by Peter Dawson
“Of course you couldn’t know,” she said.
It was then that she sensed how futile these words were, that their talk was merely putting off their parting. It made her uneasy to think that he might sense how reluctant she was to have him go, and now she was trying to find a way of telling him that she didn’t want to delay him when abruptly he said: “Up there I got to thinking, Faith. About you. About your having to go out and bring someone in to straighten things out with Fitzhugh. Seems to me there might be a simpler way of going about it.”
“What way would that be?”
“That’s what stumps me...exactly how to go about it. But there’s the Army wire to Denver. Fitzhugh would certainly let you use it.”
“But for what, Dan?”
“Getting a full description of you from someone the Department knows in Denver. Or....”
“But Laura Reed was too much like me in looks to have that do any good.”
“How about a photograph?”
“A photograph?”
“Why not? There must be one among the things in your father’s wagon.”
She thought a moment. “Old ones, yes. But none recent enough. We did have one taken of the family last Christmas. But Dad didn’t like it. He even threw the proofs away and....”
“Wouldn’t the photographer still have the plate?” he cut in. “Where was this?”
“In Denver. At a place called The Gallery.”
“That’s it, then,” he said. “Have Mike go to Fitzhugh and tell him about it first thing tomorrow. Ask him to telegraph Denver. They’ll go to this place and have a print made up and send it across here, save you the trip out. If Fitzhugh wants, he could even have it brought across by courier. That ought to wind the thing up in short order.”
In this moment, as never before, Faith was realizing what a debt of gratitude she owed Dan Gentry. To begin with, he had given her her very life. As though that in itself wasn’t enough, he had risked his own tonight giving her security for the future where otherwise she would have had none at all. And now as she understood all this a powerful emotion swayed her and she quite deliberately considered something.
Then, because her impulse came from deep within her and was wholly honest, she came closer to Gentry and, tenderly and without reservation, lifted her hands gently to his face and put her lips to his.
His arms lifted, hesitated, then came tightly about her. At once their embrace became a thing she hadn’t intended, the heady and exciting closeness of this man awakening a startling and awesome physical hunger in her she had never before known. She had the strange yet absolute conviction that here was the one man who could ever mean everything to her. And now as she felt the desire about to overwhelm her she leaned back in his arms to say breathlessly: “You have more than my thanks for what you’ve done, Dan. Much more! I wish....”
Her words broke off suddenly as, across the deep regret at his leaving, there struck a thought that made her say in a rush of words: “I’d nearly forgotten! There’s something else, Dan. It’s.... Before you go I want you to know that I don’t think of you as these others are thinking. I haven’t even from the beginning. And now, just tonight, I’ve learned how right I was about you. You see, Dan, I know what really happened.”
“What really happened?” His tone was unmistakably guarded, and the firm pressure of his arms lightened at her waist. “When, Faith?”
“When you lost your men,” she told him. Then, feeling his touch altogether leave her, she hurried on to say: “Mary Fitzhugh told me about it this morning, you see. At first I halfway believed what she said, that you’d disobeyed orders and that perhaps they had a right to do what they did to you. But then this afternoon, getting to know you better, it just didn’t seem possible.”
She hesitated, considering something that made her ask wonderingly: “Have you ever felt that way about anyone? That you...that in such a short time you can know a person really well?”
“What do you know, Faith?”
The brusqueness of his tone jolted her, made her wonder what she had said that had antagonized him. “That you weren’t even with your men when they were trapped in that cañon,” she told him. “That you and....”
He suddenly gripped her arms and shook her ungently. His voice grated harshly as he asked: “Who told you this?”
She winced at the tightness of his grip, not at all understanding this violent reaction in him. “I don’t know who it was,” she replied, her tone awed. “He was someone who came to see Mike Clears right after Ash had gone. But...but what’s wrong, Dan? It meant everything to me to hear what he said. Is it something I shouldn’t know?”
“It’s something no one should know.” He let go her arms, adding in a gentler tone: “Forgive me, Faith. I forgot myself. So Mike knows this?”
“Yes.”
He sighed in a way that eloquently expressed his impatience, saying tonelessly: “Then I’ll have to go back up there with you and see him.”
“But why don’t you want this known, Dan?”
“That’d take a lot of explaining,” came his enigmatic reply.
She was bewildered, upset by his strange behavior. And as she was trying to think of something to say, he took her arm and drawled — “Let’s get this over with.” — guiding her toward the door.
Outside, as they rounded the shed’s corner and started up the alley, he abruptly asked: “Did you think I was leaving for good?”
She looked quickly up at him. “Aren’t you?”
“No. Mike decided it was too risky, my staying in town. Because of the chance of Ash spotting me. So I’m headed up into the hills. Mike’ll know where to find me.”
“Then....”
He must have sensed she was thinking of her having shown her feelings so openly back there a moment ago; for now he told her: “Nothing could drag me away from here now. There’s some unfinished business with Ash. I was letting it go. Now I’m going to see if I can track it down. Maybe I’ll be helping you at the same time.”
His words eased the awkwardness of the moment for her, and he took her arm again, and they went on. Then, as the last of her embarrassment was dying away to leave her thankful and glad once more just to be here with him, he told her quietly: “Someday I’ll tell you the whole story about this other, Faith.”
His promise of sharing with her something so personal, something she doubted he shared with anyone, seemed to seal a strange and exciting bond between them. She was suddenly glad at having shown him so much of what lay in her heart, and as they walked along, his touch on her arm once more roused that strong awareness of him that was so disconcerting but at the same time exciting and welcome.
She was disappointed at their reaching the Lucky Find’s alley-platform steps so quickly, at this abrupt ending of the interval that had brought them so much closer to each other. It was as they mounted the steps that he said wryly: “A man’s sometimes better off without friends.”
She knew what he meant, that he was thinking of Clears. Yet she couldn’t help asking: “Where would I have been without friends yesterday and today...without you and Mike Clears?”
“Now you’re talking of something else, Faith.”
They found Clears at his desk. His head lifted at the sound of the door opening. And as Faith entered the room ahead of Gentry, the saloon man rose from his chair, bursting out in alarm: “Don’t tell me you were outside!” Before she could speak, he went on. “Ralph Blake was just here wanting to talk with you. I went up to your room and knocked. Thought you were asleep when you didn’t answer. See here, Faith, you can’t....”
His words broke off and his jaw hung slack as he saw Gentry come in behind Faith.
“Good Lord!” he breathed incredulously. He grinned delightedly, gladly as his glance shuttled in bewilderment to Faith, then back to Gentry again.
“I know it was w
rong to go out,” Faith told him. “But I’d heard what Ash said about Dan. I...I had to know.” Clears was still broadly smiling when he said: “You should have called on me. This town’s no place for a woman to wander around alone in.” He was still eyeing Gentry in that disbelieving way as he added: “Friend, you really moved the mountain tonight. Ash said you’d come down with it. I believed him. You’re a damned fine sight for these tired eyes!”
“What was it Blake wanted?”
The abruptness of Gentry’s question made Clears notice for the first time the seriousness patterning his friend’s lean face. Puzzled by it, the saloon man nevertheless said warmly: “Ralph was playing a hunch Faith might know something about Shotwell. He hasn’t a thing to work on so far.”
Faith saw Gentry’s glance come around to her. After realizing that he wanted her to answer Clears’s question, she told them: “Shotwell kept pretty much to himself. All I know is that he has a wife back in Missouri. He was going back there this summer.”
“Blake knows about the wife,” Clears said. “He found a letter from her in the poor devil’s wallet. But the letter, along with a woman’s picture and around a hundred dollars in gold in Shotwell’s pockets, is all he has to....”
“Where did the hundred come from?”
Gentry’s words, sharply spoken, startled Clears almost as much as his friend’s inexplicable seriousness. So now he bridled: “How would I know where it...?” Abruptly he caught Gentry’s meaning, and his eyes came wider open. He said in an awed way: “Damned if I’d thought of it! Why would he borrow from me when he had all that?”
Gentry remained silent, and after a long moment Clears asked patiently: “What do you make of it, Dan?”
“Someone got to him before Fitzhugh saw him last night.”
“Bribed him?”
Nodding, Gentry drawled: “To lie about the hardware.”
Clears whistled softly, eloquently. “Caleb?” When Gentry nodded, Clears asked gravely: “But how do we prove it?”
“Let Blake do that.” Gentry spoke with an odd impatience. Then, as Clears was again wondering what lay behind his friend’s manner, Gentry said bluntly: “Faith tells me someone beside Ash was down here tonight saying things about me, Mike.”
An instant wariness shrouded Mike Clears’s expression now as he leaned back against a corner of the desk. And Gentry, after waiting a moment for the man to speak, asked coolly: “Who was it?”
“Ben Qualls.”
“How much does he know?”
Clears shrugged. “Enough to make an awful liar out of you, brother. Enough to reopen the courts-martial hearings.”
“Get him in here.” “Don’t worry, Ben won’t talk.” Clears regarded his friend in a faintly amused way, shortly asking: “Why in the name of God did you let them kick you around the way they did?”
Gentry’s look was one of unconcealed anger now, and Faith, trying to puzzle out the meaning of their words, knew only that Gentry for the moment seemed on the defensive, an attitude she sensed must be foreign to him.
Then he was saying, a cool edge to his voice: “You’ve got the name for minding your own affairs, Mike. Don’t ruin it.”
The saloon man’s face reddened. Nodding sharply to indicate Faith, he asked: “Do you want her to hear this? Because I’m going to say some things you won’t like.”
“Say ’em!”
“All right, here they are.” Clears drew in a deep breath, went on. “You’re far and away the best man they’ve ever had up there at the fort. Yet you’ve let them crucify you for something you didn’t do. I’m not going to let it happen.”
“No?”
“No!” Clears echoed explosively. “Because I think I know why you did it. You did it for Fitzhugh. Threw everything overboard, ruined yourself to save the feelings of an old man who’s damned close to slipping into the grave this very minute.”
Reaching back to his desk, the saloon man picked up a small lavender envelope, gesturing with it as he went on: “Here’s proof of that! A note from Missus Fitzhugh she sent down here an hour ago. Fitzhugh’s had a setback today. Doc Spires doesn’t know but what it’ll turn into pneumonia. She wanted me to get the word to you if you were still around. Suppose he dies? Where does that leave you?”
Those words had brought Gentry across the room and now he took the envelope from Clears, pulled a sheet of paper from it, and glanced at it. The saloon man waited until he was sure Gentry had read the last daintily penned line before he repeated: “Where does it leave you?”
Gentry ignored the question. “This is all you know about the major?”
“Yes.” Clears watched as his friend tossed the letter to the desk. Then he said in a gentler tone: “I knew young Fitzhugh, knew him better than I wanted to. He was down here dead drunk more nights than I care to remember. So out on his feet I usually had him carried to that shed out back to sleep it off. To keep his father and that pretty wife of his from knowing what a no-good he was. So someone besides you has tried to save the major’s feelings.”
Gentry said quietly: “That was white of you, Mike.”
“Don’t thank me for something I’m sorry now I did, Dan. Now I wish I’d hauled him up there and dumped him on the Old Man’s doorstep! Then Fitzhugh would have known what a maverick he whelped. Then you wouldn’t have needed to whitewash the lily-livered coward by....”
“No one whitewashed him,” Gentry cut in. “He died with an arrow in his back, died fighting.”
“How do you know?” Clears asked intently. “How do you? You weren’t even there.” He paused, and when Gentry gave no answer, he went on: “It was young Fitzhugh who disobeyed his father’s orders, not you. You’d never have taken your men down that cañon when Sour Eye attacked.! Would you? Hell, no! They wound up dead because of young Fitzhugh, not you.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Gentry said. “No one can. Because every man who could tell what happened is dead. All but McCune. And he’d never talk.”
“No, Tim wouldn’t. Nor can I be dead sure of anything. But I can make my guesses from what Ben found out today.” Clears eyed his friend closely. “Where were you and McCune, Dan?”
Gentry’s glance went to Faith now and he smiled ruefully as he told her: “You’re getting the story sooner than I’d expected.” His glance shuttled back to Clears then. “We were there, Mike. But only when the scrap began. Out there on the flats before the column took to the cañon. We’d found ourselves a defensible position, a knoll rimmed with rock. There was even a hollow up there where it was safe to hold the geldings, our own and the new remounts.
“We were holding off the Apaches nicely when this hunk of lead grazed my temple. That’s the last I knew till hours later, after dark. McCune had hid me in between some boulders, had stayed with me on Fitzhugh’s orders. We hoofed it into the cañon and hid some more while the hostiles prowled around. Then finally we found the men.”
Clears remained silent over a considerable interval, awed by what he had heard. At length he breathed acidly: “So it was young Fitzhugh, after all?”
“Yes. He was next in command,” Gentry admitted wearily. “He was green, he lost his head. Maybe....”
“He knew his father’s orders, didn’t he?” Clears cut in. “Knew what a trap that box would be?”
“A man forgets at a time like that.”
“The hell he does! Not a soldier!” Clears glanced at Faith in apology for his profanity before he added disgustedly: “So you took the blame for that yellow-belly’s fool mistake!”
“Listen, Mike,” Gentry pleaded quietly, “they’d have held an investigation on it anyway. Don’t forget, the whole idea of bringing those remounts from Fort Starke was mine. I’d hounded Fitzhugh with it till he had to give in. Remember, he was down sick at the time. And even if Phil Fitzhugh hadn’t gone down that cañon, we’d still have lost some men. Pr
obably all our animals, too. It would sooner or later have come out that I was using the Army to work off a grudge against Ash. I was. That meant I was no longer worth my keep as an officer.”
“That wasn’t it, Dan. You were trying to keep Ash from robbing the Army.”
Gentry shrugged and shook his head. “We could argue it all night and never settle a thing, Mike. But I’ll tell you this much. When it’s...when the Old Man’s passed on, they can review the case. Maybe they’d give back the commission and call it quits if I told everything. If I want it, Mike. I’m not yet sure that I do.”
“Any day,” Clears said dryly.
“Put you in my place and you’d have done exactly the same,” Gentry said. “Just think it over.”
“But....”
Mike Clears checked his words, glancing helplessly at Faith in the hope she would say something to bolster his argument. But he was jolted to see her staring at Gentry tenderly and in outright admiration. And now for the first time he wavered in his stubborn reasoning. Faith’s look making him halfway grasp the logic and generosity of Gentry’s act.
So at length he said quietly: “Maybe I understand, Dan. But I’d feel better about it if you’d agree to let me take the whole thing up there after...Fitzhugh’s passed on.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll agree to do that myself.”
“Fine, Dan. Fine,” Clears said with considerable relief. “So you’ll hear no more about it from me. Except for one thing. Is there anything I can do now to help?”
Gentry considered that, finally saying: “If you play this my way, you’ll wind up with Ash on your neck.”
“What if I do?” Clears bridled. “After tonight he’s on my neck anyway. Go on, tell me what you want me to do.”
“You know where I’m going,” Gentry said. “You’re to keep me posted on Major Fitzhugh, for one thing. And there’s something you can do for Faith.”
“Name it,” Clears drawled.