Still he hesitated, wondering if this was the day the smoldering trouble would break into flame. He shrugged his shoulders and crossed the street, hoping there would be no trouble with these men who were his neighbors and had been his friends. But friendship was too often a transient thing, and lately he’d had a feeling that trouble with these men was inevitable.
The wind was still blowing, although it was not gusty and dust-laden as it had been a few minutes before. Neal tugged at his hat brim, setting it more firmly on his head so the wind wouldn’t send it rolling down the street. The last thing he wanted to do was to run after his hat in front of the men who were sitting on the bench of the Signal Butte Inn.
As it was, he felt their eyes on him before he reached the boardwalk. If they jumped him, he’d have a hell of a fight on his hands. Ben Darley was the man he wanted, not Tuttle or Sailor or any of the other farmers who were eyeing him with cold malevolence.
Neal felt the weight of the gun in his pocket, but he couldn’t use it on these men, even in self-defense. They hated him, but it was a kind of childish hatred, as if he had deprived them of candy that had been dangled in front of them for weeks.
Neal was directly in front of Tuttle when the man said: “Clark.”
Stopping, Neal looked down at the man. He said: “Well?”
He had made a mistake crossing the street here. It had been an act of bravado. He hadn’t wanted Tuttle or any of them to think he was afraid. Now he realized he should have kept his mind on Ben Darley and let Tuttle and his friends think what they wanted to.
Tuttle let the seconds ribbon out, then he said: “I hear Jud Manion has joined our club, and him claiming it would be different because he was your friend. I wish to hell he’d have drilled you. We heard the shooting and figured he had.”
The time when Neal could have reasoned with them was long past, so he didn’t try. He said: “I guess that’s the way you would have liked it.”
He would have gone on if Vince Sailor hadn’t jumped up and grabbed his arm. He was a tall, jaundiced-looking man, so thin that the old saw about having to stand up twice to cast a shadow was used repeatedly to describe him.
Neal jerked free from the claw-like hands as Sailor said: “Maybe we could get a loan from the bank if we wore boots and a ten-gallon hat like you do, but we’re farmers, Clark. Is that why your bank won’t loan us any money?”
“No, Vince,” Neal said. “You know it isn’t.”
“I ain’t so sure, Moneybags,” Sailor said contemptuously. “It’s too bad for us that the only bank in the county is run by a son-of-a-bitch who thinks nothing is important but cows. Ninety-five percent of the people in this county are farmers. Are you too bull-headed to admit that?”
“No, I’ll admit it,” Neal said.
This accusation that he was a cowman and was prejudiced against farmers was a fiction that Ben Darley had built up in the minds of all the farmers and most of the townsmen. Sam Clark had been a rancher before he was a banker, and Neal had run the Circle C for years before he had taken the bank over, so he habitually dressed like a rancher because he was more comfortable than he would have been in a sedate business suit such as Henry Abel wore. These were the facts that Darley, skilled operator that he was, had played upon successfully.
Neal knew there wasn’t the slightest use to deny anything or explain his position. He had attempted too many times and had not been believed, so he tried to go on, but Tuttle grabbed his arm just as Sailor had a moment before. He was set for trouble and nothing else would satisfy him.
“Listen to me, you bastard,” Tuttle said. “You wouldn’t lose a nickel loaning us money, but you’re so damned afraid that one of us will amount to something in this county you won’t . . .”
Neal jerked free. “You’re pushing, Alec. You’re pushing too hard.”
Tuttle laughed. “I’m just starting to push, mister.” And he swung.
Sensing this was coming, Neal ducked Tuttle’s wild blow and drove a straight right squarely to the point of the big farmer’s chin, knocking him off the walk into the street. Neal jumped back and whirled, expecting the men on the bench to rush him. They would have, he thought, if they hadn’t seen Joe Rolfe coming along the walk. So they sat there, sullenly silent except for Sailor, who called: “Kill him, Alec! Kill the son-of-a-bitch!”
Tuttle got to his feet and shook himself, cursing. He came at Neal with both fists swinging, a powerful man, but an awkward one. Neal knew how to handle himself, for he had done his share of fighting when he was younger, even taking boxing lessons from a drifter who was riding the grub line but had been a professional in his younger days. Neal cut Tuttle down as efficiently as if he were using an axe on a pine tree, a right and then a left, and Tuttle was on his back again.
“Get up, Alec,” Sailor begged. “Get up, damn it. You can’t let a man who sits on his rump in a bank all day lick you like that.”
Tuttle tried. He struggled to his hands and knees, looking up at Neal, blood running into his mouth from his nose. He licked his upper lip, spat out a mouthful of blood, and lunged forward, big arms spread. The very weight of his charge carried him into Neal. A right to the side of the head didn’t stop him. Neal stumbled back, Tuttle’s arms around his middle, hugging him as he tried to squeeze breath out of him.
Still retreating, Neal stayed on his feet as he supported almost the entire weight of the big man. For a moment he was afraid he was going down. If Tuttle got him into the dust of the street, it would be a different fight, Tuttle’s kind of fight. Neal had seen him whip too many men to want any part of it. He hit Tuttle on one side of the head and then the other, but still the heavy arms hugged him, Tuttle’s head shoving hard against his stomach.
The man was like a grizzly. Now the pressure was beginning to take its toll. Neal couldn’t breathe. Red devils danced in front of his eyes. In desperation, he brought his right fist down squarely on the back of Tuttle’s thick neck, a blow that might have killed a lesser man.
Tuttle’s grip went slack. Neal stepped back and let the man fall facedown into the dust. He lay motionlessly. Neal looked at the men on the bench; he heard Vince Sailor’s bitter cursing, then he turned to Joe Rolfe.
He said: “I hope he broke his damned neck. You holding me, Joe?”
Rolfe knelt beside Tuttle and turned him over. He stood up, his face gray as he shook his head at Neal. “Not this time,” he said. “Go on before somebody else tries to whip you.”
Neal swung around and strode on to the Mercantile, more thoroughly convinced than ever that only Ben Darley’s death could bring peace back to the Deschutes.
Chapter Three
Neal’s face showed no marks, but his ribs hurt from the pressure Tuttle had applied to his sides. The thought occurred to him that Darley might have put Tuttle and Sailor up to starting the fight. Darley claimed he needed only a few more thousand dollars to start work, and he blamed Neal because the money had not been raised. If Neal were killed in a street brawl, Darley would be free of his principal opponent without raising a hand.
At the foot of the stairs that led to the office rooms over the Mercantile Neal met Tuck Shelton. He paused, not sure whether this was trouble or not. After Jud Manion had pulled a gun on him and Tuttle had started a fight, he could expect anything.
Shelton stopped, his pale blue eyes on Neal. He was a strange man, silent and withdrawn. He was average-looking, average-size, the kind of man who never seemed to warrant a second glance. He was younger than Darley by a good ten years. When he did speak, which was seldom, his voice was soft and inoffensive. From the first Neal had wondered how Shelton fitted into the irrigation scheme, for Darley had done all the work.
“Looking for me?” Shelton asked, smiling as if he had some secret knowledge that was not known to Neal.
“No,” Neal answered. “I want to see Darley.”
“He’s in the office,” Shelton said, and went on.
Neal stared after him, thinking that Darley claimed his p
artner was the real brains of the company, but Joe Rolfe, who was a good judge of men, had another idea. “Watch out for Shelton,” Rolfe had said. “He’s hiding behind that easy way of his. He’s got the eyes of a killer. I’m guessing that’s what he’s here for, if Darley needs any killing done.”
Neal had been surprised at that, then suddenly it struck him that he had never actually noticed the man’s eyes. After that he had. They were strange eyes, with too much white like the eyes of an outlaw horse. At times Neal had surprised him by staring at him; his face had turned bitter.
But now as Neal climbed the stairs, he realized he had never learned anything from Shelton’s expressions. Usually they held as little feeling as if they were made of glass. He put the man out of his mind. Darley, not Shelton, was responsible for what had been happening in Cascade County.
Neal’s quarrel was not with Jud Manion or Tuttle or Sailor. They had simply been carried away by Darley’s glowing promises. If he could show them what the man was, their attitude would change. But how could you prove anything to people whose minds were closed?
At this moment Neal did not have the slightest idea how to answer that question, and he doubted his own good sense in coming here. Darley was too slick to attempt to use a gun. No matter how much Neal wanted to kill him, he knew he was incapable of killing any man who refused to fight.
Well, he’d come too far to back out. He paused in the hall, staring at the black letters on the glass half of the door: DARLEY AND SHELTON DEVELOPMENT COMPANY. It looked solid and dependable, just as the brochures did that had been spread all over central Oregon with pictures of Darley and the lakes he intended to tap for irrigation. The writing was dignified, never flamboyant. The final perfect touch was the blackface type at the bottom of each page: WE ARE HERE TO STAY.
Smart! Plenty smart. You had to say that for them. Shelton might be the brains, or he might be the gunslinger, but there was no doubt about Darley. He was the front, the contact man, the one who did the talking and made all the public appearances and shook hands; he was the substance, Shelton the shadow.
Not once as far as Neal knew had Darley ever made a definite, get-rich-quick promise that could be pinned down as to time and place or percentage of profit. Still, he had consistently inferred that those who invested in his company would soon double their money. Therein lay the man’s skill.
Darley had the appearance of an honest, humble man, the kind people instinctively trusted. He talked glibly about what his project would do for the county and the town, bringing life to a parched desert, creating homes for hundreds of families, making possible the raising of more food for a rapidly expanding nation that was wearing out its best soil. Then he would recite figures about the profits earned by other irrigation projects, invariably picking the most successful ones and overlooking those that had failed.
When he made a speech, Darley always finished with the statement that he and Tuck Shelton were bringing $50,000 of their own money to the project. If the people of the community had faith in central Oregon, they’d raise another $50,000. Work would start on the project the day the company had $100,000 in the treasury, for that was the amount it would take to complete the ditch. He would not, he said, turn a shovelful of dirt until he could assure both the investors and prospective settlers that the project could be successfully completed.
Neal did not believe Darley and Shelton had $50,000 of their own, and he was convinced that more than $50,000 in stock had been sold.
He opened the door and went in, feeling the weight of the gun in his pocket. Now that he was here, having been prompted by a cold-blooded desire to kill a man, he wished he had left the gun in the bank. If Darley did force a fight and Neal killed him, the men outside would never believe it was anything but murder.
He closed the door, glancing around the room. This was the reception room, furnished with several rawhide-bottom chairs, a hat rack, and a desk where Mrs. Darley worked. She served as receptionist and bookkeeper, working for nothing, Darley told the stockholders, because she believed in what the company was doing and wanted to do her part.
Neal would have turned around and left, thinking to hell with it, if Mrs. Darley had not glanced up from a ledger and rose, a smiling, handsome woman in her early thirties.
Now pride would not let Neal go. He stood there while Mrs. Darley moved toward him, her hips swaying a little but not too much, just enough to touch a torch to a man’s imagination without promising anything. Neal had talked to her a few times, and on each occasion she had bothered him because he sensed she was an eager, vibrant woman with keen animal desire.
As he watched her, he was possessed again by the haunting hunger he felt every time he was with her. He was instantly ashamed, for he was completely in love with Jane, who was everything a man could want in a wife.
She held out her hand, and, when he took it, she let it remain longer than necessary in his, asking: “What brings the enemy here?”
“I want to see your husband,” he said.
She stood looking at him, her face quite close to his, her full, red lips slightly parted at the center. Her eyes were dark brown, her hair so black that it seemed to hold a blue tone. She was wearing a brown skirt and white shirtwaist that was buttoned sedately under the chin, a manner of dress that marked her as a very moral and respectable person.
Just as Ben Darley managed to convey the impression he was honest and idealistic, so his wife kept within the bounds of propriety in both her manner of dressing and her behavior. Still, she contrived to let Neal know the respectable-appearing woman was not the real Fay Darley.
“I have a great admiration for you, Mister Clark,” she said. “Everybody in town says you’re wrong about us, but that doesn’t change you. You’re the kind who would go after anything you wanted, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess I would,” he said.
“I’ll tell Ben you’re here.” She started toward the door of Darley’s private office, then stopped and turned her head to look at Neal. “If you went after something you really wanted, I believe you’d get it.”
He liked the way she held her shoulders; he watched the sweep of her firm, perfectly pointed breasts. With an effort he turned to look at the big map on the wall of the proposed project, his throat suddenly dry. He heard her laugh as she went on into Darley’s office, as if she sensed the effect she had upon him and was pleased.
She was gone for several minutes. Neal could hear the hum of talk, but he could not make out the words. He stood there, studying the wall map that showed the Deschutes River, Cascade City, and the Barney Mountain area with the two lakes near the summit. The lakes, he saw, were drawn far larger in proportion to the country around them than they actually were. From the eastern edge of Big Lake a dotted line representing the proposed ditch curled down the slope in a northerly direction.
Beyond the end of the line was the high desert with its tens of thousands of acres of Public Domain waiting to be taken by land-hungry settlers. Water was the only thing that was needed, Darley had said repeatedly. Like many lies that are spoken often enough, it had finally been accepted.
For years Neal had run cattle on the high desert. He knew there were two other factors Darley ignored that would whip the project regardless of the water supply. One was the short growing season. It was short enough here on the Deschutes, but not nearly as short as it was on the high desert.
The second, and this was the one that proved to Neal that Darley was a liar and a crook, was the fact that the ditch had to be built across miles of lava rock, not through dirt that would be comparatively inexpensive to move. The water would have to be carried by wooden or steel flumes because blasting the lava would open up seams through which the water would trickle away.
Neal knew $100,000 would not begin to pay for the miles of flume that would be necessary, a point Darley generally managed to evade. Once, when he had been pinned down in a public meeting, he had answered that he had the right business connections. He could buy met
al fluming, he said, for a fraction of what it had cost the companies that had developed the projects along the river, a statement Neal knew was a lie.
Fay Darley opened the door and walked toward Neal. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting, Mister Clark, but I’m leaving now and there were a few things I had to talk to Ben about.” She put her hands on his arms and pulled him toward her. He felt the pressure of her breasts, he smelled her perfume, and he heard her whisper—her lips were close to his ear—“Be careful. Be awfully careful.” Then she hurried out of the office.
Neal stood rooted there, thoroughly disturbed by what she had just done. He brushed a hand across his face and looked at the sweat on his fingertips, then wiped his hands on his coat, convinced she was a wanton and startled because, knowing what she was, she still affected him the way she did.
He walked into Darley’s private office and stopped, flat-footed.
The promoter was standing behind his desk, a cocked gun lined on Neal’s chest. He said: “I can think of only one reason for you to come here, Clark. It won’t work. I propose to kill you before you have a chance to kill me.”
Chapter Four
For a long moment Neal stood just inside the door of Ben Darley’s private office, the sound of his labored breathing a rasping noise in his ears. He was completely dumbfounded, not even suspecting that Darley owned a gun. Tuck Shelton, yes, but not Darley.
Neal had known Darley as a homely, awkward-appearing man, slightly stooped and plagued by a speech impediment that gave the impression he was pausing often to select the right word for the particular occasion. He appeared to be the exact opposite of the sleek, attractive animal who was his wife, possessing qualities that would have been fatal for many tasks, but were exactly the characteristics he needed to convince people he was humble, honest, and unselfish.
The Man from Yesterday Page 3