by Peter Dawson
Keech answered out of the darkness: “That’d sure be a help, ma’am. Far as I know, Lyans ain’t thought of any way to tell her yet. She’s in room Number Fourteen.”
Jean dressed hurriedly, hearing her father and Keech leave before she had quite finished. Out on the street, she gathered her coat tightly about her against the bite of the cold night air. She took the dogleg bend in the street, and, seeing the crowd and the lights at the Land Office close ahead, she purposely avoided going over there by keeping to the opposite walk. She wished she could be with her father now, to help him take this bitter defeat that might undo all the fruits of his long struggle to settle things peaceably with the ranchers. But this other was more important. Ruth Merrill’s manner was always proud and distant, not only toward her alone; Jean knew that at such a time as this the girl would be alone and friendless, and the stubborn streak in her wouldn’t let her side with others when it came to gloating over Ruth’s misery.
The upper hallway of The Antlers was empty and so dark that Jean had a hard time finding the Number 14 on a door far back along it. Her knock remained unanswered for a long interval, so that she had to repeat it, much louder the second time.
Finally Ruth Merrill’s voice called sleepily: “Who is it?”
“Jean Vanover, Ruth. May I come in?”
Ruth made some unintelligible response and Jean tried the door. It was locked. She waited as sounds of movement came from inside. Finally lamplight glowed beneath the sill, and a moment later the door opened on Ruth. She was pulling a robe about her, tying its cord. Her silvery blonde hair was mussed, the braids hanging down her back loosened to give her a slightly disheveled look. Typically she smoothed down the robe at her slender waist and reached up to run a high-backed comb through her hair; her two hands came down to rub color into her cheeks, and at once she was her usual beautiful self, calm, assured, her look a trifle aloof as she said: “Isn’t it rather late?”
“Yes, Ruth. But something has happened. It . . .”
“To Ed?” Ruth asked with surprising intuition. She stepped aside and Jean moved past her into the room.
“Yes, to Ed. There’s been an accident.”
Jean was trying to think of words to add, words that would ease the shock of the message she was bringing, when Ruth breathed softly: “He’s dead. I know it. You don’t need to tell me.”
All Jean could do was give a brief nod of her dark head and watch the change that came over the other girl. Ruth seemed to shrink visibly, to lose her proud bearing as her shoulders sagged lifelessly. Her bright-blue eyes became moist, then tear-filled, and she was no longer quite so beautiful. Jean held out her arms. The other girl, stripped of her cloak of pride, came to her, trying to stifle a sob.
“It’ll do you good to cry, Ruth,” Jean said softly.
In the following minutes she was humble before the knowledge that Ruth Merrill wasn’t the cold and unapproachable woman she had always appeared to be. She was but a girl, tragically lost in a maëlstrom of grief, bewildered and afraid. And, when that spasm of grief had worn itself out, Ruth Merrill showed the tough fiber of her make-up. Gently she pulled away from Jean, dried her eyes, and said: “You are kind, Jean. Now tell me how it happened, all of it.”
Jean told what she knew, of the robbery, what Keech had told her father, omitting only the hotel clerk’s lurid details of Ed’s death. Ruth listened without once interrupting, dispassionately now, as though the well of emotion within her had been drained dry.
As Jean finished, an enigmatic smile touched the other girl’s face. Catching Jean’s puzzled look, she said in a tense and low voice: “I’m only thinking how typical this is of everything that’s ever happened to Ed. In a way I can be sorry for him. In another way I can’t. Tonight I hated him, loathed him for what he tried to do to Joe. Is it cruel of me to say that? I was glad he got that beating.”
“I don’t know, Ruth.”
“He’s always hated Joe. Tonight he must have heard that Joe’s father had turned him out again. He must have decided to kick the man while he was down. Well, it didn’t turn out that way. Ed must have been thinking of that, of the beating he took, when he died.” In the silence that followed, Ruth seemed to be staring through Jean, not seeing her, as an imaginary picture blocked out of the real one. “Ed could never understand that I loved Joe, that I still do love him.”
“You love Joe Bonnyman?” Jean breathed incredulously. “I thought you and Clark . . .”
Ruth laughed uneasily and turned to walk to the bed and sit on it. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, so tightly that her slender fingers were white at the knuckles. She eyed Jean squarely, intently, as she said: “It shouldn’t matter to me that you understand how I feel. But it does. Someone must understand. Ever since I can remember, Joe Bonnyman has stirred up a feeling in me that’s like the run of a grass fire before the wind. He’s the only man who ever affected me that way. He’s everything Ed wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why I liked him so much. He’s kind and impulsive, and maybe a little wild. But he was never cruel, even in what he did to his father. Ed was cruel. He was calculating. All his life he hated Joe. And because we were so opposite, I suppose he drove me toward Joe.”
Jean caught the touch of hysteria in Ruth’s voice. “You’d better lie down,” she said. “I’ll see if the doctor won’t let you have some sleeping tablets.”
“I don’t want to sleep.” Ruth said. “I want to think, to get things straight. Seeing Joe tonight has changed things as much as Ed’s not being here to hound me any longer will change them.” There came again that strange smile of a moment ago, one that did little to heighten Ruth’s good looks. “You wonder how I can talk of Joe in the face of things as they stand between Clark and me? Jean, I have a little of the devil in me. Joe was mine once, and I wouldn’t have him. Now that I have Clark, I’m not the least surprised that it’s Joe I’m thinking of. But can’t you see, it always has been Joe? There was never anyone . . .”
They both turned at a knock on the door. A quick change came over Ruth, and once more she gave momentary attention to her appearance, lifting her hands to smooth her hair, to gather the robe closer at her neck. Then she called: “Come in!”
It was Bill Lyans who stood in the doorway as the panel swung open. His hat was in his hand, and there was an uncomfortable look on his face at having invaded the privacy of a woman’s bedroom. He gave Ruth a quick glance, and his eye went to the floor, defensive in his embarrassment.
“I wanted to stop in and tell you how sorry I am this happened,” he said tonelessly. “We’ll all miss Ed.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, Bill. Yes, we’ll miss him.”
“We found something that may help us,” the deputy went on hastily. He dipped a hand in a coat pocket and brought out the horsehair hatband. Before he had a chance to continue, Ruth gave an audible gasp and his eyes went to hers, intercepting their startled expression. For a moment he was puzzled, then he asked: “Know whose it is?”
“Joe’s,” Ruth breathed. “Where did you find it?”
“In Ed’s hand.” he told her. “It looks like pretty clear proof that Bonnyman killed him.”
“No!” Ruth was up off the bed, fists clenched, eyes blazing defiance. “It couldn’t be! Joe wouldn’t kill that way. Ed wasn’t that important to him.”
“He knocked Ed through a saloon window not three hours ago,” Lyans reminded her.
“That!” Ruth was breathing deeply, as though from violent exertion. “It was some silly argument they had.”
“Did Ed tell you what it was?”
Jean Vanover’s glance was fully on the other girl, waiting for her answer. Strangely enough, she hoped that Ruth would have that answer, one that would clear Joe Bonnyman of guilt in this murder. She didn’t know why that hope struck her, but it was there.
But Lyans’s question brought a look of uncertainty to Ruth’s face. “Of course he did,” she answered evasively.
“What was it?”
> Ruth hesitated a moment, as though deciding something. Then: “Ed had once warned Joe to stay away from me. He warned him again tonight. Joe wouldn’t take it, so they fought.”
Lyans shrugged and put the hatband back in his pocket. “It won’t hurt to check up,” he said. “Johns is wirin’ the agent at Junction to find out if Joe’s on that late freight. If he is, he’s cleared.” The deputy paused a moment before adding: “And I’m hopin’ he is on it.” He looked again at the two girls in the same embarrassed way he had at first entering the room and muttered: “I’d better be goin’.”
“Wait.” Ruth’s word stopped him. “What if Joe isn’t on the train?”
“Then we’ll have to get out and hunt him.”
“But you can’t believe he would murder a man!”
“If it was him, he not only committed murder, but robbery as well. Whoever did it got close to nine thousand from Acme’s safe.”
Peculiarly enough, Jean felt little emotion beyond a curious anger as her fear of Acme’s loss was substantiated. She was too engrossed in Ruth Merrill’s strange determination to defend the man who might be her brother’s murderer, too wrapped in her own odd wish to see Joe cleared, to take in the full significance of what the robbery might mean to her father.
“So you’ve already found a victim?” Ruth gave a laugh edged with hysteria. “Why would Joe steal?”
“A lot can happen to a man in five years,” Lyans said mildly but pointedly. “Maybe he figured Middle Arizona got his layout for a song. Fact is, they did.”
There was loathing and contempt in the look Ruth gave the lawman. But she had herself well under control now, and, when she spoke, her voice was firmer. “Will you promise me one thing? To let me know before you go ahead on this?”
“That’s fair enough,” he agreed. “After all, you got the right to know before we . . .”
He broke off in mid-sentence as steps sounded on the stairs coming up out of the lobby. He turned into the doorway and looked along the hall.
“Clark . . . and Johns,” he said shortly. “Johns has probably talked with Junction.”
Jean could see the tension that ripped Ruth as they waited for the approach of Clark Dunne and the station agent along the hallway. Although her instinct was to side with this girl, she was disturbed by the contradiction in Ruth’s reasons for wanting to prove Joe Bonnyman innocent. Here was a girl who, on the surface at least, had everything she wanted. Yet she was pushing aside all the ethics of convention to protect the man who might be her brother’s murderer. It was bewildering to Jean to understand Ruth’s real feelings in the face of everything she knew about her, of her feeling for Clark Dunne, for instance. It was even more bewildering to understand her own feelings at this moment.
Clark was first in the door. He came over at once to Ruth, taking her in his arms. But in the moment she should have answered his embrace, she pushed away and looked at Johns.
“What did you find out?” she asked.
“Looks like it was Bonnyman,” Johns answered respectfully. What he next said was directed to the deputy. “They don’t know where he left the train, or when. The conductor hit the blankets right after he left here, and the brakeman was sittin’ look-out.”
Lyans looked at Clark, and the rancher said: “That’s still not proof.”
“We’ll see.” The deputy started out the door.
“Where are you going?” Ruth spoke so sharply that Lyans stopped in mid-stride.
When he faced her again, his face bore a harassed look. “To look for him, I reckon. It ain’t that I want to do this, Miss Merrill. But a man’s been murdered, your brother. Bonnyman could’ve left that train close to a dozen places where he could find a horse and get back here. The time checks pretty close. What I’m scared of is that he’s got away.”
Ruth gave no answer to that, and Lyans, sensing her antagonism toward his line of reasoning, went out into the hallway and along it, followed by Johns. They heard Johns ask—“You want me anymore, Bill?”—and the deputy answered: “Yeah. You’re to wire Gap and Junction and tell ’em to be on the lookout for . . .” There his words became lost in an unintelligible mutter as he went down the stairs.
Jean was feeling uncomfortable at having witnessed the contradictions of these past twenty minutes. She felt sorry for Ruth, and at the same time angry at her for having so openly defied all the conventions that should govern her action and thought at a moment like this.
“I mustn’t stay, Ruth,” she said now. “We’d like to have you come to the house if it would be any more comfortable for you.”
“Don’t go yet, please.” Ruth turned to Clark. “Will you do something for me, Clark?”
“Name it,” he said.
“They’ll send out a posse, won’t they?”
He nodded soberly, frowning in his effort to see what she was leading up to.
“And Joe would naturally head for Anchor, wouldn’t he? To see Blaze and get an outfit for the ride out across the hills.”
Clark’s look sharpened. “Joe didn’t do this, Ruth. He couldn’t have . . .”
Jean wondered why he didn’t complete his thought.
“But Bill Lyans thinks he did. So will the others,” Ruth insisted. “It’s up to you to get out there and warn him, warn him to keep out of sight, to get out of the country, anything to avoid arrest.”
“I tell you Joe didn’t do it.”
“Of course he didn’t.” The perfunctory way Ruth gave her denial made it plain to Clark that she didn’t believe what she was saying, and Jean caught his look of astonished bewilderment. “You must tell Lyans you’re riding out to break the news to Father. You might even start with the posse. But you’re to get to Anchor before them. Do you understand, Clark? You mustn’t let them take Joe.”
His look underwent a slow change, one Jean couldn’t understand. It hardened out of perplexity into a cool restraint. “You still care for him, don’t you, Ruth?” he asked tonelessly.
“Of course I do. He’s an old friend. I don’t want to see him made a victim by all these people who hate him.”
“But supposing he really killed Ed?” Clark’s question demanded an answer.
“Then he must have had a good reason.”
Clark let a moment’s silence run out before he said: “You’re defending him, even if he’s guilty?”
“But he isn’t. You say so yourself.” Ruth laid her hand on his arm and gave him a warm smile as she gently turned him toward the door. “Come back as soon as you can, Clark. I’ll want to know.”
He hesitated, seeming about to protest. But in the end he left without a word.
Jean was trying to think of a way to excuse herself when Ruth gave her a look that was relieved, almost happy. “You really wouldn’t mind staying with me tonight?” she asked. “You can get your things and come back. I don’t think I could bear it to stay here alone. They’ll think they have to come and sit with me, talk with me . . . all these women who hate me. You’re very kind, Jean.” Having thus put Jean to an inconvenience, rather than herself, Ruth put her arm around the other girl, ushered her to the door, and said: “Don’t be long, will you?”
Down on the street, walking toward the jail where a dozen riders were already gathered, Clark Dunne faced the sober fact that his guess of earlier tonight had been proved correct. Excitement and nerve strain had robbed Ruth of a measure of her subtlety; otherwise, she would have sent him on this errand without betraying the fact that tonight had seen a revival of her former feeling for Joe. The realization of how exactly the facts were matching with the somber picture of his earlier imagining did nothing to improve Clark’s frame of mind.
A loose board on the high-galleried front of a store across the way banged before a gust of wind. Dust was lifted from the street and swirled across to fog the light of the posse lanterns. The wind cut through Clark’s coat, laying a cold touch along his back. Glancing skyward, he couldn’t see the stars, and judged that it would be snowing before l
ong. He would have to get his sheepskin before he started out.
As Clark approached, Bill Lyans came onto the walk, four rifles under his arm. He handed them out to the waiting men, saying brusquely: “We’ll stick together as far as Bonnyman’s, and then split up in twos. Sparling leave?”
One of the men gave an affirmative. Clark saw his chance to speak, and said casually: “Someone ought to swing off to Merrill’s. Reckon that’s my job. Wait for me at Anchor, Bill.” Lyans gave him a brief look that held a meaning Clark didn’t grasp until the deputy said: “Sparling’s already left for Brush. It’ll save you the trip.”
Thus, offhandedly, did Bill Lyans let Clark know where he stood. The deputy had delegated another man to a task that was logically Clark’s. Clark was a friend of Joe’s, and was therefore to be watched until the hunt was well organized.
“As you say, Bill,” Clark answered, only faintly irritated by the studied unconcern of the others, who understood well enough what was going on. He found satisfaction in not being able to follow Ruth’s wishes. What he didn’t like, though, was the prospect of having to be under Lyans’s orders during the hunt for Joe. Certain private matters needed his urgent attention, and this misdirected manhunt might prove a costly waste of time. However, there was nothing he could do about it.
Manhunt
The wind came out of the east, its first fitful gusts bringing snow. It whipped down the washes below the mesa rim, kicking up a scud of dust so thick that Joe Bonnyman tilted his head against it, eyes squinted. But that wind bore a sweet smell of grass, and drove out the tang of sage that had been in his nostrils these past two hours. He welcomed it. He would always associate that fresh sweet odor with home.
He had quit the roan two miles back, not wanting to lame the animal too badly. He’d left his saddle and war bag back there, pausing only long enough to get his gun and strap it about his waist. He had chosen to wear the weapon out of habit that had lately become too strong to ignore, an instinct that warned him never to travel a strange country without it.