“No, thank God,” I said. “I cleaned up what mess there was, here and in the other rooms. Oh, and I brought you two pair of shirts and Levi’s—they’re in the bedroom.”
He smiled then for the first time. “Homecoming presents,” he said. “Three of them.”
“Three? Just the cleanup and the clothes—”
“You’re forgetting the most important. You.”
He took me into his arms again, and I clung to him as tightly as before. He was filled with confused and conflicted feelings, yes, but not about me. That was what mattered, that he loved and wanted me as much as I loved and wanted him. From now on, neither the Colonel nor anyone else was going to keep us apart.
WILL SATTERLEE
It was late afternoon when Seth Jennison finally got around to informing me that Jim Tarbeaux had returned. I chided him for not letting me know immediately so I could have buttonholed Tarbeaux before he arranged transportation with Sam Benson for passage out to his ranch. Still, it was not too late to interview him for tomorrow’s issue of the Banner. Keystone was only a little over seven miles from town, a tolerable round-trip drive.
I left the office immediately and walked the four blocks to the house R.W. and I shared. I often walk to and from work when weather permits, even on hot summer days such as this one. Dr. Phillips says the exercise is good for my heart, which has a slight murmur, and also helps keep my blood pressure at a manageable level.
I hitched up our buggy, raised the hood to protect myself from the sun, and drove out to Keystone. Even though the day had cooled some, I was perspiring heavily when I neared the ranch. As I came around the last turn in the dusty wagon road, a lone rider emerged from the Keystone track and cantered off across the prairie. The horse was an Appaloosa, the rider a woman—Mary Beth Greathouse. She had wasted no time renewing her acquaintance with Jim Tarbeaux.
I had not been out to Keystone since George Tarbeaux passed on, and as I expected, the compound had suffered noticeably from its eight months’ neglect. The ranch had never been a showplace, but George had kept it up to the best of his ability after Jim was sent to prison, even after the devastating winter that had cost him half of his small herd. I wondered what Jim’s reaction to its deteriorating state had been when he rode in today.
He came striding from the barn when he heard my buggy rattle into the yard, stopped nearby and stood with his hands on his hips as I set the brake and climbed down. “Mr. Satterlee,” he said by way of greeting, making half a question of my name.
Without being obvious about it, I studied him as we shook hands. Prison had changed him, but perhaps for the better. The last time I had seen him, he was a callow, reckless youth; now he was a man. There was hardness in him, reflected in his eyes and the set of his jaw, but it struck me as the hardness of maturity, not the cold, bitter meanness that prison instills in some men.
“I heard you were back, Jim. I’ve come to tell you how sorry I am about your father’s passing—”
“So am I. More than I can say.”
“—and to welcome you home.”
“You’ll be one of the few,” he said without apparent rancor. “I reckon I’m still a pariah in most folks’ eyes.”
“Not mine. I haven’t changed my mind about your innocence. An opinion I have stated in the Banner and intend to continue stating.”
“I appreciate that.” He said the words through a humorless half-smile, but the expression of gratitude seemed sincere.
My face was streaming sweat; I dried it with my handkerchief, fanned my face with my hat.
“Hot out here in the sun,” he said. “You’re welcome in the house.”
“Thank you, but I won’t stay long. Mind if I ask what you’re planning to do, Jim?”
“About what? The ranch? Rufus Cable?”
“Both.”
“I haven’t decided yet.” He waved a hand that encompassed the rundown property. “Take a lot of time and money to fix the place up. Money I don’t have, no matter what most folks think. All I’ve got is what I came out of Deer Lodge with and that won’t last long. And nobody is likely to give me the kind of loan I’d need.”
“Selling is always an option,” I said.
“Who’d buy it, land and beef prices being what they are?”
“Someone not interested in cattle ranching might.”
“Nesters? No, I wouldn’t sell to one of them. Not after all the work Pa put into this ranch. Ma, too, before she died. And my contribution before Cable gouged five years out of my life.”
“You haven’t seen him yet, have you?”
“No.”
“But you plan to.”
“Eventually.”
“And when you do?”
He showed the mirthless smile again. “I’d like nothing better than to clear my name and make him pay for what he did to me, but I won’t resort to violence to do it. The last thing I want is to spend even one more minute behind bars.”
I believed him. “Well, then, I’ll make that clear in my editorial in tomorrow’s edition of the Banner.”
“Obliged for that, too.”
I would have liked to ask him about Mary Beth, what his intentions were, but I had the feeling he would close up on me if I did. I was not supposed to know about the letters they had exchanged—no one was. It was only by accident that I had learned about them from Etta Lohrman, and I had sworn to her that I would not betray the confidence. Tarbeaux would have been perfectly within his rights to tell me his relationship with Mary Beth was none of my business. We had established a rapport; it would have been a mistake on my part to jeopardize it.
We shook hands again and I climbed back into the buggy. “If there is anything else I can do for you,” I said then, “don’t hesitate to ask.”
“I appreciate that, but I won’t be asking favors. Whatever I do, I’ll do it on my own.”
“Good luck to you, then.”
He nodded. “I’ll need it, Mr. Satterlee.”
“Will,” I said. “My friends call me Will.”
NED FOLEY
I have been tending bar at Occidental House for nigh on ten years now, the Occidental being Box Elder’s premier watering hole and gambling parlor. It has ruby-glass chandeliers, a polished Brunswicke bar backed by gilt-edged mirrors, red satin wall hangings, the best free lunch in town (pickled herring our specialty), and a side room through an archway where customers can play stud or draw poker, or buck the tiger or bet on the red, black, and double O. No percentage girls per se, though we do have what Tate Reynolds, the Occidental’s owner, calls “hostesses” who are of a better class than most.
Our clientele is mostly townsmen, cattlemen, drummers and other travelers passing through. But Tate’s a democratic gent; anybody who has the price of a drink and doesn’t cause trouble is welcome. Nesters don’t come in much, just now and then for a beer or two and usually in small bunches. They keep pretty much to themselves, same as the ranchers and cowhands. Every so often a remark will get passed between the two factions, but there’s yet to be any fighting on the premises. But it’s an uneasy truce, here and everywhere else in the basin. So far cooler heads than Colonel Elijah Greathouse’s have prevailed. For how long is anybody’s guess.
Most days and nights in the Occidental pass without incident. Oh, now and then somebody will take too much liquor and cause a ruckus, especially after the spring and fall roundups when cowhands come in to let off steam and blow some or all of their pay, but not nearly as many as before the Great Die-Up. Skirmishes are few and far between, and sidearms not being allowed within the town limits, there hasn’t been a single incidence of gunplay in my ten years behind the bar. One set of fisticuffs we had was downright amusing, and it didn’t involve locals. A couple of patent-medicine drummers got into an argument one afternoon over which of them sold the best cure-all for a variety of ills and afflictions and would have beat each other unconscious if I hadn’t put an end to it with my bungstarter. The amusing part was, we found out aft
erward that both patent medicines were manufactured by the same company in Chicago and neither of those peckerwoods knew it.
There hadn’t been a whisper of trouble in over two months when Elrod Patch came in Wednesday night at a few minutes past ten. Uh-oh, I thought when I spotted him. He couldn’t have picked a worse night.
Usually Patch does his drinking in the Ace High and the other cheap saloons over in Shantyville, but every now and then he’ll wander into the Occidental. He’s tolerable if more or less sober, but when he’s carrying a load he can be more obnoxious and contentious than usual if anybody so much as looks at him cross-eyed. He was carrying one tonight, judging by his slight stagger as he crossed the room. He was alone, naturally. If Patch had any friends or drinking companions in or around Box Elder, I had never heard of them.
What made the situation problematical was the fact that one of the other customers was Berne Rheinmiller, the young son of a German farmer out on Big Creek. He wasn’t a regular, either; in fact, this was only about the third time I’d seen him, the other two times being when he’d come into town late in the day for supplies. Tonight, though, he’d been here for over an hour nibbling on schnapps with a Norwegian his age named Harald something. He was building up a load of his own—I was about ready to cut him off—and angrily telling anyone who’d listen how Patch had cheated his old man on a deal they’d made for a new plowshare. There wasn’t any question that the story was true. Patch didn’t like nesters any more than Colonel Greathouse did.
The Rheinmiller youngster didn’t see him at first; he was at the far end of the bar, his back turned, talking to Harald. There was plenty of room at the bar—we weren’t all that busy, it being a weeknight—and Patch bellied up near where I was and snapped out an order for beer. That eased my fears some, though not much. As long as he wasn’t drinking whiskey punches, he was a mite easier to get along with.
I poured him a mug and slid it along the bar. The men on either side weren’t crowding him, but they each moved a foot or two anyway to make sure he had plenty of elbow room. One of them, George Petrie, a clerk in the freight office, said something to him, polite. The glare George got in return closed his mouth, decided him to hurry up and swallow the rest of his drink and walk on out.
Petrie’s place was taken by the new printer at the Banner, Artemas Jones. He’d bought a beer and introduced himself when he first came in. Affable gent, more so than most rolling stones. It was unusual for one of his breed to patronize the Occidental, their drinking and gambling being pretty much confined to the same Shantyville saloons Patch frequented, but this fellow had money in his pocket—poker winnings from the last place he’d worked, he said. He’d been playing stud at Pete Ryan’s table in the gaming room the past couple of hours, looking to fatten his stake.
“Another beer?” I asked him.
“One for the road.”
I kept one eye on Patch as I drew it. His glass was mostly empty and he was squinting at himself in the mirror, his head haloed in smoke from one of the three-for-a-nickel stogies he favored. The smell of it was as potent awful as Indian kinnikinnick, strong enough to overpower the combined odors of better tobacco, beer, sawdust, sweat, and the hostesses’ perfume.
“How’d you make out?” I asked Jones when I served him.
“Lost most of what I had. Thirty-two dollars.”
“Too bad.”
He shrugged and said philosophically, “Easy come, easy go.”
Patch guzzled the last of his brew, licked foam off his mustache, and called for a refill. In a loud voice, this time.
And that was when the trouble started.
Berne Rheinmiller turned around at the sound of Patch’s voice, peered his way, then smacked his empty glass down on the bar and came stomping over. His first mistake was laying a hand on Patch’s shoulder and pulling him around. His second was half shouting, “You damned crook!”
It got quiet in there all of a sudden, real quiet. Seemed like everybody froze, too, as if like Lot’s wife they’d all been turned into pillars of salt. The only one who moved was me. I started edging over to where I kept my bungstarter handy under the bar.
Patch jerked the kid’s hand off, glowered blearily at him. “Who you callin’ a crook?”
“You cheated Hugo Rheinmiller yesterday, shamed him.”
“I never cheated nobody.”
“Four dollars extra you tried to charge for the plowshare, then you stole a dollar from him—”
“Stole! Like hell I did.”
I said, “Take it easy, gents, no trouble now,” but neither of them paid any attention to me.
“Who the hell are you, kid?” Patch said. “Kin to that Heinie out at Little Creek?”
“Berne Rheinmiller, son of Hugo.”
“Son of a bitch is more like it, calling me a crook.”
That provoked Rheinmiller into making his third mistake. He lunged and swung at Patch. Patch stayed the blow by catching the youngster’s fist in a huge paw, then shoved him backward into one of the tables. The momentum from the shove twisted Patch into the printer, Jones, who was standing there next to him mug in hand. Beer and foam splattered all over the front of Jones’s sack coat.
He said, “Hey!” and threw his shoulder into Patch—a reflex action, the way it looked. The blacksmith staggered, grunted, and without looking at Jones, swung a beefy arm sideways into his chest and knocked him down onto the brass foot rail. When he landed, I heard one of the spittoons go clanging across the floor. Then Patch let out a bellow and went after Rheinmiller.
It was no contest. The youngster was shaken up from his collision with the table and his coordination was none too good anyway from the schnapps. Patch caught hold of him with one paw and hit him three or four times with the other in quick succession, then picked him up squirming and hollering. He was in such a rage by then that he pulled Rheinmiller into a horizontal stretch across the front of his body, then brought his knee up as if he were getting ready to slam the kid down across it. If he’d done that, bull-strong as he was, he’d likely have broken Rheinmiller’s back.
I vaulted over the bar with my bungstarter, but I banged my knee and it slowed me down. Everybody else was too afraid of Patch to make a move to stop him, all except Jones, who’d hauled himself off the floor still clutching his empty mug. He got there before I did, and just in the nick of time. The Occidental’s mugs are heavy cut glass and the roundhouse swing he made with it slammed into the side of Patch’s head with a sound like a hammer hitting a melon. Patch went down in a heap, Rheinmiller on top of him.
Harald and a couple of others moved then, untangled the youngster, dazed and bloody, and lifted him and sat him down in a chair. Patch didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. His eyes were open, rolled up with most of the whites showing. There was blood on his mouth and a piece of something yellow-black glinting on his chin. The blow must have broken off one of his snaggle teeth.
Jones said, “He’s not dead, I hope.”
I knelt down to check the pulse in Patch’s neck. “Coldcocked, that’s all. Good thing you didn’t hit him any harder.”
Somebody said, “Well, that’s open to debate,” and there wasn’t any disagreement.
Jones and I and two others picked Patch up, carried him out into the alley in back, and laid him on a patch of grass under a half-dead cottonwood. When we came back inside, Harald had taken Rheinmiller away—to Dr. Phillips for treatment, probably. Several customers, myself included, offered to treat Jones to beer and he accepted twice before he called it a night.
“Who is Patch anyway?” he asked me when I brought him the first.
“Local blacksmith.”
“Doesn’t seem to be much liked.”
“He isn’t. Mean and spiteful, if not exactly crooked. You did the right thing hitting him the way you did, saved that youngster from being hurt worse than he is. But there’s something you need to know about Elrod Patch.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s a grud
ge holder,” I said. “Were I you, I’d be real careful to avoid him the rest of your stay in Box Elder.”
R. W. SATTERLEE
Printing day was always a chore. The work was long and hard, especially when there was just two of us to get it all done and the week’s edition out on schedule. Part of my job was to feed the ink roller, so I went in to the office ahead of Dad. Give-a-Damn Jones was already there, resetting a portion of Dad’s editorial, the part dealing with Jim Tarbeaux’s return yesterday, that Dad had written last night.
“Were you able to get a room at the Travelers’ Rest?” I asked him.
“I was. Better lodgings than some I’ve had.”
“What about your horse? Did you sell it?”
“The livery owner bought it for a pittance,” Artemas said. “He didn’t want the saddle, though. Neither did the saddle maker, Rufus Cable. You wouldn’t happen to know anyone interested in buying one, would you?”
“I wish I did, but I don’t. I could ask around.”
“Don’t put yourself out, R.W. The saddle’s not worth much.”
“What’d you do with it? Take it to the Travelers’ Rest?”
“No. Mr. Benson let me leave it at the livery. Maybe I can talk him into paying me a dollar for it before I leave.”
I set to work with the ink. Artemas finished the resetting, ran off a galley of the front page for a final check. Pretty soon he said, “Your father’s editorial is pretty strong stuff.” He ran an ink-creased finger over the dual headlines: Box Elder’s Little Napoleon and below it in smaller type, A Miscarriage of Justice. “He really does have it in for Colonel Greathouse.”
“Yes, he does.”
“This is sure to infuriate the rancher.”
“I know. But Dad’s not afraid of him. Or afraid to speak his mind when he feels wrongs have been done and folks like the settlers and Jim Tarbeaux mistreated.”
“He’s outspoken in his defense of Tarbeaux, but he doesn’t say why he thinks the man was wrongly convicted.”
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