Milo Talon

by Louis L'Amour

  She, on the other hand, tried to guide the conversation around me and had a good bit more luck.

  I told her nothing about my mother, Em Talon, who had been born a Sackett, but a little about Barnabas, my well-educated brother. She found out that I’d punched cows, had ridden shotgun for a stage-line, and was a deputy marshal for awhile. I told her about horses I’d known, a wolf that followed a cousin of mine, a wolf that remained wild but went wherever my cousin did; yet I learned nothing about her, nor did she tell me where she had come from or how she got where she was, nor what impelled her to come here, to this forlorn little town at the end of nowhere.

  That was what worried me most. Why had she come here? Was it really circumstances? Or was there some other reason? And why had Jefferson Henry come here?

  Suppose, just suppose there was more to that Pinkerton report than one could see at first study? Had the Pinkertons discovered more than they realized? Had they been taken off the case before they discovered too much? Suppose he had deliberately chosen me because I had what he might think was a doubtful reputation?

  Now, I was no outlaw, but I’d ridden the Outlaw Trail and was accepted in their hideouts. I could go where no peace officer could, and his informants might have suggested that I was a shady character who might be used. Or even set up for something.

  Somewhere in my subconscious there was the will-o’-wisp of an idea, something that barely eluded me, something the fingers of my thoughts could not quite grasp.

  For the first time that morning I remembered the quiet step in the hall, the hand that tried the door.

  A stranger who had simply come to the wrong door? Not for a minute could I accept that. He had been too careful. Was he planning robbery or murder? And if murder … why?

  “I shall stay,” Molly said suddenly. “Is it all right if I use the money you loaned me to buy a share of the restaurant?”

  “I’d prefer it,” I said, “and I think you’d be showing uncommon wisdom if you did.” I smiled. “Naturally, if you have the money invested you’ll have a better chance of paying me back.”

  “I don’t believe you even thought of that.” She looked up at me suddenly. “To tell you the truth, I had no idea where to go from here. I was frightened and I still am.”

  “If you start running, Molly, there’s no place to stop. There are old outlaws hiding in the hills whom nobody remembers or cares about. Whatever crimes they committed were long ago and far away, but they are still running.”

  The door opened and briefly was blocked by a dark bulk. I looked up.

  He was a big man, broader, heavier, and thicker than I, with a long, hard-boned face with eyes that were gray and cold. The eyes looked at me, measured me at a glance, then shifted to her.

  I knew at once this was John Topp.

  He seated himself across the room, ordering breakfast. My eyes ignored him, my mind did not.

  Was it only for breakfast? Or was he here to see what I might be doing? His attention lingered on Molly Fletcher and there was a prickling of the hair at the back of my skull. This was a dangerous man.

  Molly was sitting very straight, white to the lips. “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said gently. “He works for Jefferson Henry.”

  When she did not respond, I inquired, “Do you know him?”

  “No. Only—I think I’d better go to my room. I must unpack.” She glanced at me again. “Will I see you? I mean, are you staying here?”

  “For a few days. I’ll be seeing you.”

  She left hurriedly and John Topp did not look around or seem to notice. He was simply sipping coffee occasionally and staring out of the window, yet I was sure he had missed nothing.

  Had it been he who tried my door last night? No, his weight would have made more of a creak. It had been someone else. And this man was no thief. There was something too elemental about him. He was as simple and direct as a boulder rolling down a hill.

  Pushing thoughts of him aside, I considered St. Louis. It would mean several days by railroad to get there and return, days when I did not wish to be away. Despite what might be learned in St. Louis, I felt the focal point was here or in the vicinity.

  It was then I remembered Portis. St. Louis was his town. When not there he revolved in an elongated orbit between there, Natchez, and New Orleans.

  Portis was a man who lived by knowing. So far as I was aware he had not been involved in anything criminal, but I was sure he supplied information to criminals from time to time, and others as well. Including the law.

  What Portis did not know Portis could find out, and he was a friend of mine.

  We had met in El Paso when I had pulled three men off him in an alley. A long, thin man, slightly stooped, he had been an actor, a schoolmaster, a clerk for Wells Fargo, and an occasional journalist. When we talked we found much in common, and I came to like the man as I believe he did me.

  Leaving the restaurant, I crossed to the station and glanced down the track toward the siding. The private car was gone.

  Returning to the hotel I wrote a short note to Portis.

  I need all information pertaining to Harold and Adelaide Magoffin, deceased. Perhaps hotel employees. Left unclaimed luggage. Pier Van Schendel, employee, knows or knew location of luggage. If available I want it here, untouched. PVS permitted papers to be extracted for $20. See what you can do. Immediate attention.

  For the next two days I thought, drew diagrams on paper, reread the letters, and examined the photographs again and again. Then a wire was delivered from the railroad station.

  Lay off.

  My response was almost as brief.

  No chance. Need imperative.

  Portis was a canny man. If he said “lay off” he must have reason. From him such advice was not idle. Nonetheless, I’d no intention of quitting. Yet the advice was puzzling. What was there about searching for a missing girl that might call for such a warning?

  Alone in my room with a chair under the knob, I lay back on my bed with hands clasped behind my head, I tried to think the situation through.

  To find a child missing for all those years would seem to be a straightforward project. The task was one for patience, diligence, and some imagination, and simple enough. Yet nothing about it was proving to be simple.

  Why had the child’s parents not wished to be found? Their only communication that I could find thus far was with two as yet strange people now deceased. Both had been reasonably young, hence the fact of their death left me faintly uneasy. How had they happened to die? How was it that both had died within what must have been a relatively short time? One might die, of course. But two? Such things happened, of course, and possibly I was unduly suspicious.

  Perhaps I was developing a fervid imagination. The gold I was carrying was enough for an attempted robbery, and Molly’s reaction to the picture might be just what she implied. Portis might be simply trying to dodge a job he didn’t have time for.

  The answers might all be simple, but I did not believe it. Something was wrong, all wrong. I had the feeling I was getting myself into something that was none of my business, something that could get me killed.

  What was I getting into? I was no detective. I had no business getting involved in something like this. I was a drifting cowhand who had worked at this and that, and although I had some minor experience as a peace officer, I’d never been involved in anything like this. Several days had passed and I had dipped into my expense money and had gotten exactly nowhere. Perhaps I should have gone to St. Louis myself, but Portis knew that city as I never would, even to the darkest and dimmest recesses of the underworld.

  Yet I was jumpy and restless and I thought I knew why. I was being watched. Why was I watched? To see if I did my job? Or might I be treading on somebody’s toes? Or did somebody want to know what I found out as soon as I found it? Perhaps to move in and take over, eliminating me?

  Right then I wished I could sit down over a cup of coffee at our kitchen table and talk it over with Ma.
My mother, old Em Talon, who had once been Emily Sackett, was one of the shrewdest people I’d ever known. She had a way of getting right to the heart of things. But she was miles away on our ranch in Colorado and whatever I did would have to be done by myself.

  Suppose I saddled up and rode off into the hills? Would I be followed? It might be one way of discovering who was interested in me and in my activities.

  On the other hand, I wanted to be here to pick up that valise from St. Louis, if it came. By this time it might have been stolen, sold, lost, or given away.

  Of one thing I was sure. If the baggage was still there, Portis would find it. Leave it to Portis, I told myself, and take that ride.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT WAS A clear, bright day. The town lay upon a flat with not a tree or a shrub that was so much as knee-high. In the distance the hills lay low upon the horizon, and glancing back toward town, I knew at once I would not be followed. There was simply no way it could be done in that stark and empty land.

  A few miles out from town I found a hollow with a little water in its bottom and some fresh green grass. Ground-hitching my horse, I lay down on the slope to doze a little in the warm sun. Lying on the ground I could hear the sound of any approaching horse.

  For my trouble I got nothing but a little sunshine and relaxation. My horse, however, got a belly full of good grass, which he seemed to appreciate. Nobody made any attempt to follow me, nobody even seemed to know or care that I had ridden out of town.

  Was John Topp left behind to watch me? If so, was he the only one?

  While I lay in the sun, my mind was not idle. With only the sound of my horse crunching grass, it was a good time to think, and slowly I turned every step of the case over and over, trying to reach some conclusion. At the end I was no further ahead than when I began.

  When the train came in I was at the station, but there was nothing for me. Watching the train come in was about the only excitement the town had to offer so I was not alone on the platform.

  At least a dozen people were standing around, and there were several rigs. One was driven in by a rancher who was meeting his daughter, and when she got off the train every male in sight took a couple of steps closer.

  She was something to look at and she knew it. She paused on the step a moment before she stepped down so the women could see what she was wearing, and she lifted her skirt just a little so she could step down easier, which gave the boys a glimpse of what was usually described as a well-turned ankle.

  She glanced at me, quick to spot a stranger of the right age, but my eyes were on the baggage car. Not that I was missing anything, because I was standing where I could see both at once.

  John Topp was there, seated on a bench against the wall of the station, his face revealing no interest in anything. Noting the size of the man and his hands, I made a mental note to be careful. Mr. Topp would be a rough package to handle. He looked as strong as a bull and just as determined. He seemed totally unaware of my existence and I hoped it would stay that way.

  When the train pulled out the loiterers wandered back across the street to the stores or saloons. The saloon I chose was a squalid place with a fat bartender with heavy-lidded, piggish eyes. He provided the beer I asked for, then returned to the other end of the bar and hoisted his bulk on a stool and buried his face in a huge sandwich.

  Three men, one of them a Mexican vaquero, sat at a nearby table beside the cobwebbed, flyspecked window. They were drinking beer and talking in a desultory way, and without much interest. It was cooler here than out in the street where their horses switched their tails at the flies.

  “Nowhere,” one of them said, “they went nowhere. They only sat. Even in their car it must have been hot. And the wind? There was always the wind. Day after day they sat there and nobody moved except sometimes to sit in the shade of the water tank. They are crazy, I tell you! Crazy!”

  “Hah! You call them crazy? Who sleeps in a dirty bunkhouse? Who follows the cattle? Is it him? He lives in a car like a mansion! He eats of the best! He has to drink what he wishes! And you call him crazy?”

  “If I could live like that I would not be where the heat is and the wind. I would live in a town! And they just sit there, day after day, and do nothing!”

  “I think they wait.” The silent one spoke quietly. “I think they wait for something or someone. I think when that somebody comes, they go.”

  “They did not go. They came here,” the first speaker replied. “Here! You think that is not crazy? What is here?” He swept his arms in a wide gesture. “Nothing is here, yet here they stay for more days, just waiting.”

  “The car is gone,” the quiet one said, “but the big one is still here.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He sits. He walks along the street and comes back to sit some more. He does nothing.”

  They were silent and I took a swallow of my beer. The vaquero looked up and caught my eyes on them. I lifted my glass. “Luck!” I said.

  He looked into his empty glass and shrugged.

  Motioning to the bartender, I said, “Beers for the gentlemen.” To them I said, “I have had good luck. An old debt … sixty dollars paid me. Two months’ wages!”

  Reluctantly, the bartender withdrew his face from the sandwich and served the beers. I took mine and joined them. “For three days I shall sleep, I shall eat, and I shall watch the trains come and go. After that I’ll look for a job. Or maybe I’ll drift.”

  “It is good to loaf sometimes, but you will find no work here. The cattle are gone, but for a few. It is sheep,” one of them said with disgust.

  “There is money in sheep,” the quiet one commented. “You butcher a steer, he is gone. You clip the wool from a sheep and he is still there. Do not speak lightly of the sheep.”

  “The one who had the car? Was he sheep or cattle?”

  The vaquero shrugged. “I thought he was with the steam cars, but I do not know. He bought no stock, and from over the hill where I was holding some horses on the grass I could see him well.”

  “I hear he had no visitors.”

  “Hah! So you think!” The vaquero leaned across the table. “I know! Two! Two visitors he had and both by night. They did not come together, but each rode up in darkness, very quietly. When each came to the door there was a moment of light when the door opened, that was all.

  “Each rode alone. Each rode in the night. It was four days after the first came before the second arrived.”

  “It has an odor,” the quiet one said. “Why only in the night? Is the man in the car a thief?”

  “There were no others? Only two?” I asked.

  The vaquero shrugged, then hesitatingly, he added, “There was another night when I heard something. My dog was with the horses and he was restless. When something worries him, I know it. I suspected wolves, but I saw none. I saw nothing. But the dog … the dog was worried.

  “I went back to lie down. All was still. Then I heard it in my ear. A man running.”

  “A rider?”

  “No rider. A man running. Running very fast, very frighten.”

  “Running? Where would a man run to, Pablo? There is no place. It is all wide open.”

  “It was a man running,” Pablo insisted. “I know what is a man running. It is not a horse. It is not a sheep or a cow. It is a man … running hard.”

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  The scoffer shrugged. “That’s a question! A man could run for a day and come to nothing. Bah! You were dreaming!”

  “The scream was not a dream,” Pablo said.

  We all stared at him.

  He stared back. “That was later. There was a scream. A single scream. I heard it.”

  “An animal,” one said, “a mountain lion, perhaps.”

  “Another beer?” I suggested. “Soon the money will be gone but while it is here … drink!”

  We drank solemnly and were friends. Nor did they speak again of the car or of the man running. We talked of catt
le and horses, of saddles, ropes and spurs, and two of us had ridden in brush country, and we spoke of that, making the stories greater for the benefit of the two who knew no better.

  After awhile I arose and left them. Later, on the street, I saw Pablo, the vaquero. “A strange thing,” I said, “a man running out there, and the scream.”

  He was rolling a cigarette. “The scream was a man,” he said. Delicately, he touched his tongue to the cigarette paper. “It was a man in pain, very much pain.” He glanced at me. “Once, during the revolution, I have heard such a scream.”

  He lit the cigarette. “The scream. I think it comes from the man who was in the cars.”

  “Cars?”

  “There were two. His car and another, a boxcar, always locked.”

  This Mexican, he was not simply talking now. He was talking to me. Very quietly, I said, “Pablo, we need to talk, you and I, but not here.”

  “I am with the horses, perhaps one more week. It is east and somewhat north. An hour or so of riding.”

  “I shall come.” I turned away, then hesitated. “Pablo? Be careful.”

  “Si.” He brought a glow to the tip of the cigarette. “I heard the man scream.”

  Seated over coffee at Maggie’s, I thought about that. If a man had been running there might still be tracks. There might be more than tracks. If anything had been left it might be long before it was found. After all, this was not a place where men rode.

  “Jefferson Henry,” I told myself, “I am beginning to wonder about you.”

  CHAPTER 5

  AT DAYBREAK I went down the street to Maggie’s. The horizon was lifting yellow into the sky, but in the west a few laggard stars remained stubbornly in place. My boots echoed on the boardwalk.

  One light showed from the station where the dispatcher was already at work. The only other lights were in the hotel behind me and at Maggie’s, which was ahead.

  The single street opened to the prairie at either end, and the buildings along the street were false-fronted or two-storied frame structures. It was bleak and bare, the weather-beaten buildings taking shape from the darkness as the light grew.