Passin' Through (1985)

by L'amour, Louis

  He took a good look at me and came with two cups and a pot of Arbuckle’s.

  Taking the will from my pocket, I showed it to him. “That ranch belongs to Janet Le Caudy,” I said. “Half of it was hers, anyway. My guess is that Dory Hollyrood poisoned Phillips, forged a will or had her fancy man do it, and then she came out here figuring she’d gotten herself a real stylish layout.

  “She surely didn’t find what she expected, and then she began talkin’ about sellin’ out. Then Janet showed up with a claim.” I laid it all out for him. “She’ll be in, you can talk to her.”

  “Why tell me? I’m not the law.”

  “You’re somebody who knows us. You know us a little bit, anyway, and I want the facts on record. That woman,” I added, “is mean. I figure she planned to poison me for my stake. It isn’t much but she’ll settle for whatever she can get.”

  “You’d better talk to Reed Bell.”

  “The Pink? Is he still around?”

  “Been in an’ out all day, askin’ for you.” The cook grinned. “He said not to trust you.”

  “Not to trust me? Why?”

  “He said not to trust you at guessin’ a woman’s age.”

  I shrugged. “With a horse you can look at their teeth, just try doin’ that to a woman.” I looked over my cup at him. “Where’d I miss on that?”

  “He didn’t say, but - he’s comin’ across the street now.”

  Bell came in, put his hat down on the table, and ran his fingers through what hair he had left. “You’re a hard man to keep track of, Passin’,” he said, “I never did see a man keep moving so much.”

  “I kep’ my hair. I mean, nobody took my scalp.”

  “I’ve been scatterin’ around some my own self. You said that Mrs. Hollyrood was an actress?”

  “That’s what she told me. Showed me some old playbills, too.”

  “Oh, she’s been an actress, all right. A lot else, too. She still at the ranch?”

  “So far’s I know. They may cut an’ run now that we got away from them.” I cleared my throat. “I had a shootin’ with Lew Paine.”

  “He’s been askin’ for it. The sheriff will probably give you a vote of thanks. Sooner or later he would have had to do it.”

  “He’s alive. He come on me sudden an’ he was standin’ with brush in the background an’ my shot was too quick.”

  “That Mrs. Hollyrood? You sent me off on a blind trail. You said she was fifty, sixty years old, if I recall?”

  “She must be. She’s got gray hair, an’ >>

  “Ever hear of anybody wearin’ a wig? That’s what she’s got. Three or four of them, as a matter of fact. To tell you the truth, she’s in her middle thirties, somewhere. And she’s got dark hair when it’s natural, which it rarely is.”

  “You going to arrest her?”

  “Uh-huh. Soon as the sheriff gets back.”

  “Clinton, too?”

  “Charles Pelham Clinton, know the man well. No, we just don’t have evidence enough. Maybe if you and Miss Le Caudy make a statement -”

  “We will, but I don’t think we have much that would stand up in court.”

  Later, I went across the street and got a room for myself, then I hunted up the town barber and treated myself to a haircut and a shave, changed my clothes, and then stretched out on the bed to catch forty winks, as the saying is.

  When I opened my eyes again it was full dark. Looking out the window, I couldn’t see a light in town. The restaurant was dark and nobody was moving around, so I just undressed and went back to bed.

  It was a few minutes before I went back to sleep, and lying there I wondered what was happening at the ranch and what Mrs. Hollyrood would do now. Most of all I wondered about Matty. She was caught up in something she should get shut of before they decided she knew too much and wasn’t loyal enough. Of course, they did not know that she’d seen me outside the house nor that she had warned me away before that.

  “Mr. Passin’,” I said to myself, “you got yourself into a lot that didn’t concern you. Now you’d better saddle up, pack up, and hit the trail for the high-up hills.”

  Another thing was naggin’ at me. Here I was, twenty-eight years old with a lot of rough country behind me, and all I had in the world was three horses, a rope, some mining tools, and a few shootin’ irons that I was having to clean all the time.

  Right now, due to a streak of luck in hitting that pocket of ore, I had more money than ever in my life before, but when a man came right down to it the little I had didn’t amount to much, and when that was gone, what was left? A job punching cows at thirty bucks a month or back to prospecting? Suddenly I began to feel I didn’t want to spend my years looking a burro in the behind while I followed him over the mountains.

  I sat up, put my hat on, and folded my arms around my knees. Somehow I always think better with my hat on.

  Then another uneasy feeling came over me. Why, all of a sudden, was I thinking like this? Why, after all those rambling years, was I suddenly beginning to think like a taxpayer?

  I’d been telling myself for years that I was a mean man, and there were some who would agree. Here and there I’d been hard to get along with, mostly because I don’t take to getting pushed around, but all the while other men I’d ridden with had their own ranches, opened banks, I mean, legitimately, or had become lawyers or storekeepers. I mean, they were citizens. What was I but a saddle tramp?

  Well, I took my hat off and lay back down and stared at the ceiling, feeling uneasy with myself. All right, I was twenty-eight. Where was I going to be when I was forty? Still riding the rough string for some other man?

  When somebody wanted to know who I was, would I have to say I was just Passin’ Through?

  Well, that’s what we all were doing, in a way, but when a man cashes in his chips he should leave something a little better than he had found it.

  Matty now, Matty should get shut of those people. It was my feeling she had fallen in with them and was about to get herself into trouble through misguided loyalty. Sometimes a person gets to running with the wrong crowd and stays with them even when he knows he shouldn’t. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know anybody else or because it’s become a habit. There had been a few times when I was younger that I had traipsed around with folks I’d sort of fallen in with, folks who, if I hadn’t left them, would surely have gotten me hung.

  There was that Texas outfit, a wild bunch, but not a good wild bunch, if you know what I mean. They weren’t just blowing off steam like cowhands often do, there was a meanness to what they did. One night they started talking-of holding up a train and I listened, and when we rode off to our separate places that night I just kept riding, clean out of the country. I’d been sixteen then, man-grown and rugged, but with an ounce of brains picked up from somewhere. There were six in the outfit until I rode off and left them. They held up their train, all right, and when they split up the take, each man got twenty-six dollars and fifty cents. A year later two of them, showing less brains than I’d have expected, tried to hold up a stage on which Eugene Blair was riding shotgun. Those boys aren’t with us anymore. Another was in prison, and two were hung by impatient citizens.

  Tomorrow was another day, and when I fell asleep I was remembering the rope I’d had around my own neck.

  Chapter Twenty

  First morning in my life when Fd been in bed past seven o’clock, but when I awoke I was rested for the first time in weeks. For a few minutes I just lay there thinking how good it felt, then I got up, shaved, and dressed. All the time I was conscious of what was happening in the street below, and whilst shaving could glance from the corners of my eyes up the street toward the tall building, all of two stories, that ended the street. Back of it the La Platas lifted toward the sky. No snow on them yet, but it wouldn’t be many weeks.

  From the Dutchman’s blacksmith shop I could hear the clang of his hammer on the anvil where he was shoeing a horse or sharpening steel for some miner.

&n
bsp; Up Deadwood Gulch where the aspens were turning to gold I could see the smoke from a chimney, vaguely blue against the pines.

  Slinging my gun around my hips, I tried to think back to a day when I hadn’t worn one. Ninety percent of the men down there in the street would be armed, but those days were passing. Would I pass with them? I shook my head to rid it of such thoughts. It was a wild and rough west we had come into and it needed men with the bark on.

  By the time I reached the street, most men were at work. The morning sun was pleasant and I loafed along the street in front of the general store. A youngster came out with a small striped paper sack of candy in his hand. When I was his age most candy still had medicinal centers, but that was already passing off in the cities. A woman went into the door and when I went in she was buying some dress goods. Most women made their own clothes and a woman who couldn’t sew was a rarity. The clerk was showing her a bolt of cloth, had it spread out on the counter. I walked across the room to look at a saddle, all carved leather and fancy, like no saddle a workin’ cowhand could afford, although most times the saddles were worth more than the horse who carried it.

  Idling around, looking at some spurs, some fancy, some workaday types, and ropes. Me, I always made my own riatas out of rawhide the way the Mexicans did. In fact it was an old Mex showed me the way of it. The best ropers around were the Californios or Mexicans, most of them using ropes twice as long as the average workin’ cowboy whom I knew.

  Truth was, I was kind of watching for Janet. I figured she would be on her way to the restaurant pretty soon and maybe I could get to eat with her again. Not that she’d have much use for me now that the trouble was over. I walked back to the street, hating to leave the wonderful smells of that general store, fresh ground coffee (they got the beans in big burlap bags and ground them on the premises), new leather, and dry goods.

  There wasn’t much happening in the stores. The men had gone to work and most women were about their household work and wouldn’t be coming to shop for a couple of hours yet, maybe more.

  The Dutchman had quit work and was walking across to the restaurant for coffee. There were a couple of strange horses tied to the hitch rail in front of a saloon.

  At the distance I could not make out the brands, but then I didn’t know much about the brands in this part of the country.

  A few clouds were showing in the blue sky. I walked across the street, paused in the door of the restaurant to look around, then went inside. It was a mighty peaceful time, so why should I be feeling uneasy?

  The Dutchman was at his coffee and he nodded to me. Most folks knew who I was by now. News gets around quick in a small town, and I could see folks stealing glances at me but nobody seemed anxious to talk. They’d heard about Houston Burrows and even Pan Beacham and my brief difficulty with Lew Paine, so I was trouble.

  The Dutchman, a hardworking man, probably felt the same, although he knew I hadn’t much choice. “You kill Beacham?”

  “Left me no choice. He come for me.”

  The Dutchman’s mug of coffee looked like a thimble in his hand, it was that big.

  “I know him. Bad man.” He gulped coffee and broke a piece from the corn pone before him. “I know him in Trinidad. He is brother to Clinton.”

  Well, now! That explained some things but left the gate wide open for trouble.

  He looked over at me. “You bring much trouble with you. You go soon?”

  Irritation began to mount in me, and I liked the Dutchman. He was a good man. He worked hard and was good at what he did.

  “Probably,” I said. “I’d like to see Miss Le Caudy get settled on her ranch first. She’s had a lot of trouble.”

  They knew that to be true and they knew that I had ridden point for her in all of it.

  That was well and good. They knew what I had done and why I had done it but that was over now. Trouble had a way of building around a man who was known to be good with a gun, and they did not want trouble. The west was growing up and they no longer liked the old wild cowboy reputation. The railroad had come in, Animas City was giving way to Durango, and they were thinking of being a city. They wished to attract businessmen, not the wild bunch. We who rode the lone trails, our time was running out.

  Businessmen were showing their irritation by coming out and shooting some of the wild bunch out of their saddles. The unknowing were too quick to forget that most of those businessmen had been soldiers in the Civil and Indian wars, and many had been cattlemen themselves. They knew just as much about guns and fighting as did the outlaws, and in some cases a good deal more.

  The Lincoln County War down New Mexico way had fought itself out, and only last July, not sixty days ago, Billy the Kid had been killed at Fort Sumner by Pat Garrett.

  “Two mens comes this day, very early.” The Dutchman was talking to me. “They come from the west. I do not know them, and they do not talk.” He swallowed some coffee. “They look at your horses. They talk about the roan, and I think they know him. I think they know that horse.”

  Only half my mind was following him. I was watching for Janet and she was not coming. Or had she already gone? I wished to ask but did not. Both of these men would know.

  I rode a blue horse to where the trails divided, and the blue horse brought me here.

  “Will you stay?” The Dutchman was persistent.

  He wished to be rid of me. No animosity, just because he did not think me good for the town or the time. I smiled at him. “Right now, Dutch, I don’t know. I’m thinking of taking my outfit and riding up the mountains to where the rivers are born. I’m thinking of going up there to look for whatever I can find. I’m a looker and a seeker, Dutchman, not a man who hunts trouble.

  “None of this that’s been happening was of my choosing. They came to me and I accommodated them to clear the road for the settling of that ranch. When Janet Le Caudy is settled and safe I will ride on.”

  “We take care of her.”

  Well, I looked at him. “Dutch, you’ve got drills to sharpen, hinges to make, and horses to shoe. Will you be sitting on her ranch if Charles Pelham Clinton comes back? Could you handle him if he did come? I mean, with a gun?”

  “I think it better you go.”

  “Give me time, Dutchman, give me time.”

  Getting up, I walked outside. There were two men down the street, standing together. There was another across the street standing by the horses, and it all looked natural enough except that it was the middle of the morning and few men loafed about at that hour.

  Up in my room I stretched out on the bed but I did not sleep. “You’ve got to ride away, Mr. Passin’,” I said to myself. “You’ve got to find a place where nobody knows you. Particularly you’ve got to ride away before that trouble down the street begins to happen.”

  They were through with me here. I’d worn out my welcome. If I rode out of town those men would follow and they would all be rid of me.

  I stared up at the ceiling, suddenly lonely, sad for myself, and wondering what the next step would be. Would those men even let me get out of town? Or would it happen down there? And who were they, anyway? Maybe it was somebody else they wanted? Yet I knew it was me. I knew they wanted me in their sights and they had what they believed was a reason.

  Maybe I was like Matty, only she was worse off, being a woman. I doubted if she had any money, being dependent on Mrs. Hollyrood, and she was too beautiful, with no home, no relatives, no place to go. Some of that I knew, some I had surmised. To get a job she would have to work for a man, and the man, chances were, would have a wife. Few wives would want to have so beautiful a woman working day after day with their husbands, even as still, cold, and quiet a woman as Matty.

  When sundown came I went across the street to eat. When I glanced down the street only one man was there, loitering in front of a saloon and smoking a cigarette. Well, they were going to get their chance. Fd be no more trouble to Parrott. When the night came I would get my horses and ride out, and whatever those men
were after they would find. They’d find it somewhere on down the trail, and I hoped they’d be satisfied with what they found.

  Cook didn’t have much to say until he’d served my meal and two other customers had gone. Then he brought the coffeepot and sat down across from me. “Sorry about that,” he said, “sorry about this mornin’, but the Dutchman was speakin’ for the community.”

  “You, too?”

  “No, not me. I told them you were a good man to have around, but they wouldn’t buy it. Things had been quiet, they said, until you came. They want you gone. The Dutchman feels like me but they asked him to speak for them.”

  “I’ll ride out tonight.”

  “Sorry to see you go.” He paused. “The Dutchman will get your horses, saddle up for you, load your pack. Why don’t you go up the canyon? You can ride over the rim and down Bear Creek. They’ll never know what happened to you.”

  “I never got anywhere sidestepping trouble.”

  “This time you’d better. If you want there’s a trail up the side of the canyon, up Madden. If you want to go west you could follow the Mancos down. If I were you I’d ride out Bear Creek. There’s something doing at a place called Tellur-ide. I’ve never been there myself.”

  “I don’t follow the camps. I like wild country.”

  “You’ll find it.”

  We were silent then, and others came in, ate, and left. It was time I was leaving.

  “If you’re thinking of the young lady,” cook said, “she left on the stage for Durango. Pulled out this morning. Seems she’s got another aunt in there. The aunt’s not a resident. She came out to try to get her niece to come home with her.”

  “Think she’ll do it?”

  “Why not? A ranch like that is no place for a young, pretty girl. Too lonesome. She’ll go back east, I reckon.”

  “Was she in here?”

  “Early this morning, about daylight. Ate her breakfast and seemed in no hurry.”

  My cup was empty. I stared into it, then got up slowly. “All right,” I said, “if the Dutchman will bring my horses to the upper end of town, I’ll ride out.”