by Luke Short
“Don’t be a sucker,” Alec said. “Hell, an Indian couldn’t track him on that ridge rock. Besides that, the timber is full of hunters. How you going to tell which one did it?”
Beyond his wrath, Tully knew Alec was right, and he slowly relaxed, his anger unfading. It could have been one of the angry drunk hunters he had booted off the property yesterday, or it could be Hodes’s man who had instructions to shoot up the camp and then lose himself in the anonymity of half a hundred hunters.
CHAPTER 6
Tully’s first move was to plug the holes in the gas drums lest the cascading gasoline catch fire from the cookshack stove. Alec went directly to the cat to assess the damage. Tully, however, was more concerned with the compressor, and he went back to examine it thoroughly. Outside of a hole in the gas tank it was unharmed, but the cat was another matter. Its radiator was riddled; its new fuel pump was smashed, but the block was undamaged. The squat tugger was unharmed, but the air hose was holed. Estimating what the hidden rifleman had accomplished, Tully guessed that it would be a week before parts could be obtained from Denver and the cat made usable again. A simple welding job would put the compressor in use by tomorrow.
Tully looked up to see the cook cautiously entering the clearing. He tramped slowly over to Tully and halted. “You never hired me for this,” he said flatly. “I quit.”
“All right,” Tully said resignedly. “Get your stuff together. I’m going to town.”
The rest of the crew, pair by pair, drifted into camp, drawn from their work by the clanging of the rifle slugs on metal. Since they had not been under fire, they were less disturbed than the cook, and Tully, explaining it as retaliation from the hunters he had kicked off the claim yesterday, sent them back to work. Afterwards he and Alec repeated their yesterday’s chore of removing the gas tank from the compressor. An hour later Tully was again on his way to town.
He ignored the cook beside him as he considered what he must do next. First, he would check the camp of the hunters he had booted off the claim the day before. He was certain that if one of them was the rifleman, his guilt would show. If he was satisfied that the hunters were innocent, that left Hodes, and he would have his showdown with Ben Hodes.
After a bruising ride down to the survey road, he came alert, watching the dust of the road for the story told by the tire tracks of the pickup. The truck, oddly, had kept to the road as if the hunters had abandoned the idea of making camp on the mine property. When he came to the second hunters’ camp he stopped the jeep, hoping someone there could give him news of the pickup and its occupants. However, the camp was deserted. Driving on, he noted that the tire tracks of the pickup still clung to the road and were made yesterday. They were still there as he pulled off the mine road onto the access road.
Reluctantly, Tully decided that the hunters were not guilty. Discouraged by his ordering them off, they had apparently chosen to camp in another part of the country. It seemed unlikely that one of their numbers had been the rifleman. If they were interested enough in finding likely hunting country, then an elk kill was more important to them than this hoodlum retaliation.
That left Ben Hodes. At the Liberty Gulch road Tully turned right toward the Mahaffey. Approaching the mill, he noted the half-dozen cars parked by the mill office. He did not know what sort of car Ben Hodes drove, but he was certain that it would not be one of the old model cars on the lot. Swinging into the parking lot, he stopped the jeep, climbed out and entered the Mahaffey office. Two middle-aged women, one seated at a typewriter, the other standing before a file cabinet, looked around as he entered.
“I’m looking for Mr. Hodes,” Tully announced.
The file clerk said, “He’s not in and he won’t be for a week. He’s at the mining convention in Denver.”
Tully scowled. “When did he leave?”
“Yesterday morning.”
For an angry moment Tully considered this. There was every reason in the world for Ben to be absent now, he thought grimly. The mining convention was the most reasonable of excuses to avoid the consequences of the shooting. Ben could easily have arranged for the events of this morning, then have left town to insure the appearance of his own innocence.
Wordlessly, angrily, Tully wheeled and went out. On the drive back to town he made a bleak appraisal of the future. What had once been only a nuisance had now turned into a genuine threat. He had promised Ben Hodes that when it did, Hodes would be in real trouble. Yet Ben was unreachable. When he returned he would blandly protest his innocence, ask for proof of his guilt and continue to sabotage the Sarah Moffit operations. No he won’t, Tully thought grimly.
When he reached town, he delivered the cook at the nearest bar, unloaded the compressor tank to be patched, then headed straight for the courthouse. On the second floor he found Sheriff Olson in his musty office that smelled of floor-cleaning compound and, oddly, of freshly watered plants. A row of enormous potted geraniums filled both high windows of the otherwise drab room.
Sheriff Olson was seated in a swivel chair facing a scarred rolltop desk and he was carefully reading a tattered Montgomery Ward catalogue when Tully entered. He was a small, bald, wiry man, in his early sixties, dressed in tight-fitting Oregon-style pants and blue denim shirt. A curl-brim Stetson lay on the desk. But instead of completing his costume and wearing cowman’s boots, he wore bulbous-toed high lace shoes.
Sheriff Olson had a lean, amiable face, bisected by one of the most untidy bale-of-hay, roan-colored mustaches that Tully had ever seen; it was as if he had modeled himself, not quite successfully, after a picture of a paterfamilias of seventy-five years ago.
He looked at Tully with total friendliness as he closed the catalogue and dropped it to the desk.
“Hi, young feller,” he said, his voice friendly. “Looking for me?”
Listen to the rube accent, Tully thought, and he was sure the sheriff was living up to his own conception of a long gone, gun-toting, tobacco-chewing, rough-diamond sheriff of western fiction.
“I guess I am,” Tully said. “How do you go about swearing out a peace bond against somebody?”
The sheriff’s bushy eyebrows raised. He looked searchingly at Tully as he fished in his shirt pocket and drew out an old curve-stem pipe. He made no effort to load it or light it, but put it in his mouth and talked around it. “Why,” he said slowly, judiciously, “you go to the justice court, state your case with your witnesses, then if the justice court grants a peace bond, the constable hauls your man in and he pays up.”
“Not you?”
Sheriff Olson’s mustache lifted faintly as he smiled. “Well, we got no constable here for the justice court, so I guess I’m your man. It’s illegal, but I’m still your man.” He paused. “Who are you gunning for?”
“Ben Hodes,” Tully said grimly. “Where’s the justice court?”
Sheriff Olson leaned back in his chair and ignored Tully’s question. “Ben Hodes, huh? It doesn’t seem likely. What’d he do?”
“Somebody he hired shot up my camp today. He wrecked my machinery so it’ll be out of commission for a week. Once I get it repaired, he’ll do it again.” Tully paused to isolate this. “But mostly I don’t like people shooting at me and my men whenever they like, and I want him bonded. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to start shooting back.”
Sheriff Olson ignored this also. “What proof you got Ben Hodes hired a man to shoot you up?”
“Without going into a thirty-minute lecture, I’ll tell you this much,” Tully said. “Hodes has been trying for years to buy the Vicksburg Claims for a tenth of what they’re worth. I’ve got them and I’m mining them. I think Hodes doesn’t want me to, and this is his way of trying to scare me off.”
Sheriff Olson said nothing and there was a long silence. Finally Tully said, “Well?”
“I’m still waiting for your proof,” Sheriff Olson said.
Tully tipped his head toward the street. “Would a shot-up compressor gas tank impress you?”
“No, no,” Olson said, still amiably. “I don’t doubt you were shot at. But what proof you got that Hodes is behind it?”
“Who else could be?” Tully countered.
“It’s hunting season,” Olson said mildly. “These hunters nowadays will shoot at anything, including their wives.” He cackled at his own humor, but Tully did not even smile.
“It’s hard to mistake a bulldozer for an elk, or even for your wife.”
“You’ve never seen mine,” Olson said, and cackled again.
Unsmilingly Tully waited for his laughter to ebb, then he said, “Well?”
“I’m still waiting for proof,” Olson said. His voice remained friendly.
“Look,” Tully said, anger pushing him. “As a resident of this county and a property owner, I’m entitled to the protection of the law against people who’re endangering my life and my property. What are you going to do about it?”
Olson shrugged. “What can I? You want me to round up every hunter in the country and ask him if he shot at a bulldozer by mistake?”
“That might be a start,” Tully observed angrily.
Now some of the amiability left the sheriff’s eyes. He removed the pipe from his mouth and pointed the stem at Tully. “Don’t go telling me my business, young feller. I’ll be glad to take you to our J.P. when you show me proof that Ben Hodes shot at you. Until you can, you better keep a civil tongue in your face.”
Tully checked his anger and said reasonably, “Sheriff, I counted forty shots that were fired at our camp. Those shots were not aimed at people, they were aimed at our machinery—our cat, our compressor, our tugger and our fuel. What does that sound like to you?”
“Like a lot of shooting,” Olson said, and cackled again.
Tully thought suddenly, Why I’m dealing with an idiot. But he went on, “Does that sound like a nearsighted hunter?”
Olson shook his head in negation.
“Then it could only have been someone interested in stopping our operations. Do you agree?”
Sheriff Olson nodded his head in affirmation.
“Since Hodes is the only man interested in halting our operations, then isn’t it logical that he hired the rifleman?”
“Nope,” Sheriff Olson said. “It isn’t logical unless you got proof.”
Tully stood looking at him a long moment, then he said, “Oh, the hell with it,” turned and walked out of the office. The full tide of his anger almost sickened him as he tramped down the stairs and halted in the corridor.
He might as well face the fact now that he was as much in Indian country as the first settler in the West. This was Ben Hodes’s town and these were Ben Hodes’s people and he, Tully Gibbs, was the foreigner. Without framing it in his own mind he knew that if he retaliated against Hodes with Hodes’s weapons, he would be in immediate and deep trouble. His anger still riding him, he moved into the cross corridor heading for the clerk’s office and Sarah.
When he entered, Sarah was busy selling a license to the owner of a new car, and she greeted him perfunctorily. He took one of the high stools in the far corner of the room and lighted a cigarette. Presently Justin Byers came out of the vault carrying a big ledger which he put on the counter and studied a moment. Then he returned the ledger to the vault, came out, saw Tully, nodded in greeting, picked up his hat which was lying on the corner of the counter and left the room. Soon Sarah was finished with the license registration and came over.
When, ten minutes later and still hunched on the bookkeeper’s stool, Tully finished telling her of the shooting, he felt the first edge of his anger gone. Sarah was seated at her typing desk, half turned away from it, and she heard him out in silence. Then she smiled almost wryly and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “But Olson’s right, Tully,” she said finally. “You do need proof.”
Tully groaned. “There’s that word again.”
“All the same, you haven’t a shred of evidence.”
Tully slid off the stool, rammed his hands in his pockets and stood looking down at her. “So we get it fixed, so he shoots it up again, so we get it fixed and he does it still again?”
“Oh, I know, Tully,” Sarah said. There was genuine sympathy in her voice that almost surprised Tully. They looked in each other’s eyes for a wordless moment.
Tully said gloomily, “What would happen if I shot up the Mahaffey?”
“You’d be jailed.”
“Yeah, but I can play rough, too,” Tully said grimly. “It’s easy enough to slip a handful of dynamite caps in the stuff the Mahaffey’s milling.”
“You’d just hurt the workmen.”
“He wasn’t worried about hurting mine.”
“You don’t mean that, Tully,” Sarah said softly.
Tully sighed. “No, I guess I don’t. Only this guy has got to be stopped. I think it’s time for me to take him apart. All I’ll get out of that is a fine at the most.” He looked at Sarah. “Maybe if I do it three or four times, he’ll get the idea.”
Sarah said nothing, and Tully grinned crookedly. “The trouble is he’s not here to take apart. He likely won’t be for two weeks. Anything can happen in that time.”
Sarah was silent a long moment, and then she said, “The only thing we can do, Tully, is to try and stop it. Have you thought of asking Olson to be deputized?”
“Ha!” Tully said scornfully. “Olson can’t wait to do me a big fat favor.”
“Not you. He wouldn’t think of it, but every man you’ve got working for you out there has grown up in this town. If they say they’re in danger, I think he’d do it. Send Alec in and Olson would be afraid to turn him down. It’s men like Alec who elect him.”
“Where does it get us?” Tully demanded. “What good would a deputy have been today?”
“A deputy could have gone in the Mahaffey, stopped everybody’s work and demanded an accounting of everybody’s time. If he did it often enough, I think he could make plenty of trouble for Ben.”
Tully considered this. There was a certain shrewdness in what Sarah suggested. If he removed himself, the foreigner, from the picture Olson would be forced to intervene in a quarrel between the two local factions. It was a weapon of retaliation at most, and a kind of protection at the least. He would send Alec in. Sarah rose now, looking at her watch. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment now, Tully. What do you plan to do?”
“I’ve got to phone Denver for parts, then I’ll pick up some lunch and take the tank out.”
Sarah, walking over to her coat, said over her shoulder, “Snap the lock when you leave.”
Tully said he would.
Sarah had almost reached the door when she halted, turned and said, “I’ll buy you lunch at Joe’s.”
“Fine,” Tully said, trying not to show the surprise he felt at her invitation.
Why did I say that? Sarah wondered as she descended the stone steps of the courthouse. All her stern resolutions to see little of Tully and to make that little as impersonal as possible had gone overboard already. She had promised herself that she would be firmly suspicious of him and mistrust his every move. Yet this morning she had sympathized with his troubles and had even arranged to have lunch with him. He was, she decided almost bitterly, getting to be a bad habit with her, one that was increasingly hard to break. That’s because of Kevin, she thought, and she knew immediately that this wasn’t true.
Turning into the Main Street, she noticed that the sky was beginning to haze over. There was some weather coming, she knew, and she wondered, almost fretfully, what a sleet or snow storm would do to the Sarah Moffit operations. It seemed that lately she did nothing but worry about the Sarah Moffit—or about Tully Gibbs.
Dr. Richards’s ground-floor office next to the hardware store smelled of medicine and newly laid linoleum and its waiting room was empty of patients. The door in the far wall was open and when Sarah closed the street door Dr. Richards called, “Come on through, Sarah.”
She crossed the waiting room and entered the consultatio
n room. Dr. Richards, in shirt sleeves, was at the sink scrubbing syringes and placing them in the sterilizer nearby. He was a small man in his middle forties, certainly too thin, almost frail. His face seldom wore anything but the humorless, almost fretful expression that was on it now as he glanced over his shoulder.
Sarah, who loathed all pomposities, did not really like Dr. Richards, but she forgave him much because of his devotion to his profession. She said, “Hi, Doc,” knowing it would irritate him, and slipped out of her coat which she dropped on the white metal chair. “Where is Mrs. Bjornsen?”
Dr. Richards frowned and said, “I can call her. Are you afraid to be alone with me long enough to get your cold shot?”
Sarah laughed. “I was teasing.”
Dr. Richards only grunted and dried his hands. Since he was County Medical Officer, he and Sarah saw much of each other at the courthouse. When his duties occasionally brought him before the commissioners, Sarah always took his side against them, defending him almost to the point of insubordination. For the three commissioners with their rough country humor loved to bait him, to deride his skill as if he were a not-very-good veterinarian, and refused his most reasonable request for hours before giving in.
Sarah rolled up her sleeve as she watched Dr. Richards’s small, precise hands prepare the syringe and fill it with cold vaccine. This white-painted room with its cold metal cabinets, examining table and scales all painted white, too, seemed a fitting background for this bloodless little man, she thought.
Dr. Richards asked abruptly, “Did the commissioners kick about my last month’s bills?”
“They never really do. They just like to tease you,” Sarah said easily.