“We’ll find the money on them, won’t we?” Neal asked, leading Redman out of the barn. “They wouldn’t be likely to cache it, and come later?”
“No, sir,” Rolfe said. “This is a place they won’t ever want to come back to. Better put your sheepskin on. It’s gonna get mighty cold if we don’t catch up with ’em before sundown.”
Rolfe took the reins and led the horse around the house. Neal went inside, told Jane what had happened, and kissed her and Laurie. He came out a moment later, wearing his sheepskin and carrying his rifle. Henry Abel was waiting with Rolfe and Doc Santee.
“Stay here, will you, Henry?” Neal asked. “I don’t think there’s any trick to this, but I’d feel better if I know you’re in the house.”
“Sure, I’ll stay,” Abel said, nodding gravely.
Neal mounted and rode east, Rolfe on one side of him, Doc Santee on the other. Once he looked back to wave. Jane and Laurie were on the front porch with Abel. All three waved, then Neal turned and did not look back again.
Jud Manion understood at last, Neal thought. So would the others, but Manion was the one whose friendship he had hated most to lose. But as he thought about it, it struck him there was something which wasn’t quite in place, some little part that didn’t fit.
Then it came to him. He asked: “Joe, where’s Missus Darley?”
“Hell, I don’t know. She wasn’t in their office. I suppose she’s at the boarding house.”
She could be, Neal thought, but he remembered how close to panic she had been that morning, certain that her life was in danger. Then the terrifying thought came to him that Darley or Shelton might have killed her to keep her from talking. They were capable of it, and he didn’t doubt that they would if they knew what she had told him this morning.
He was having his nightmare again, he thought. No, this was real. He could not shake the feeling that Fay Darley had been honest with him and somehow he was responsible for what had happened to her. He tried to put it out of his mind, but the doubt grew until it became a torturing sense of guilt.
Chapter Sixteen
Watching Neal ride away, Henry Abel wondered if it was over at last. He had seen the worry and tension grow steadily in Neal, and now if he could relax . . . But he couldn’t because it wasn’t over and it wouldn’t be over until Darley and Shelton were in jail or dead, and Neal knew for sure who had written the notes and what the intention was behind them.
I should have gone and let Neal stay here, Abel thought. He started to say that, then held his tongue as Laurie went skipping past him and through the door, calling something to her mother.
“We’ve still got to be careful,” he said. “I’m going to stay here till Neal gets back.”
But worry had rolled off Jane’s shoulders. She laughed and shook her head at him. “There’s no need to, Henry. You go on home.”
“To what?” he asked somberly.
Jane understood. “I’ll be glad to have you, if you want to stay. I just don’t think it’s necessary.”
She went into the house, but he stood outside for several minutes, unable to feel the confidence Jane did. He was haunted by a vague worry he could not identify except that it seemed to him danger had disappeared too quickly to be real. But maybe he had overestimated the danger, maybe he listened too much to the idle talk of men like O’Hara and Quinn and Olly Earl when the only real danger had been from Darley and Shelton, and perhaps from Darley’s wife. She was a bitch if he’d ever seen one.
The uneasiness lingered in him even after he went back into the house. He stood in the parlor, listening to Jane and Laurie’s chatter from the kitchen. They were too far away for him to hear what they said, but it wasn’t important. He thought about Neal and Jane and Laurie, and about his own wife, who he was sure he hated. He shook his head. He wasn’t going to think about her now. This was important. He could think about his wife any time.
A moment later Jane went upstairs with Laurie, and, when she came down, she said: “Laurie’s taking her nap. I’m going downtown if you’re going to stay here. I haven’t been out of the house all day.”
“I’m staying,” Abel said stubbornly, sensing that Jane didn’t really want him to stay. She didn’t have any confidence in him for a thing like this. Joe Rolfe didn’t, either. Well, by God, he’d show them. He said roughly: “Jane, Neal said he left a Thirty-Eight revolver on the bureau upstairs. Will you get it for me?”
She hesitated, then said—“All right.”—and went upstairs to her bedroom, returning a moment later with the gun. She handed it to him and went on to the hall door. “I won’t be gone long.” Then she turned and looked at him. “Henry, you don’t think Neal will get hurt?”
“No, there’s three of them. Shelton’s the one they’ve got to look out for. Darley’s just got a slick tongue.”
“I guess they won’t be back for a long time.”
“May be quite a while,” he said, “but Joe Rolfe knows the high desert like you know your front yard. So does Neal.”
She laughed shakily. “Funny how I felt a while ago. Like I’d been all bound up. Tied so I couldn’t move or even breathe. Then when I heard that Darley and Shelton had left town, it seemed like we were free. Like it was all over. But it isn’t for Neal. I guess I’m just selfish, thinking of myself that way.”
“No, you aren’t selfish,” Abel said gently. “Neal’s a very lucky man.”
“Oh, I’m the lucky one, Henry. Well, I’ll be right back.”
He stood at the window watching while she went down the street, walking fast the way she liked to when Laurie wasn’t with her. He’d seen her walking that way along Main Street, or stopping to talk with some other woman in town, her face animated. Neal was lucky, all right. He didn’t know what a bad marriage was, or what it did to a man.
A knock on the back door broke into his thoughts. He crossed the dining room and went into the kitchen, his mind still on Jane. He opened the back door and froze, shocked into immobility. Tuck Shelton stood a step away, a gun in his hand. Ordinarily Shelton’s face was devoid of expression, but now it was filled with a kind of wolfish eagerness.
So it had been a trick! Somehow Shelton and Darley had circled back to town.
Darley must be around here, too. Maybe in front of the house. Abel knew he had to do something. Shelton was alone now. If Abel had any chance, it would be before Darley and Shelton got together.
Abel had been a coward from the day big Buck Shelly had shot him, but he wasn’t a coward now. He thought of Laurie upstairs, and of the notes Neal had received. He stood there, staring at Shelton for a matter of seconds, his thoughts racing. The man wouldn’t shoot because he’d alarm the town.
Encouraged by that thought, Abel jumped back and grabbed for the .38 he had slipped under his waistband. But he was slow. Far too slow. Shelton took one quick step forward and slashed him across the head with the barrel of his gun. Abel went down in a loose-jointed fall, knocked cold.
Shelton holstered his gun. Picking up the .38 that Abel had dropped, he looked at it, then stuck it under his waistband. He stood motionlessly for a time, his head canted to one side, listening, but he heard nothing. He shut the back door and quickly searched every room on the first floor. Finding no one there, he picked Abel up and carried him into the parlor and slammed him down on the couch.
He scratched his jaw thoughtfully, then swung around and ran up the stairs. He looked into the bathroom. Empty. So were the first two bedrooms, but the third wasn’t. Laurie was asleep on the bed.
He retreated into the hall and shut the door. He grinned as he went down the stairs. Abel was beginning to stir. Shelton rolled him onto the floor and dug his toe into his ribs. He sat down on the couch, his revolver in his hand, and waited until Abel sat up, holding his head.
“Got a headache, banker?” Shelton asked.
Abel pulled himself into a chair and sat there holding his head.
Shelton said: “Better answer me.”
“Yeah, I
got a headache.”
“Where’s Clark?”
“Out in the desert with Rolfe and Santee. They’re chasing you.”
“Not me,” Shelton said. “This didn’t work quite the way I planned, but it’s all right. I hid in a closet in the office and left the safe open. Rolfe took one look, and, when he saw the safe was empty, he lit out of there like his tail was on fire.”
“Jud Manion told Rolfe he saw you and Darley.”
“He saw Darley, all right, but not me. The other one was Fay, riding astraddle. Manion must have seen ’em off a piece and mistook her for me.” He scratched his jaw, his opaque eyes narrowed. Finally he said: “Where I missed out was thinking Clark would stay home.”
“I wish he had,” Abel said. “You wouldn’t be sitting there . . .”
“Where’s Missus Clark?”
“She went downtown.”
“When will she be back?”
“I don’t know.”
Shelton was silent for several minutes, then he said: “You kind of like the Clarks, don’t you, banker? You like ’em extra well, seeing as Clark’s your boss.”
“Sure I like them.”
“Now that little girl sleeping upstairs. Be a shame if anything happened to her, wouldn’t it?”
“If you touch her . . .”
“Shut up, banker. You won’t do anything if I touch her. You’d better keep hoping she don’t wake up and start to bawl.” He jabbed a forefinger in Abel’s direction. “I don’t like squalling brats. If she starts yelling, you’d better get upstairs and see she shuts up. If she don’t, she gets hurt. And if you try leaving the house, or try anything when Missus Clark comes in, you’ll get hurt. Savvy that?”
Abel nodded, his head hurting so much he couldn’t think straight. He only knew that being shot eight years ago was nothing compared to the trouble he was in now. And there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Not a damned thing.
Shelton sat on the couch ten feet in front of him, his gun on his lap, a grin on his wild, wolfish face. He’s just waiting for me to make a wrong move, Abel thought, but I won’t do it. I won’t do it.
Chapter Seventeen
Neal rode in silence when they left town. He had no desire to talk. Apparently Joe Rolfe and Doc Santee didn’t, either. They probably felt as he did, a little limp now that it was practically over. It was simply a matter of staying on the trail of the two men until they were found. After all the uncertainty he had been through lately, Neal was sure of one thing. This would prove to everyone in the county that he had been right. The money would be on Ben Darley and Tuck Shelton.
Well, Rolfe would bring in the two men. They’d be jailed and tried and convicted and sent to the state prison at Salem, and that would be the end of the whole business. The money would be returned. No one, unless it was Fay Darley, would be badly hurt except for the broken dreams of greedy men. There would be no quick profits. O’Hara and Quinn and Tuttle and the rest of them would learn again that hard work and patience marked the slow passage to prosperity.
As Neal’s father had said repeatedly, the exceptions are few indeed. But there were other dreams, the solid kind that his father had had that were far more practical than this will-o’-the-wisp thing Darley and Shelton had come up with. Holding back more water on the upper river so there would never be a shortage, a railroad giving downgrade passage to the Columbia, modern sawmills to harvest the pine crop that was ready for the harvesting—these were dreams worth working for and could be attained, with sweat and outside capital. Maybe he could get Stacey interested before he went back to Portland.
Now, with the town well behind them, the narrow road cut eastward through solid walls of juniper; hoofs stirred the deep lava dust. Above them the sun dropped steadily toward the towering peaks of the Cascades, then the junipers began to thin until there was only a scattering of them in the sagebrush and lava ridges that were scabs in the shifting, sandy soil. They reached Horse Ridge and began to climb the road that was hardly more than a trail looping up the slope in long, sharp-turning switchbacks.
Neal had tried not to think about Fay Darley; he tried to keep his mind on the one important fact that the two men who had come close to bringing disaster to Cascade County were ahead. But now, with the sun almost down, he began to worry again. The uneasiness that had been in him when he’d left town had never completely deserted him.
He began thinking of the things that could go wrong. They might not be able to pick up the fugitives’ trail. Both men knew the high desert. At least they had spent a good deal of time at the lakes in the Barney Mountain area. So, knowing the country, they could have taken any of a dozen routes.
If Darley and Shelton did escape with the money, the county’s progress would be retarded for years. With typical human forgetfulness, the men who had invested in the project would blame Joe Rolfe and Neal for letting it happen.
“You figured it would go like this,” Quinn or O’Hara or Tuttle would say, “and you let ’em get clean away. What kind of a lawman are you, Joe?” Or: “You wanted ’em to pull this off, Clark. You had to prove you were right.”
Or it might have been a trick to get Neal and the sheriff out of town. Jud Manion would not have willingly had any part in such a maneuver, but he might have been used. Possibly they had shot at him so he’d do the very thing he had done. Darley and Shelton might have disappeared into the junipers and be headed back to town right now.
Neal could not stand it any longer. When they reined their horses to a stop halfway up Horse Ridge, he demanded: “How are you going to know which way to go, Joe? This is a hell of a big country.”
Doc Santee was looking at Rolfe, too. The same question was in his mind, Neal thought. He had been called out here more than once to tend to a buckaroo with a broken leg or bullet hole in his belly. Invariably he’d ridden back to town alone, guided only by the stars. Like Neal, he knew how it was out here: dry washes, miles of rimrock that looked alike, alkali flats, and a juniper forest that ran for miles and miles, the trees so close together in some places that the only direction a man could see was up, a country where fifty men could lose themselves as easily as two.
Rolfe knew all of this as well as Neal or Santee did, and the doubts showed on his weather-burned face. He said testily: “I can guess what you’re thinking. We’re too far behind ’em to catch up. We didn’t fetch any grub, and there’s no place out here to stock up until we get to Commager’s camp on the lakes.”
“That’s part of it,” Neal said, “but there is a chance they might have circled back. We haven’t been watching for any sign. Chances are we wouldn’t have caught it anyway, with as many tracks out here on the road as there are.”
Rolfe snorted his contempt. “They’re ahead of us. You can count on it. Besides, why would they circle and head back, now that they’ve got the dinero?”
“Those notes I got were plenty of reason,” Neal said. “You forget them?”
“No, I ain’t forgot ’em,” Rolfe snapped. “I thought about leaving you in town, and I would have if there was anybody else I could have brought, but I didn’t figure you’d get boogery like this.”
“You still haven’t explained those notes,” Santee said.
Rolfe’s frayed temper suddenly snapped. “Why, God damn both of you for a pair of chuckle-headed idiots. You know as much about this business as I do and most of the time you ain’t stupid. They wanted Neal out of town and they had good reason. If he hadn’t talked to Stacey when he did, everything would have been different.”
Neal was silent. Whatever he said would be the wrong thing, with Rolfe as sour-tempered as he was. If Jud Manion had said he’d seen three riders, Neal would have been convinced that everything was just as it appeared to be. He didn’t want to think they had killed her, but they wouldn’t have gone off and left her, knowing she would talk. Darley might have dreamed up some excuse for being out here, but he wouldn’t have any chance to make it stick with Fay testifying against him. Neal didn’
t know what to think, so the uneasiness continued to plague him.
Santee, too, said nothing. Presently Rolfe, a little ashamed of his outburst, said mildly: “If we’d hung around town long enough to get rigged out proper like, it would’ve been dark afore we got started. This way there’s a chance we might catch ’em. Darley ain’t no horsebacker.” He cocked his head, glancing at the sun that was resting atop the peaks. “Gonna be dark purty soon. Maybe they’ll stop and cook supper and we’ll see the fire.”
“Not Shelton,” Doc said. “He’s too old a hand at this game, if I’ve got him figured right.”
Rolfe shrugged and started toward the top, with Neal riding beside him. Presently the sheriff said: “I’ve been digging at this in my head ever since we left town. Before that, too. Only one thing you can be sure of. Them notes you got was just a bluff to get you out of town so they could suck Stacey into the deal. I kept thinking Shelton had something else in his noggin, but I reckon he didn’t.”
Neal, remembering the fury he had seen so plainly in Darley when Stacey had arrived, and the unexplainable lack of anger in Shelton, was not convinced Shelton didn’t have something else in mind. Suddenly he knew he had to go back. But he hesitated, not knowing how he could tell Rolfe about the crazy, twisting fear that was in him.
Santee said: “You ducked Neal’s question, Joe. You’re an old hand at this game, but being an old hand doesn’t cut down the size of the country.”
“I thought you’d forget the question, if I got you sidetracked,” Rolfe said. “All right, I’ll tell you the way I’ve got it figured. Darley’s a weak sister. He’ll break. The desert will do that every time to a man who ain’t used to it. You both know that.”
“Sure,” Santee agreed, “but meanwhile we’re riding . . .”
“We’ll head for the lakes if we don’t pick ’em up between here and there,” Rolfe cut in. “It’s my guess we’ll be hunting one man, not two. Shelton will plug Darley and go on with the dinero. I thought we’d get Commager and his men to help. Chances are we’ll have to keep right on going . . .”
The Man from Yesterday Page 12