by B. M. Bower
When she came out again, Lite was standing there, smoking a cigarette and leaning against a post.
“You’d better get some sleep, Jean,” he reproved her when she came and stood beside him. “You had a pretty hard day yesterday; and today won’t be any easier. Better go back and lie down.”
Jean merely pulled the serape snugger about her shoulders and sat down sidewise upon the railing. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “If I could, I wouldn’t be out here; I’d be asleep, wouldn’t I? Why don’t you go to bed yourself?”
“Ah-h, Art’s learned to talk Spanish,” he said drily. “I got myself all worked up trying to make out what he was trying to say in his sleep, and then I found out it wasn’t my kinda talk, anyway. So I quit. What’s the matter that you can’t sleep?”
Jean stared down at the shadowy street. A dog ran out from somewhere, sniffed at a doorstep, and trotted over into Mexico and up to the sentry. The sentry patted it on the head and muttered a friendly word or two. Jean watched him absently. It was all so peaceful! Not at all what one would expect, after seeing pictures of all those refugees and all those soldiers fighting, and the dead lying in the street in some little town whose name she could not pronounce correctly.
“Did you hear Art tell about taking a letter to dad the day before?” she asked abruptly. “He wasn’t telling the truth, not all the time. But somehow I believe that was the truth. He said dad stuck it in the pocket of his chaps. I believe it’s there yet, Lite. I don’t remember ever looking into that pocket. And I believe—Lite, I never said anything about it, but somebody kept coming to the house in the night and hunting around through all the rooms. He never came into my room, so I—I didn’t bother him; but I’ve wondered what he was after. It just occurred to me that maybe—”
“I never could figure out what he was after, either,” Lite observed quietly.
“You?” Jean turned her head, so that her eyes shone in the light of a street lamp while she looked up at him. “How in the world did you know about him?”
Lite laughed drily. “I don’t think there’s much concerns you that I don’t know,” he confessed. “I saw him, I guess, every time he came around. He couldn’t have made a crooked move,—and got away with it. But I never could figure him out exactly.”
Jean looked at him, touched by the care of her that he had betrayed in those few words. Always she had accepted him as the one friend who never failed her, but lately,—since the advent of the motion-picture people, to be exact,—a new note had crept into his friendship; a new meaning into his watching over her. She had sensed it, but she had never faced it openly. She pulled her thoughts away from it now.
“Did you know who he was?”
It was like Jean to come straight to the point. Lite smiled faintly; he knew that question would come, and he knew that he would have to answer it.
“Sure. I made it my business to know who he was.”
“Who was it, Lite?”
Lite did not say. He knew that question was coming also, but he did not know whether he ought to answer it.
“It was Uncle Carl, wasn’t it?”
Lite glanced down at her quickly. “You’re a good little guesser.”
“Then it was that letter he was after.” She was silent for a minute, and then she looked at her watch. “And I can’t get at those chaps before tomorrow!” She sighed and leaned back against the post.
“Lite, if it was worth all that hunting for, it must mean something to us. I wonder what it can be; don’t you know?”
“No,” said Lite slowly, “I don’t. And it’s something a man don’t want to do any guessing about.”
This, Jean felt, was a gentle reproof for her own speculations upon the subject. She said no more about the letter.
“I sent him a telegram,” she informed Lite irrelevantly, “saying I’d located Art and was going to take him back there. I wonder what he thought when he got that!”
Lite turned half around and stared down at her. He opened his lips to speak, hesitated, and closed them without making a sound. He turned away and stared down into the street that was so empty. After a little he glanced at his own watch, with the same impulse Jean had felt. The hours and minutes were beginning to drag their feet as they passed.
“You go in,” he ordered gently, “and lie down. You’ll be all worn out when the time comes for you to get busy. We don’t know what’s ahead of us on this trail, Jean. Right now, it’s peaceful as Sunday morning down in Maine; so you go in and get some sleep, while you have a chance, and stop thinking about things. Go on, Jean. I’ll call you plenty early; you needn’t be afraid of missing the train.”
Jean smiled a little at the tender, protective note of authority in his voice and manner. Whether she permitted it or not, Lite would go right on watching over her and taking care of her. With a sudden desire to please him, she rose obediently. When she passed him, she reached out and gave his arm a little squeeze.
“You cantankerous old tyrant,” she drawled in a whisper, “you do love to haze me around, don’t you? Just to spite you, I’ll do it!” She went in and left him standing there, smoking and leaning against the post, calm as the stars above. But under that surface calm, the heart of Lite Avery was thumping violently. His arm quivered still under the thrill of Jean’s fingers. Your bottled-up souls are quick to sense the meaning in a tone or a touch; Jean, whether she herself knew it or not, had betrayed an emotion that set Lite’s thoughts racing out into a golden future. He stood there a long while, staring out upon the darkness, his eyes shining.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE LETTER IN THE CHAPS
Though hours may drag themselves into the past so sluggishly that one is fairly maddened by the snail’s pace of them, into the past they must go eventually. Jean had sat and listened to the wheels of the Golden State Limited clank over the cryptic phrase that meant so much. “Letter-in-the-chaps! Letter-in-the chaps!” was what they had said while the train pounded across the desert and slid through arroyas and deep cuts which leveled hills for its passing. “Letter-in-the-chaps! Letter-in-the-chaps!” And then a silence while they stood by some desolate station where the people were swarthy of skin and black of hair and eyes, and moved languidly if they moved at all. Then they would go on; and when the wheels had clicked over the switches of the various side tracks, they would take up again the refrain: “Letter-in-the-chaps! Letter-in-the-chaps!” until Jean thought she would go crazy if they kept it up much longer.
Little by little they drew near to Los Angeles. And then they were there, sliding slowly through the yards in a drab drizzle of one of California’s fall rains. Then they were in a taxicab, making for the Third Street tunnel. Then Jean stared heavy-eyed at the dripping palms along the boulevard which led away from the smoke of the city and into Hollywood, snuggled against the misty hills. “Letter-in-the-chaps!” her tired brain repeated it still.
Then she was in the apartment shared with Muriel Gay and her mother. These two were over at the studio, the landlady told her when she let them in, and Jean was glad that they were gone.
She knelt, still in her hat and coat and with her gloves on, and fitted her trunk key into the lock. And there she stopped. What if the letter were not in the chaps, after all? What if it were but a trivial note, concerning a matter long since forgotten; a trivial note that had not the remotest bearing upon the murder? “Letter-in-the-chaps!” The phrase returned with a mocking note and beat insistently through her brain. She sat back on the floor and shivered with the chill of a fireless room in California, when a fall rain is at its drizzling worst.
In the next room one of the men coughed; afterwards she heard Lite’s voice, saying something in an undertone to Art Osgood. She heard Art’s voice mutter a reply. She raised herself again to her knees, turned the key in the lock, and lifted the trunk-lid with an air of determination.
Down next the bottom of her big trunk they lay, just as she had packed them away, with her dad’s six-shooter and belt carefully
disposed between the leathern folds. She groped with her hands under a couple of riding-skirts and her high, laced boots, got a firm grip on the fringed leather, and dragged them out. She had forgotten all about the gun and belt until they fell with a thump on the floor. She pulled out the belt, left the gun lying there by the trunk, and hurried out with the chaps dangling over her arm.
She was pale when she stood before the two who sat there waiting with their hats in their hands and their faces full of repressed eagerness. Her fingers trembled while she pulled at the stiff, leather flap of the pocket, to free it from the button.
“Maybe it ain’t there yet,” Art hazarded nervously, while they watched her. “But that’s where he put it, all right. I saw him.”
Jean’s fingers went groping into the pocket, stayed there for a second or two, and came out holding a folded envelope.
“That’s it!” Art leaned toward her eagerly. “That’s the one, all right.”
Jean sat down suddenly because her knees seemed to bend under her weight. Three years—and that letter within her reach all the time!
“Let’s see, Jean.” Lite reached out and took it from her nerveless fingers. “Maybe it won’t amount to anything at all.”
Jean tried to hold herself calm. “Read it—out loud,” she said. “Then we’ll know.” She tried to smile, and made so great a failure of it that she came very near crying. The faint crackle of the cheap paper when Lite unfolded the letter made her start nervously. “Read it—no matter—what it is,” she repeated, when she saw Lite’s eyes go rapidly over the lines.
Lite glanced at her sharply, then leaned and took her hand and held it close. His firm clasp steadied her more than any words could have done. Without further delay or attempt to palliate its grim significance, he read the note:
Aleck:
If Johnny Croft comes to you with anything about me, kick him off the ranch. He claims he knows a whole lot about me branding too many calves. Don’t believe anything he tells you. He’s just trying to make trouble because he claims I underpaid him. He was telling Art a lot of stuff that he claimed he could prove on me, but it’s all a lie. Send him to me if he comes looking for trouble. I’ll give him all he wants.
Art found a heifer down in the breaks that looks like she might have blackleg. I’m going down there to see about it. Maybe you better ride over and see what you think about it; we don’t want to let anything like that get a start on us.
Don’t pay any attention to Johnny. I’ll fix him if he don’t keep his face shut.
CARL.
“Carl!” Jean repeated the name mechanically. “Carl.”
“I kinda thought it was something like that,” Art Osgood interrupted her to say. “Now you know that much, and I’ll tell you just what I know about it. It was Carl shot Crofty, all right. I rode over with him to the Lazy A; I was on my way to town and we went that far together. I rode that way to tell you good-by.” He looked at Jean with a certain diffidence. “I kinda wanted to see you before I went clear outa the country, but you weren’t at home.
“Johnny Croft’s horse was standing outside the house when we rode up. I guess he must have just got there ahead of us. Carl got off and went in ahead of me. Johnny was eating a snack when I went in. He said something to Carl, and Carl flared up. I saw there wasn’t anybody at home, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in the argument, so I turned and went on out. And I hadn’t more than got to my horse when I heard a shot, and Carl came running out with his gun in his hand.
“Well, Johnny was dead, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Carl told me to beat it outa the country, just like I’d been planning; he said it would be a whole lot better for him, seeing I wasn’t an eye-witness. He said Johnny started to draw his gun, and he shot in self-defense; and he said I better go while the going was good, or I might get pulled into it some way.
“Well, I thought it over for a minute, and I didn’t see where it would get me anything to stay. I couldn’t help Carl any by staying, because I wasn’t in the house when it happened. So I hit the trail for town, and never said anything to anybody.” He looked at the two contritely. “I never knew, till you folks came to Nogales looking for me, that things panned out the way they did. I thought Carl was going to give himself up, and would be cleared. I never once dreamed he was the kinda mark that would let his own brother take the blame that way.”
“I guess nobody did.” Lite folded the letter and pushed it back into the envelope. “I can look back now, though, and see how it come about. He hung back till Aleck found the body and was arrested; and after that he just simply didn’t have the nerve to step out and say that he was the one that did it. He tried hard to save Aleck, but he wouldn’t—”
“The coward! The low, mean coward!” Jean stood up and looked from one to the other, and spoke through her clinched teeth. “To let dad suffer all this while! Lite, when did you say that train left for Salt Lake? We can take the taxi back down town, and save time.” She was at the door when she turned toward the two again. “Hurry up! Don’t you know we’ve got to hurry? Dad’s in prison all this while! And Uncle Carl,—there’s no telling where Uncle Carl is! That wire I sent him was the worst thing I could have done!”
“Or the best,” suggested Lite laconically, as he led the way down the hall and out to the rain-drenched, waiting taxicab.
CHAPTER XXV
LITE COMES OUT OF THE BACKGROUND
For hours Jean had sat staring out at the drear stretches of desert dripping under the dismal rain that streaked the car windows. The clouds hung leaden and gray close over the earth; the smoke from the engine trailed a funereal plume across the grease-wood covered plain. Away in the distance a low line of hills stretched vaguely, as though they were placed there to hold up the sky that was so heavy and dank. Alongside the track every ditch ran full of clay-colored water that wrapped little, ragged wreaths of dirty foam around every obstruction, like the tawdry finery of the slums.
From the smoking-room where he had been for the past two hours with Art Osgood, Lite came unsteadily down the aisle, heralded as it were by the muffled scream of the whistle at a country crossing. Jean turned toward him a face as depressed as the desert out there under the rain. Lite, looking at her keenly, saw on her cheeks the traces of tears. He let himself down wearily into the seat beside her, reached over calmly, and took her hand from off her lap and held it snugly in his own.
“This is likely a snowstorm, up home,” he said in his quiet, matter-of-fact way. “I guess we’ll have to make our headquarters in town till I get things hauled out to the ranch. That’s it, when you can’t look ahead and see what’s coming. I could have had everything ready to go right on out, only I thought there wouldn’t be any use, before spring, anyway. But if this storm ain’t a blizzard up there, a couple of days will straighten things out.”
Jean turned her head and regarded him attentively. “Out where?” she asked him bluntly. “What are you talking about? Have you and Art been celebrating?” She knew better than that. Lite never indulged in liquid celebrations, and Jean knew it.
Lite reached into his pocket with the hand that was free, and drew forth a telegram envelope. He released her hand while he drew out the message, but he did not hand it to her immediately. “I wired Rossman from Los Angeles,” he informed her, “and told him what was up, and asked him to put me up to date on that end of the line. So he did. I got this back there at that last town.” He laid his hand over hers again, and looked down at her sidelong.
“Ever since the trouble,” he began abruptly, but still in that quiet, matter-of-fact way, “I’ve been playing a lone hand and kinda holding back and waiting for something to drop. I had that idea all along that you’ve had this summer: getting hold of the Lazy A and fixing it up so your dad would have a place to come back to. I never said anything, because talking don’t come natural to me like it does to some, and I’d rather do a thing first and then talk about it afterwards if I have to.
“So I hun
g on to what money I had saved up along; I was going to get me a bunch of cattle and fix up that homestead of mine some day, and maybe have a little home.” His eyes went surreptitiously to her face, and lingered there wistfully. “So after the trouble I buckled down to work and saved a little faster, if anything. It looked to me like there wasn’t much hope of doing anything for your dad till his sentence ran out, so I never said anything about it. Long as Carl didn’t try to sell it to anybody else, I just waited and got together all the money I could. I didn’t see as there was anything else to do.”
Jean was chewing a corner of her lip, and was staring out of the window. “I didn’t know I was stealing your thunder, Lite,” she said dispiritedly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
‘Wasn’t anything to tell—till there was something to tell. Now, this telegram here,—this is what I started out to talk about. It’ll be just as well if you know it before we get to Helena. I showed it to Art, and he thought the same as I did. You know,—or I reckon you don’t, because I never said anything,—away last summer, along about the time you went to work for Burns, I got to thinking things over, and I wondered if Carl didn’t have something on his mind about that killing. So I wrote to Rossman. I didn’t much like the way he handled your dad’s case, but he knew all the ins and outs, so I could talk to him without going away back at the beginning. He knew Carl, too, so that made it easier.
“I wrote and told him how Carl was prowling around through the house nights, and the like of that, and to look up the title to the Lazy A—”
“Why wouldn’t you wait and let me buy it myself?” Jean asked him with just a shade of sharpness in her voice. “You knew I wanted to.”