by Peter Dawson
He waited for Pleasants to say something. When nothing came, he glanced at Echols. “They had a man behind me. I had the luck to spot him before he could do what he was told, draw a bead on my back. What should I have done, let them take me and either string me up right there or beat my brains out?”
“Let’s stop clawin’ at each other,” Echols inserted impatiently, as though he wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. “We’ll see what the inquest turns up.”
“Which’ll be nothing at all.” Having registered his complete disgust, Lute Pleasants abruptly stalked across the room and went out the door, slamming it hard behind him.
“Sweet-tempered cuss,” Fred Bond dryly observed.
It seemed that Jim Echols hadn’t heard. He sat now with elbows on the arms of his tilted-back chair, chin resting on his clasped hands as he narrowly regarded Rivers. And with the silence weighing more heavily with each passing second, both Kate and Fred sensed the change in his manner and stared at him in growing puzzlement.
Suddenly the lawman hit the desk top a booming blow with fisted right hand. “Now, by God,” he exploded, “we’ll have the truth!”
When Rivers said nothing, the lawman’s glance strayed briefly, angrily to Fred and the girl. “Know who we got here?” he asked tonelessly. “Did friend Rivers tell you he’s just finished getting four years of free board and lodging from the territory?”
Kate’s stunned and bewildered glance swung quickly to Rivers. And Fred Bond breathed sharply—“What’s this?”—as his surprised stare followed his sister’s.
“Go ahead, Sheriff. Get out your knife and hack away,” Rivers said quietly. “But why didn’t you start it sooner, while Pleasants was here?”
“Because I damn’ well want to keep him off my back, not yours.”
Echols’s look had been smug, yet now it changed subtly, his thin face reddened in anger. “Kate, Fred, the governor handed this man a pardon a while back.”
The girl was eyeing Rivers in a mutely appealing way so eloquent of her wanting to believe in him that he was almost, but not quite, tempted to speak for himself. Instead, he said: “Echols doesn’t believe in pardons.”
“Not in this one, I don’t. Tell them how you got it. Tell ’em why you were put behind the bars in the first place.”
“You know the story, you tell it.”
“Don’t think I won’t.” The lawman’s now-furious scowl shuttled to Kate and her brother. “This man was tried and sentenced for life for killing his father. For filling his father’s back full of buckshot in a stage hold-up with another man near Peak City, up north five years ago. How do I know? Because my cousin was driver of the stage. They beat Bill, left him for dead. But he lived. He’s a cripple now, livin’.…”
“That’s not true, is it?”
Softly as she had spoken, Kate’s hushed and horrified exclamation halted Echols in mid-sentence. The girl’s face had lost its color and her greenish hazel eyes showed outrage and disbelief. She was strikingly beautiful now as she eyed Rivers, insisting: “It isn’t, is it?”
“Not a word of it.”
The sheriff snorted scornfully. “Twelve men on a jury thought so, Kate. Bill heard this.…”
“Just a minute, Jim.” The girl’s glance hadn’t strayed from Rivers as she cut Echols short the second time. “I want to hear this from the man who knows exactly what happened.”
Frank Rivers sighed deeply in frustration, for the moment feeling beyond his depth in trying to say anything in the face of the lawman’s barbed antagonism. Nonetheless he stubbornly began: “The night of the killing I was a three-day ride north of Peak City, headed for my homestead up in the Bighorns. That night I camped along a road with a drummer, an old man peddling a wagonload of odds and ends from town to town. The next day, when I turned up at the homestead, they had a deputy waiting to arrest me.”
“Then why would they think you had anything to do with it?”
It was Fred Bond who put the question. And before Rivers had a chance to answer, Echols was speaking for him. “Why? Because Bill, this cousin of mine, heard Rivers’s partner call him by name that night. Not once but twice. The first time it was ‘Rivers’, the next time ‘Frank’. Bill swore to that in court.”
The sheriff looked up at Rivers derisively now. “How much did the two of you get out of that Wells, Fargo strongbox? Twelve thousand in dust, wasn’t it?”
When Rivers only shook his head helplessly in answer, Kate asked hollowly: “Is all this true, Frank?”
Hearing her call him by his given name subtly conveyed to Rivers the fact that this girl, for some inexplicable reason, was still wanting to believe in him. And there was a deep humility in him as he told her: “Yes. That’s the story that came out at the trial.”
“You got a different one?” Fred Bond wanted to know.
Rivers nodded, leaning back against the wall. “Yes. Echols will tell you that my father and I were on the outs, that.…”
“On the outs, you call it?” The lawman laughed dryly. “Fred, him and his old man had come close to a knock down and drag out only three days before this happened. In front of witnesses.”
Once again Rivers nodded. “That’s true. As far as it goes.” He was speaking to Kate now. “My father ran the Wells, Fargo office in Peak City. There was, and still is, a lot of easy money to be picked up working around the diggings. He thought that’s what I should be doing, salting the dollars away. I didn’t. I’d built up this Bighorn homestead and wanted to raise cattle. That’s what our scrap was about.”
Fred Bond said: “Jim, this doesn’t prove a thing. Kate can tell you that the old man and I never saw exactly eye to eye, the good Lord rest his soul.”
“It helped prove something at Rivers’s trial, though,” Echols testily stated.
“It did,” Rivers admitted. “But only because I couldn’t produce my one witness, this peddler I’d camped with the night the stage was held up. Which,” he added dryly, “brings up the question of my pardon our friend here doesn’t like.”
“Who the hell does like it?” The sheriff gave Kate a brief, apologetic glance. “I’m one of maybe half a thousand people that think you bought your way out of prison with the gold you got off the stage that night.”
Trying to ignore those acid words, a rough edge creeping into his tone, Rivers said: “It took my lawyer better than four years to locate that old drummer and bring him back to see the judge who sat at my trial. Once the judge heard his story, he went to see the governor. There was a court hearing and they turned me loose.”
Jim Echols snorted in disgust. “They’ll be arguin’ that pardon up in Peak City for the.…”
“What kind of a hard-headed joker are you, Echols?” Rivers cut in sharply, unable any longer to hold his temper in check. “I spent four years in a stinking hole of a prison because the law made a mistake. Now you sit there making another. What does a man have to do to live down something he never did?”
The sheriff’s face turned livid. He came slowly up out of his chair and leaned forward, hands gripping the edge of his desk. “Listen, you. I was raised with Bill Echols, the same as if he’d been my brother. He’s crippled now, he’ll never walk again. Someone half beat the life out of him. If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. That’s why I came here. You know that.”
Echols suddenly made a chopping gesture with one hand. “The hell with this.” He was furious, trembling as he reached to his pocket and brought out a bunch of keys. Jerking a thumb toward a heavy door set midway the length of the office’s back wall, he said brittlely: “In you go. You’re going to stay locked up till time for the inquest. And my hunch is you’ll.…”
“Jim, none of this is fair,” Kate said in a low voice.
“Fair, Kate? Was he playin’ fair when he beat in the back of Bill’s skull, then caved in his side kickin’ him after he’d fallen into the road off the stage that night?”
D
oggedly the lawman stepped over and pulled open the door of the jail. Nodding curtly, he motioned Rivers to join him. And as the tall man stepped past Kate and came toward him, he backed away and drew the gun from the holster riding his thigh, holding it lined at Rivers.
As the two disappeared into the jail, Kate asked in a hushed voice: “What’s come over him, Fred? It isn’t like him to kick a man when he’s down.”
Fred Bond sighed, answering as unconcernedly as he could: “We’ll have a talk with him when he comes back out.”
They waited, hearing the rattle of a cell door being unlocked in the jail, hearing the door clang shut, and the key being turned again in the lock. Then Jim Echols reappeared and pushed the heavy oak door of the jail shut, locking it with a big key.
“Jim, let’s cool down and think this over,” Fred said as the sheriff turned from the door. “Here’s a man who was ready to bring a body down here of his own accord, his irons clean, and.…”
“That’s got nothing to do with this other,” the lawman cut in sharply.
“But it does, Jim,” Kate insisted. “You’re not trying this man over again. He’s been pardoned for that other. All you’re interested in is whether or not he killed Cauble. And you don’t have a bit of proof that he did.”
The sheriff tossed his keys onto the desk so viciously that they slid off and dropped to the floor. He wheeled on Kate abruptly, asking: “What am I to do? Just turn him loose?”
“He turned himself over to you, Jim. You looked at his guns.” Kate smiled then, her eyes pleading with him for understanding. “If you tell about his past at the inquest, he hasn’t a chance.”
“I don’t want him to have a chance. Not one.”
“But suppose you’re wrong? Suppose he’s innocent? Suppose he’s tried here for killing Cauble? And suppose they hang him? How would you feel if it came out later you’d been mistaken?”
The intensity of her words finally penetrated the hard shell of Jim Echols’s unreason. He shook his head now, sighing mightily as he grumbled: “Don’t ask a man questions he can’t answer.”
“She’s right. You’ve got to answer them before it’s too late.” Fred Bond put his back to the stove close alongside his sister, shortly continuing: “Sure, you’ve got your ideas on his pardon. But what was that he said … something about his reason for being here?”
“His reason for bein’ here,” the sheriff echoed derisively. “Know what he’s doin’? He’s ridin’ the country lettin’ on like he’s lookin’ for a lame carpenter.”
“What’s a lame carpenter got to do with this?” Fred asked.
“The night the stage was held up, Bill got a good look at one of the pair that did it. He swears this man was lame. Well, it seems there’d been a lame carpenter putting a new roof on the Wells, Fargo shack in Peak City the week before this all happened. But he turned up drunk on the job three mornings straight runnin’, so Rivers’s old man fired him. They tried to locate him for the trial as a witness, because he’d listened in on this scrap Rivers had with his father. But by then they couldn’t locate him.” Smiling in a belittling way, Echols went on: “Rivers claims this carpenter could have known when the gold was being shipped. And the carpenter, knowin’ about the fight he’d had with his father, used his name that night to frame the killin’ on him. If I remember rightly, Rivers even claims they meant Bill to live so he could say he’d heard the name used.”
For a long moment after the lawman finished speaking, no one said anything. It was Kate who finally asked: “Couldn’t Frank be right about all this?”
“I don’t believe so for a minute. It’s too far-fetched.”
Kate glanced at Fred now before putting another question. “And you’re going to tell all this at the inquest, Jim?”
“Don’t know yet, Kate. It’s a tricky thing to decide.”
“You know what this’ll mean to Lute Pleasants, don’t you?” she pointedly asked. “He’ll hit the roof because you didn’t tell him sooner. And if I know Lute, he’ll see that Rivers stands trial for killing Sam Cauble.” She was eyeing the lawman coldly now as she added: “That would be something for you to be proud of, wouldn’t it, Jim?”
The withering scorn in her tone made Jim Echols protest: “Lord, Kate, you act like I … like.…”
When he didn’t finish, Kate took her coat from the back of the chair sitting against the wall nearby. “Well, Fred, I guess we’ve done all we can,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She was on her way to the door, coat thrown over arm, before Echols managed to blurt out: “Now listen, Kate. You’ve got to look at my side of this.”
If the girl heard him, she gave no sign of it as she opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. And Fred, following her, paused at the door to glance around at the lawman and slowly shake his head, nothing else, before he pulled the door shut.
Chapter Five
Lute Pleasants could still feel the numbness, the shock that had gripped him on hearing Jim Echols first call the tall stranger by name. Rivers! He had been jolted hard in the beginning, and almost as hard as each repetition of the name drove home the conviction that this just might be Frank Rivers, son of the man he had shot that night with Sam Cauble on the stage road below Peak City.
Here was the one name on the face of the earth Pleasants had any reason whatsoever to fear now that Sam Cauble was dead. And for the first few minutes after leaving the courthouse—having told Ben and Harry to meet him after the inquest—he had come close to being panicked as he wondered what Frank Rivers’s presence in Ute Springs could mean.
If his first name is Frank, he kept telling himself. If.…
He was standing in a store entrance two doors below the hotel when Kate and Fred Bond left the courthouse and rode their horses down to the livery, leading Rivers’s buckskin and mare. The fact of their taking the two animals with them was sobering; it probably meant that Echols was holding Rivers under arrest.
This was something Pleasants had wanted to see happen an hour ago. Now it was the last thing he wanted, for if this should turn out to be the Peak City Frank Rivers it was all-important to him to see the man quickly on his way out of the country.
If he’s the one, he told himself once more.
Last summer he had read a caustic newspaper editorial criticizing Frank Rivers’s pardon and belittling Rivers’s statement that he was going to try and clear his name by finding further proof of what had really happened the night his father died. And the more Pleasants thought about it now, the more it seemed that, if this was Frank Rivers, he might be hunting for some trace of the two men who had stopped the stage that night.
This had no sooner occurred to him than he was starkly remembering that Sam Cauble had been talking to Rivers just before the bullet had knocked him out of the saddle this morning. For one dread, nerve-wearing minute, Pleasants’s face felt clammy and cold as he wondered whether Sam had recognized Rivers. If so, it was very possible that Sam had been galled enough, or drunk enough, to let Rivers know that the man who had shot his father was right here almost within his reach. That could well be the reason Rivers had come back to town instead of heading over the pass this morning.
Pleasants had little time to dwell on this frightening possibility, for just then he saw Echols come out of the courthouse and head this way across the street. Guessing that the sheriff was on his way to the hotel for his noon meal, Pleasants started up the walk. And Jim Echols, seeing him approaching, stopped and waited for him at the foot of the hotel verandah steps.
“Well, your man’s locked up,” the lawman bluntly announced as Pleasants joined him.
Pleasants had already guessed this but nonetheless asked: “Why?”
“Why?” The lawman’s look was one of unfeigned amazement. “God Almighty, didn’t you swear out a warrant on him?”
“I mean … why, when you were all set to turn him loose?”
“A warrant’s a warrant. You said to arrest him, so I did.”
“Now hold on, Sheriff.” The Beavertail man spoke mildly, placatingly. “I only meant to lock him up if you were sure he really … by the way, what did you call him?”
“Rivers. Frank Rivers.”
Once again Pleasants felt that now-familiar numbness knife through him, though he gave no outward indication of it, his tone calm and unruffled as he asked: “Did you get more out of him than I heard?”
Echols hesitated slightly before answering: “Not a thing.”
“You don’t think he put the bullet through Sam?”
“I don’t. But it’s not for me to say. Let the coroner decide.”
Pleasants shook his head as though completely baffled. “I’ve been thinkin’ about this. It’s serious business. Maybe I was too steamed up a while ago to see it straight. But so would you have been if you’d come across him the way I did, Sam loaded across his hull like a sack of feed.”
“No one says you don’t have a right to be good and sore.”
Pleasants frowned now, saying seriously: “Y’know, I’m beginning to think Rivers couldn’t have killed Sam.”
Jim Echols’s jaw came partly open in surprise. “You can say that after all the hell you raised?”
“After all the hell I raised.” The Beavertail man managed a guilty smile. “Sorry, Sheriff, but a man doesn’t see his foreman killed every day. It took me some time to see things straight.”
The lawman was hopelessly confused now. Some minutes ago his dignity had suffered considerably at the hands of two of his close friends, Kate and Fred. Now his arbitrary stand of not giving Frank Rivers the benefit of any doubt whatsoever was being cut from under him by Pleasants’s change of mind.
So there was real venom in his words as he drawled: “Then I’m to turn him loose? Just like that?”
“Guess so, Sheriff,” Pleasants blandly replied. “At least, don’t hold him on my warrant.”