by B. M. Bower
Half an hour after Swan arrived, the coroner came in a machine, and with him came the sheriff. The coroner, an important little man, examined the body, the horse and the saddle, and there was the usual formula of swearing in a jury. The inquest was rather short, since there was only one witness to testify, and Lone merely told how he had discovered the horse there by the creek, and that the body had not been moved from where he found it.
Swan went over to where Lone, anxious to get away from the place, was untying his horse after the jury had officially named the death an accident.
“I guess those horses could be turned loose,” he began without prelude. “What you think, Lone? I been to Thurman’s ranch, and I don’t find anybody. Some horses in a corral, and pigs in a pen, and chickens. I guess Thurman was living alone. Should I tell the coroner that?”
“I dunno,” Lone replied shortly. “You might speak to the sheriff. I reckon he’s the man to take charge of things.”
“It’s bad business, getting killed,” Swan said vaguely. “It makes me feel damn sorry when I go to that ranch. There’s the horses waiting for breakfast—and Thurman, he’s dead over here and can’t feed his pigs and his chickens. It’s a white cat over there that comes to meet me and rubs my leg and purrs like it’s lonesome. That’s a nice ranch he’s got, too. Now what becomes of that ranch? What you think, Lone?”
“Hell, how should I know?” Lone scowled at him from the saddle and rode away, leaving Swan standing there staring after him. He turned away to find the sheriff and almost collided with Brit Hunter, who was glancing speculatively from him to Lone Morgan. Swan stopped and put out his hand to shake.
“Lone says I should tell the sheriff I could look after Fred Thurman’s ranch. What you think, Mr. Hunter?”
“Good idea, I guess. Somebody’ll have to. They can’t——” He checked himself. “You got a horse? I’ll ride over with yuh, maybe.”
“I got legs,” Swan returned laconically. “They don’t get scared, Mr. Hunter, and maybe kill me sometime. You could tell the sheriff I’m government hunter and honest man, and I take good care of things. You could do that, please?”
“Sure,” said Brit and rode over to where the sheriff was standing.
The sheriff listened, nodded, beckoned to Swan. “The court’ll have to settle up the estate and find his heirs, if he’s got any. But you look after things—what’s your name? Vjolmar—how yuh spell it? I’ll swear you in as a deputy. Good Lord, you’re a husky son-of-a-gun!” The sheriff’s eyes went up to Swan’s hat crown, descended to his shoulders and lingered there admiringly for a moment, traveled down his flat, hard-muscled body and his straight legs. “I’ll bet you could put up some fight, if you had to,” he commented.
Swan grinned good-humoredly, glanced conscience-stricken at the covered figure on the ground and straightened his face decorously.
“I could lick you good,” he admitted in a stage whisper. “I’m a son-off-a-gun all right—only I don’t never get mad at somebody.”
Brit Hunter smiled at that, it was so like Swan Vjolmar. But when they were halfway to Thurman’s ranch—Brit on horseback and Swan striding easily along beside him, leading the blaze-faced horse, he glanced down at Swan’s face and wondered if Swan had not lied a little.
“What’s on your mind, Swan?” he asked abruptly.
Swan started and looked up at him, glanced at the empty hills on either side, and stopped still in the trail.
“Mr. Hunter, you been longer in the country than I have been. You seen some good riding, I bet. Maybe you see some men ride backwards on a horse?”
Brit looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Backwards?”
Swan led up the blaze-faced horse and pointed to the right stirrup. “Spurs would scratch like that if you jerk your foot, maybe. You’re a good rider, Mr. Hunter, you can tell. That’s a right stirrup, ain’t it? Fred Thurman, he’s got his left foot twist around, all broke from jerking in his stirrup. Left foot in right stirrup——” He pushed back his hat and rumpled his yellow hair, looking up into Brit’s face inquiringly. “Left foot in right stirrup is riding backwards. That’s a damn good rider to ride like that—what you think, Mr. Hunter?”
CHAPTER SIX
LONE ADVISES SILENCE
Twice in the next week Lone found an excuse for riding over to the Sawtooth. During his first visit, the foreman’s wife told him that the young lady was still too sick to talk much. The second time he went, Pop Bridgers spied him first and cackled over his coming to see the girl. Lone grinned and dissembled as best he could, knowing that Pop Bridgers fed his imagination upon denials and argument and remonstrance and was likely to build gossip that might spread beyond the Sawtooth. Wherefore he did not go near the foreman’s house that day, but contented himself with gathering from Pop’s talk that the girl was still there.
After that he rode here and there, wherever he would be likely to meet a Sawtooth rider, and so at last he came upon Al Woodruff loping along the crest of Juniper Ridge. Al at first displayed no intention of stopping, but pulled up when he saw John Doe slowing down significantly. Lone would have preferred a chat with some one else, for this was a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued man; but Al Woodruff stayed at the ranch and would know all the news, and even though he might give it an ill-natured twist, Lone would at least know what was going on. Al hailed him with a laughing epithet.
“Say, you sure enough played hell all around, bringin’ Brit Hunter’s girl to the Sawtooth!” he began, chuckling as if he had some secret joke. “Where’d you pick her up, Lone? She claims you found her at Rock City. That right?”
“No, it ain’t right,” Lone denied promptly, his dark eyes meeting Al’s glance steadily. “I found her in that gulch away this side. She was in amongst the rocks where she was trying to keep outa the rain. Brit Hunter’s girl, is she? She told me she was going to the Sawtooth. She’d have made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the storm. She got as far as the gulch, and the lightning scared her from going any farther.” He offered Al his tobacco sack and fumbled for a match. “I never knew Brit Hunter had a girl.”
“Nor me,” Al said and sifted tobacco into a cigarette paper. “Bob, he drove her over there yesterday. Took him close to all day to make the trip—and Bob, he claims to hate women!”
“So would I, if I’d got stung for fifty thousand. She ain’t that kind. She’s a nice girl, far as I could tell. She got well, all right, did she?”
“Yeah—only she was still coughing some when she left the ranch. She like to of had pneumonia, I guess. Queer how she claimed she spent the night in Rock City, ain’t it?”
“No,” Lone answered judicially, “I don’t know as it’s so queer. She never realized how far she’d walked, I reckon. She was plumb crazy when I found her. You couldn’t take any stock in what she said. Say, you didn’t see that bay I was halter-breaking, did yuh, Al? He jumped the fence and got away on me, day before yesterday. I’d like to catch him up again. He’ll make a good horse.”
Al had not seen the bay, and the talk tapered off desultorily to a final “So-long, see yuh later.” Lone rode on, careful not to look back. So she was Brit Hunter’s girl! Lone whistled softly to himself while he studied this new angle of the problem,—for a problem he was beginning to consider it. She was Brit Hunter’s girl, and she had told them at the Sawtooth that she had spent the night at Rock City. He wondered how much else she had told; how much she remembered of what she had told him.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a round leather purse with a chain handle. It was soiled and shrunken with its wetting, and the clasp had flecks of rust upon it. What it contained Lone did not know. Virginia had taught him that a man must not be curious about the personal belongings of a woman. Now he turned the purse over, tried to rub out the stiffness of the leather, and smiled a little as he dropped it back into his pocket.
“I’ve got my calling card,” he said softly to John Doe. “I reckon I had the right hunch when I didn’t turn it over to Mrs.
Hawkins. I’ll ask her again about that grip she said she hid under a bush. I never heard about any of the boys finding it.”
His thoughts returned to Al Woodruff and stopped there. Determined still to attend strictly to his own affairs, his thoughts persisted in playing truant and in straying to a subject he much preferred not to think of at all. Why should Al Woodruff be interested in the exact spot where Brit Hunter’s daughter had spent the night of the storm? Why should Lone instinctively discount her statement and lie whole-heartedly about it?
“Now if Al catches me up in that, he’ll think I know a lot I don’t know, or else——” He halted his thoughts there, for that, too, was a forbidden subject.
Forbidden subjects are like other forbidden things: they have a way of making themselves very conspicuous. Lone was heading for the Quirt ranch by the most direct route, fearing, perhaps, that if he waited he would lose his nerve and would not go at all. Yet it was important that he should go; he must return the girl’s purse!
The most direct route to the Quirt took him down Juniper Ridge and across Granite Creek near the Thurman ranch. Indeed, if he followed the trail up Granite Creek and across the hilly country to Quirt Creek, he must pass within fifty yards of the Thurman cabin. Lone’s time was limited, yet he took the direct route rather reluctantly. He did not want to be reminded too sharply of Fred Thurman as a man who had lived his life in his own way and had died so horribly.
“Well, he didn’t have it coming to him—but it’s done and over with, now, so it’s no use thinking about it,” he reflected, when the roofs of the Thurman ranch buildings began to show now and then through the thin ranks of the cottonwoods along the creek.
But his face sobered as he rode along. It seemed to him that the sleepy little meadows, the quiet murmuring of the creek, even the soft rustling of the cottonwood leaves breathed a new loneliness, an emptiness where the man who had called this place home, who had clung to it in the face of opposition that was growing into open warfare, had lived and had left life suddenly—unwarrantably, Lone knew in his heart. It might be of no use to think about it, but the vivid memory of Fred Thurman was with him when he rode up the trail to the stable and the small corrals. He had to think, whether he would or no.
At the corral he came unexpectedly in sight of the Swede, who grinned a guileless welcome and came toward him, so that Lone could not ride on unless he would advertise his dislike of the place. John Doe, plainly glad to find an excuse to stop, slowed and came to where Swan waited by the gate.
“By golly, this is lonesome here,” Swan complained, heaving a great sigh. “That judge don’t get busy pretty quick, I’m maybe jumping my job. Lone, what you think? You believe in ghosts?”
“Naw. What’s on your chest, Swan?” Lone slipped sidewise in the saddle, resting his muscles. “You been seeing things?”
“No—I don’t be seeing things, Lone. But sometimes I been—like I feel something.” He stared at Lone questioningly. “What you think, Lone, if you be sitting down eating your supper, maybe, and you feel something say words in your brain? Like you know something talks to you and then quits.”
Lone gave Swan a long, measuring look, and Swan laughed uneasily.
“That sounds crazy. But it’s true, what something tells me in my brain. I go and look, and by golly, it’s there just like the words tell me.”
Lone straightened in the saddle. “You better come clean, Swan, and tell the whole thing. What was it? Don’t talk in circles. What words did you feel—in your brain?” In spite of himself, Lone felt as he had when the girl had talked to him and called him Charlie.
Swan closed the gate behind him with steady hands. His lips were pressed firmly together, as if he had definitely made up his mind to something. Lone was impressed somehow with Swan’s perfect control of his speech, his thoughts, his actions. But he was puzzled rather than anything else, and when Swan turned, facing him, Lone’s bewilderment did not lessen.
“I’ll tell you. It’s when I’m sitting down to eat my supper. I’m just reaching out my hand like this, to get my coffee. And something says in my head, ‘It’s a lie. I don’t ride backwards. Go look at my saddle. There’s blood——’ And that’s all. It’s like the words go far away so I can’t hear any more. So I eat my supper, and then I get the lantern and I go look. You come with me, Lone. I’ll show you.”
Without a word Lone dismounted and followed Swan into a small shed beside the stable, where a worn stock saddle hung suspended from a crosspiece, a rawhide string looped over the horn. Lone did not ask whose saddle it was, nor did Swan name the owner. There was no need.
Swan took the saddle and swung it around so that the right side was toward them. It was what is called a full-stamped saddle, with the popular wild-rose design on skirts and cantle. Much hard use and occasional oilings had darkened the leather to a rich, red brown, marred with old scars and scratches and the stains of many storms.
“Blood is hard to find when it’s raining all night,” Swan observed, speaking low as one does in the presence of death. “But if somebody is bleeding and falls off a horse slow, and catches hold of things and tries like hell to hang on——” He lifted the small flap that covered the cinch ring and revealed a reddish, flaked stain. Phlegmatically he wetted his finger tip on his tongue, rubbed the stain and held up his finger for Lone to see. “That’s a damn funny place for blood, when a man is dragging on the ground,” he commented drily. “And something else is damn funny, Lone.”
He lifted the wooden stirrup and touched with his finger the rowel marks. “That is on the front part,” he said. “I could swear in court that Fred’s left foot was twisted—that’s damn funny, Lone. I don’t see men ride backwards, much.”
Lone turned on him and struck the stirrup from his hand. “I think you better forget it,” he said fiercely. “He’s dead—it can’t help him any to——” He stopped and pulled himself together. “Swan, you take a fool’s advice and don’t tell anybody else about feeling words talk in your head. They’ll have you in the bug-house at Blackfoot, sure as you live.” He looked at the saddle, hesitated, looked again at Swan, who was watching him. “That blood most likely got there when Fred was packing a deer in from the hills. And marks on them old oxbow stirrups don’t mean a damn thing but the need of a new pair, maybe.” He forced a laugh and stepped outside the shed. “Just shows you, Swan, that imagination and being alone all the time can raise Cain with a fellow. You want to watch yourself.”
Swan followed him out, closing the door carefully behind him. “By golly, I’m watching out now,” he assented thoughtfully. “You don’t tell anybody, Lone.”
“No, I won’t tell anybody—and I’d advise you not to,” Lone repeated grimly. “Just keep those thoughts outa your head, Swan. They’re bad medicine.”
He mounted John Doe and rode away, his eyes downcast, his quirt slapping absently the weeds along the trail. It was not his business, and yet—— Lone shook himself together and put John Doe into a lope. He had warned Swan, and he could do no more.
Halfway to the Quirt he met Lorraine riding along the trail. She would have passed him with no sign of recognition, but Lone lifted his hat and stopped. Lorraine looked at him, rode on a few steps and turned. “Did you wish to speak about something?” she asked impersonally.
Lone felt the flush in his cheeks, which angered him to the point of speaking curtly. “Yes. I found your purse where you dropped it that night you were lost. I was bringing it over to you. My name’s Morgan. I’m the man that found you and took you in to the ranch.”
“Oh.” Lorraine looked at him steadily. “You’re the one they call Loney?”
“When they’re feeling good toward me. I’m Lone Morgan. I went back to find your grip—you said you left it under a bush, but the world’s plumb full of bushes. I found your purse, though.”
“Thank you so much. I must have been an awful nuisance, but I was so scared—and things were terribly mixed in my mind. I didn’t even have sense enough to t
ell you what ranch I was trying to find, did I? So you took me to the wrong one, and I was a week there before I found it out. And then they were perfectly lovely about it and brought me—home.” She turned the purse over and over in her hands, looking at it without much interest. She seemed in no hurry to ride on, which gave Lone courage.
“There’s something I’d like to say,” he began, groping for words that would make his meaning plain without telling too much. “I hope you won’t mind my telling you. You were kinda out of your head when I found you, and you said something about seeing a man shot and——”
“Oh!” Lorraine looked up at him, looked through him, he thought, with those brilliant eyes of hers. “Then I did tell——”
“I just wanted to say,” Lone interrupted her, “that I knew all the time it was just a nightmare. I never mentioned it to anybody, and you’ll forget all about it, I hope. You didn’t tell any one else, did you?”
He looked up at her again and found her studying him curiously. “You’re not the man I saw,” she said, as if she were satisfying herself on that point. “I’ve wondered since—but I was sure, too, that I had seen it. Why mustn’t I tell any one?”
Lone did not reply at once. The girl’s eyes were disconcertingly direct, her voice and her manner disturbed him with their judicial calmness, so at variance with the wildness he remembered.
“Well, it’s hard to explain,” he said at last. “You’re strange to this country, and you don’t know all the ins and outs of—things. It wouldn’t do any good to you or anybody else, and it might do a lot of harm.” His eyes nicked her face with a wistful glance. “You don’t know me—I really haven’t got any right to ask or expect you to trust me. But I wish you would, to the extent of forgetting that you saw—or thought you saw—anything that night in Rock City.”