floor was a dull heavy sound, and a man back at the bar cried out involuntarily.

  Red did not move, and Dave stood watching him, feet planted wide apart, breathing deeply. It was apparent to every man in that room that Red Cates, from the moment he lunged at Dave, had never had a chance, and that knowledge held them mute.

  Dave’s wintry glance lifted to Frank Ivey, and they looked at each other a long moment.

  Frank said, “A man would never do that to me.”

  “Or me,” Dave said.

  Ivey pushed away from the bar and came over to stand above Red. His blocky body was motionless, save for the foot with which he tried to toe Red over and failed. His gaze, bold and speculative, rose to Dave now, and his square stubborn face, brown and smooth and underlaid with heavy muscle, altered faintly into a curiosity.

  “You joined up with the wrong outfit,” he murmured. “That’s a pity.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s too late now. You’re drifting.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” Ivey said calmly. “We decided that. No man who ever worked for an outfit that talked sheep is hired here. We told Leach and Harvey. So now you go too.”

  “When I’m ready.”

  Ivey shook his head. “Remember,” he said mildly, and turned to two of the men at the bar and demanded help in a quiet, imperative voice.

  Dave picked up his Stetson and put it on and tramped out of the bar. Stopping on the boardwalk just beyond the door, he laid his glance along the street and gi
ngerly felt his knuckles. He heard a man come out of the saloon behind him, and also heard the footsteps cease, and he looked back over his shoulder to find Jim Crew, shoulder against the door jamb, watching him. Crew’s chill gaze held a feeling Dave remembered. He had seen it before, when Jim Crew had put him to bed those nights, and it was pity. It angered Dave now and deepened a growing obstinacy within him.

  “That’s one way to make a man take out a homestead here,” Dave murmured.

  “But there’s lots of country other places,” Crew observed.

  “You too?”

  “Oh, no,” Crew said quietly. The look of pity was still there. “It would just save trouble,” he murmured.

  “Who for?”

  “Both of us.”

  Dave said, “Well, you get paid,” and turned, but not toward the livery stable. The buggy he had brought up to the hotel was still there, and he headed for it.

  Approaching the veranda he saw Connie Dickason coming down the steps, and when she saw him something in his bearing made her pause. She stood on the second step, and Dave came up to her and stopped and said, “That job still open?”

  Connie nodded.

  “You got a foreman,” Dave said.

  3

  Dave took the grade road out of Signal, and presently, a mile or so beyond, he left it and headed out across the flats toward the Federals. Later in the morning, when he had achieved the foothills, he stopped to blow his horse and looked back at the Bench. Its rich carpet of grass, the edges ragged where the black foothills timber knifed into it, stretched deep to the south. Over against the foothills, in the direction of Frank Ivey’s Bell, a tall dust-devil reeled slowly into the foothills, and was broken. Ben Dickason’s D Bar lay out of sight behind a tawny ridge that jutted deep into the Bench as far as American Creek, and lay between him and Bell; and over the ridge too, but far to the east, was Circle 66. This north end of the Bench was poor graze; from here a man could see why, for the grass lost its color even under the morning’s gray sky and the land broke more sharply into mottled rocky upthrusts. This was the country of the small outfits like Circle 66, but there was this difference between them; a man could reach out here for miles, and get only a hardscrabble range. Circle 66, at the far end of the Bench, would reach out into the real grass that these ten-cow outfits would never have.