Chavis grinned and holstered his gun. “Thanks.”
“Christ.”
They walked up the street, turned at the intersection beyond the Marshal’s Office, and went up to a small frame house set back behind a painted wooden fence that enclosed a yard full of cottonwoods. Clarissa Vane answered Chavis’ knock, gave Destiny a curious glance and elicited Chavis’ explanation: “Got a visitor for Jeremy.”
“He’s awake,” she said, and let them in.
Six turned his head on the pillow and gave Destiny his cursory attention before he welcomed Chavis with a growl. The room was still warm with the day’s stored-up heat; Six was in a nightshirt, covered only by a sheet. His toes rested against the footboard of the bed; his head was propped up on two pillows. A tray of dishes stood on the table by the bed; Clarissa picked it up and said, “I’ll wash the dinner plates while you men talk,” and left the room.
Destiny said, “You’re Jeremy Six. I’ve heard of you.”
Chavis explained, “This here’s Jim Destiny, Jeremy. He’s on his way through town. I brought him by to see if you couldn’t talk him into taking over as deputy for you until you get back on your feet.”
“Not a chance,” Destiny said. He found a chair and sat down. “But I’m willing to be sociable. How’d you get laid up?”
“Gunshot,” said Six.
“Occupational hazard,” Destiny said, without a break in expression. “I lost three brothers that way.”
“I’ve heard,” Six said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t bring them back,” said Jim Destiny. “I just figure not to go out the same way myself. Which is why I’ve got no interest in taking your job.” He changed the subject firmly. “Who shot you?”
“A tough by the name of Jennings.”
“You pull him down?”
“Yes,” Six said, and it was all the explanation Destiny needed.
Tracy Chavis said, “Jennings drew you into a trap that night, Jeremy. There’s only one way to figure that. He had orders to kill you.”
“Maybe,” Six said. “Can you prove that?”
“No. Stratton claims it must have been all Clete Jennings’ idea. Says he had nothing to do with it. But what the hell do you expect him to say? We both know Stratton sicced Jennings on you.”
“What we both know and what we can prove are two different things, Tracy.”
Jim Destiny was leaning forward, elbows on knees. He was frowning. “Stratton. That wouldn’t be Sid Stratton?
Chavis said, “You know him?”
“Yeah,” Destiny breathed. “I know him. What’s his piece of all this?”
Encouraged by Destiny’s signs of interest, Chavis said, “Stratton came into town a few months ago and bought a saloon here in Cat Town. He’s been building toward trouble ever since.”
“I can believe that,” Destiny said. “He’s still here in town, Stratton?”
“He is,” Chavis said. “If I had anything to say about it, he wouldn’t be. But he’s slick enough not to leave loose ends hanging where you can grab them. Nobody can prove anything against him. In the meantime he’s setting up for a big grab.”
“Sure,” Destiny said. “He’ll start the biggest card game in town and run it straight and honest until all the rich folks are hooked. Then he’ll switch in a fast deck and suck every dollar off the table like a tornado coming through town.”
Six said, “I see you’ve met Stratton before.”
“Yeah, I met him. So’d my brother.”
“Which brother?” Chavis asked.
“Steve.”
“Wasn’t he killed in Silver City a few months ago?”
“That’s right,” Destiny said, with a bleak glance at him. “It wasn’t Stratton that killed him, but it was on Stratton’s account that he got killed. All right, gents. I’ll buy a hand in the game.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Chavis said. “I hoped you’d come around. You’re taking a hell of a load off my mind, fellow.”
“I’m not interested in your mind,” Destiny said. “Pin a badge on me, Marshal, and I’ll see what I can do about closing Sid Stratton down. Then I’ll be on my way.”
“Not so fast,” Jeremy Six said. “This isn’t a raw boomtown and we don’t do things that way here, Destiny. If you want the job, you’ll do it my way.”
“Which is?”
“By the book,” Six said flatly. “You don’t pick fights, you don’t bend the law, you don’t crowd people you don’t like into corners where they’ve got to draw against you just so you can shoot them down in so-called self-defense. If you want to close Sid Stratton down, then you get proof against him that will stand up in court, and you arrest him alive, and you put him in jail, and you hang around long enough to testify against him when his trial comes up.”
Destiny gave Chavis a blank side-glance. “Sounds like a namby-pamby brand of law and order you’ve got around here.”
Six said, “You play by those rules or not at all, Destiny.”
“You sound just like my brother Steve.
“I hear he was a good lawman,” Six answered.
“He used to be, until a while before he got killed. He hit the skids—or didn’t you hear?” Destiny’s mouth corners turned down. “Steve was drunk when they killed him. Too drunk to shoot back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Six. “But that doesn’t make the law wrong.”
“The law,” Jim Destiny muttered, and shrugged. “All right. I don’t much care how I bring Stratton down, so long as it gets done.”
“One warning more,” Six said. “I’m interested in justice, not vengeance. You understand that?”
“Sometimes the two amount to the same thing,” Destiny answered. “But we’ll play by your rules, Marshal. Now, where do I sign up?”
When Chavis and the new deputy were gone, Six settled back on his pillows with a grimace. The wound had scabbed over; each movement of his torso stretched the half-formed scab and made it feel like pulling hair. Forced to stay flat on his back because too much movement would open the wound again, Six felt the inescapable irritability that came to every active man confined against his will. It had made him gruff with Destiny, when he realized the young man was in the grip of sadness and grief and probably needed understanding. But it was a tough country; Jim Destiny would have to work out his own troubles. Six’s job was to see that Spanish Flat didn’t suffer as a result.
Clarissa came in drying her hands; she sat by him, in the chair Destiny had left. She said, “I overheard most of it from the kitchen. You hired him because you need him, but you’re worried because you’re not sure it wasn’t a mistake.”
“You read a man too well,” he growled.
“I’ve known you too long,” she answered with a smile. “That boy’s all right,” Six said. “He’ll be all right, at any rate, as soon as he gets whatever’s bothering him out of his system. I’m just afraid he may take it out of his system with enough of a bang to blow up half this town.”
“He’s bitter about his brother. You could see that.”
“It’s something more than that,” Six said. “He’s had time to get over his brother’s death. There’s some other grief eating at that boy.”
She touched his forehead gently. “You did what you had to do. Don’t brood, Jeremy.”
He reached for her hand and enveloped it in his own big fist. Even on these summer days she somehow looked cool. Her hair was long, heavy and black, cascading past her shoulders. She was a New Orleans girl whose family had gone broke on three-cent cotton in the wake of the Civil War; she had been on her own in tough country since then, but there was a part of her that didn’t seem to have been touched by it. She was tough enough when she had to be, but she wasn’t coarse in any way. She was all woman—a fact she used to her own shrewd advantage in the man’s world she inhabited; she had made her way across the West as a lady gambler, and had counted on men’s curiosity to keep her card games peopled. In Spanish Flat she
had stopped to play poker in a game at the Glad Hand Saloon—and the owner of the place, on a bad streak, had backed an ace-high straight with the title to his property. Clarissa had won the game with a heart flush, and had become owner and manager of the Glad Hand. She had made it into a comfortable saloon, the best but for the Drovers Rest, but nonetheless it was a Cat Town saloon and nothing more. It had been months before Jeremy Six had removed his hat in her presence—a sure sign that he had finally acknowledged that, despite her place, Clarissa was a lady worthy of his respect.
They both lived in the same hard world of violence and shadows; yet in their own ways they both stood above it. It was not strange that in time their mutual respect had warmed and deepened.
Now she squeezed his hand and said again, in her gentle voice, “You did what you had to do.”
“Just the same, I’ll be easier in mind when I can get on my feet and keep an eye on Jim Destiny for myself.”
Three
In his cynical life of uncaring dissipation, young Earle Mainwaring did not take pride in many things. But there was one thing he was proud of; though, if he thought about it, he would realize there was no reason to take pride, for it was none of his doing.
Earle Mainwaring had a beautiful sister; he was proud of her. Lisa was petite, finer-boned than her brother, who was himself a small-boned man. She had Earle’s dark coloring, but where Earle’s hair was an unkempt black mat falling around his face, hers was shining raven-black, combed back and swept up behind her head. She was small but her carriage was regal; her waist seemed no larger to the eye than a big man’s handspan; her mouth was full, her eyes large and bright, her face high-boned and striking.
They lived in their father’s house, at the edge of Spanish Flat on a green knoll planted with thick trees that screened the big house from the road two hundred yards below. A winding gravel drive, marked by coach lights on posts, made its way through the trees to a wide turnaround in front of the Georgian veranda. For Arizona, it was an extraordinary house; but then, Garrett Mainwaring was an extraordinary man.
He had come, their father, from a distinguished line: the Mainwarings of Baltimore. He had served with distinction as a brigadier general in the War Between the States. He was a mining engineer by profession, and he was one of the best. As the family’s fortunes had staggered at the end of the hard war, Garrett Mainwaring had struck out to the West in search of mineral wealth. The result had been the Mogul strike—the silver discovery that had opened the mountains above Spanish Flat to a crush of immigrants in search of the gleaming metal. Mainwaring’s Silverbelle had been the first mine to go into operation on the Mogul—first, and biggest. Garrett Mainwaring had done his own hardrock digging, exploring the quartz and limestone of the Mogul Rim country with spade and pick; he had surveyed his own veins of silver, hauled his own ore on his own back, and filled the county assayer’s eyes with amazement at the richness of the ore. He had staked his own claim, brought in machinery, and hired men to dig the first of what soon became dozens of deep tunnels that burrowed far into the rock-solid mountains.
The Mainwaring fortune of antebellum days had been nothing to compare with the wealth Garrett Mainwaring took out of the Arizona ground. By now he owned two mines and shares in five others, as well as a reduction mill and an ore-freight line and three houses—one at the Silverbelle Mine, one in San Francisco (where every wealthy man west of Denver was required by custom to own a residence), and one, this one in which he spent half his time and his children lived all the time, just outside Spanish Flat.
A great many men had struck it rich in the ore fields of the West since the war. For most of them, it was the first time in their lives they had known wealth. They spent recklessly: they gambled with gusto; they invested in fly-by-night schemes; they bought railroad trains to carry them around the country; they built huge rococo monstrosities of houses, or imported European castles stone-by-stone. They had money, but no taste. They had wealth, but no knowledge of its uses. Garrett Mainwaring was not one of those. His aristocratic background had instilled in him the ability to invest wisely, to build soundly, to live in the greatest possible comfort without garish ostentation.
The house in Spanish Flat was not exceptionally large; it had five bedrooms, parlor, drawing room, dining room, kitchen, two indoor bathrooms, and the galleried veranda. It was an eminently comfortable house. Its walls were of double thicknesses separated by a dead-air space that insulated against summer heat; and its site, on top of a grassy hill surrounded by trees, gave it every possible advantage of breeze and shade. It was not a show-off house but there was no denying that it was the most elegant, dignified, and livable house in Spanish Flat.
If Garrett’s firstborn, his son Earle, was aware of that distinction, he never remarked on it. The Georgian house was the place where Earle hung his hat, and was waited on by the two house servants; that was all. Tonight, Earle sat in the parlors stuffed leather wingback chair, feet propped on a leather ottoman and hand wrapped around a bottle of Kentucky’s best sour mash whiskey, from which he took periodic swallows. His petulant eyes shifted restlessly from the bottle to the curving staircase. He was waiting for his sister to come down.
Lisa had only recently come home from finishing school in Baltimore. If her father, in sending her East to school, had expected her to make the acquaintance of eligible young men from Eastern society, he had been correct; but if he had expected her to find any of those young men suitable for marriage, he had been wrong. The young men of Baltimore, she said, thought of nothing but how to make money in stocks and futures, or how to become successful corporation lawyers, or whose yacht was to be the site of next weekend’s drunken party. None of the young men -had callused hands or values that meant anything to Lisa. And so she had finished school and come home to the West where she had grown up. When her father had shown his disappointment, Lisa had said tartly, “I’m sorry, Dad. I guess you just can’t make a genteel crinoline lady out of me.” And Garrett Mainwaring had thrown up his hands and fled to San Francisco on the pretext of having business there. He was still out of town.
Earle heard her footfalls at the top of the stairs and looked up. She came down with a flare of skirts, a figure of grace descending the steps on delicate feet. But there was nothing delicate about the direct, disapproving glance she gave him. “That’s Dad’s chair.”
“So?”
“So you had better get your spurs off that ottoman before you tear a hole in it. Have you spilled whiskey on the chair yet?”
“Good God,” he said. He dragged his foot down and banged the bottle on the marble-top table beside him. “I don’t suppose you’re ready to go yet?”
“I’m ready,” she said, tying the drawstrings of her bonnet beneath her chin. “But I still don’t understand why you want me to go with you to see Amos Krausmeier.”
“Just be nice to him. Agree with whatever I say. I need him to help me out on a little deal, and I want to make a good impression. You can help me do that. Just bat those big blue eyes.”
“What kind of deal, Earle?”
“Look,” he said uncomfortably, “will it kill you to do your brother a favor without asking so goddamn many questions?”
“All I want to know is what you expect to gain by this.”
“It’d take too long to explain,” he said. “It’s just that I got myself in a little jam and Krausmeier may be able to help me out of it, but I don’t want him to get the idea he’s doing anything for me. I want him to think it’s the other way around—I want him to think I’m doing him a favor.”
“What favor?”
“You’ll see soon enough. Look, Lisa, all you’ve got to do is back me up, whatever I say to him. If I say the moon’s made out of green cheese, you tell him how good it tastes. Is that so damned hard?”
“It is when I’ve got a pretty good idea it isn’t true.”
“What isn’t true?”
She said, “I don’t really think the moon is made out of green che
ese. Do you?”
“For God’s sake.” he said, and turned around, throwing his arms in the air and looking at the ceiling in vast exasperation.
Lisa chuckled and took his arm. “All right, big brother. It’ll be amusing to see what sort of scheme you’ve got cooked up. And Amos Krausmeier has always made me laugh anyway.”
They took the buggy; Earle drove as if there was an urgent need for speed. Lisa said nothing; she wished she understood what was troubling her brother. Ever since she had come home, he had been taut and irritable, jumpy and snappish. She could easily believe he was in “a little jam”; she wanted to know what it was, but she knew better than to press him with direct questions. She would never get an answer out of him that way. Better to watch what developed and try to fathom the mystery from whatever clues he might divulge. They had never been particularly close, even though they were only two years apart in age; they were both deceptive people, but in opposite ways. Earle appeared to be deadly serious about everything, yet at bottom he was neither deep nor committed. His attention span was short; he devoted his serious attention to frivolous things. Lisa, on the other hand, gave the appearance of being light on her feet and frivolous, and yet her quick-witted bantering manner masked deep concern and warmth.
It was that depth of human character, rather than an excess of affection for her trivial brother, which made her worry about him now. She had worried about him for a long time, for this was a man’s world and in the ordinary scheme of things he would be expected to step into his father’s shoes at some time and take over the reins of Garrett Mainwaring’s businesses. By an ironic trick of fate it was the daughter, not the son, who was better equipped to do that—even their father recognized that; yet he, and Lisa too, kept hoping Earle would grow up.
So far, there hadn’t been any signs that he would. Lisa watched him lash the buggy horse petulantly, watched the poutish set of his narrow features, and wondered again what “little jam” he was in this time.
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