“How do I know that?”
“Trusting, ain’t you?”
“Show me a reason why I should trust you,” she said.
Jim Brand put his gun back into its holster and stayed put, on the chance something might come up in the conversation across the hall that might give him a clue to what he sought.
Lutz said, “You sure you ain’t seen Brand up here?”
“What if I have?” There was a brief stretch of silence, after which the girl said in a more apprehensive voice, “What do you want, anyway?”
“You,” Lutz said bluntly.
The girl laughed softly—Brand could barely make it out; then she said in an even tone of voice, “On what terms?”
“What the hell kind of a question is that? How does a man want a woman?”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said.
“Let me in, you goddamn spitfire, and I’ll show you what kind of terms I’ve got in mind.”
“You may be a big man to some, Wayne, but where do you think you get off talking to me that way?”
It took a moment; Brand imagined that Lutz was probably forcing himself to calm down; then the rumbling voice said, “Hell, girl, I can buy you whatever you want. I can take you out of this pack-rat’s nest and set you up in style. We’ve talked about this before, Michaela.”
“You mean you’ve talked. I just listen. So far I haven’t heard much. What’s really on your mind, Wayne?” There was an unmistakable bitter resignation in her tone.
“You are,” Lutz said. “You know that, damn it. Every time I find an excuse to come by here, you give me that sweet-mocking smile of yours and you laugh at me. You lead me along a ways and then you drop me, and laugh about it. I can see your eyes, Michaela—I see the way you flirt with every man that comes along. Hell, you don’t have to make calf eyes at scum like that McCasford kid or drifters with no bottom like Brand. I’ll take you out of all that—I’ll set you up. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she said. “But it’s not enough.”
“Then,” Lutz said quietly, “what is enough?”
“If you can’t get it yet, Wayne, I’m not about to tell you.”
“I see,” Lutz said. “You want it all. You want my head on a silver tray, is that it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Marriage. That’s what you’ve got up your sleeve.” The girl answered him with a cold, brittle laugh.
Lutz said, “Damn it, you know how things are.”
“Sure,” she said, and once again Brand could detect the overlay of bleak and hopeless pride on her tone. “I know exactly how things are. You’ve got a code to live up to, don’t you? A virtuous, honorable, pious goddamned code.”
“Don’t laugh at me,” Lutz warned.
“Do I look like I’m laughing?”
“How do I know? I can never tell what you’re thinking.”
“Then I’ll tell you. You’d marry me quick enough if I was a white girl.”
Lutz’s voice rose, blustering. “I never said anything about that.”
“Of course not. Now get out of here, will you?”
“Wait a minute—”
“Do you think I want to be anybody’s half-breed mistress? Do you think that’s all I want out of life?”
“You won’t get a better offer, Michaela.” Lutz seemed to be trying to make his voice gentle.
“That’s a cruel thing to say.”
“Is it? I believe in facing reality. Maybe you ought to try it sometime.”
“No, thanks. I’ll hold out. There’s no place in your scheme of things for dreams, is there, Wayne?
“Sure,” he said. “If they’re the kind of dreams you can do something about. I started out with two hundred head of scrawny longhorns I snaked out of the East Texas brush country. That and a dream—and look where I am now. But I knew I could make it, see—and that’s the difference. You’re so goddamned proud you’re blind. It ain’t your fault you’re a half-breed, but it ain’t my fault either.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You brought it up. Damn it, open your eyes. Neither one of us can change the truth, Michaela.”
“You could do something about it—if you wanted to bad enough.”
“Aagh,” Lutz said in disgust. In the darkness of the old man’s silent room, Jim Brand stood frowning, head lowered, ashamed of his own eavesdropping and yet unwilling to disclose his presence.
“Get out,” the girl said quietly.
“All right. Just you think about it, hey?”
The heavy boot heels tramped back down the hallway to the head of the staircase. On the roof, hailstones rattled like falling gravel. The wind was a whisper-wail under the eaves, sweeping along the building, shaking it. Jim Brand stepped out of his hiding place into the direct stare of the girl.
She said, “You hear all that?”
“Yes.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, I guess.”
“Answer me one question.”
She just looked at him. He watched her with guarded earnestness and said, “If he asked you to marry him, would you?”
Her eyes turned enigmatic. “I don’t know,” she said. “Would you care?”
He made no answer; he wasn’t sure of himself. He just stood watching her until after a moment she turned back into her room and shut the door. Thereupon he went down the hall, paused at the head of the stair, touched his gun butt and went downstairs.
CHAPTER XII
LUTZ, ANDREWS, OLD Manning, Elias, McCasford. It narrowed down to the five of them. One was probably a killer; and when Brand looked at each set of eyes, he had the distinct feeling he was looking down the bores of a double-barreled shotgun, loaded and cocked.
He sat at the long split-puncheon table, having produced a deck of cards from his pocket and now playing a halfhearted game of solitaire that kept his hands busy while his mind studied possibilities.
By the stove, the one-armed youth said something to Elias and then crushed his cigarette out underfoot and went toward the bar, where he picked up the half-full bottle from which Mitch Andrews had been drinking, and brought the bottle with him to Brand’s table.
Brand noticed Elias’ hooded eyes following all this with speculative interest. Time hung like the platform of a gallows; all the while, Brand had the feeling it was about to drop from under him. There was a sinister silence that spread like a thick foam.
McCasford stood across the table from him, suspending the bottle between his fingers by its neck. “Mind if I sit?”
Brand nodded. The youth swung his legs over the bench and sat down, took a swallow from the bottle, closed his eyes while it burned its way through his throat, and pushed the bottle forward. “Drink?”
“I don’t mind.” Brand reached for the bottle.
McCasford was studying him. “You ain’t scared,” he observed.
“What of?”
McCasford shrugged and looked around sleepy-eyed. “Everybody in this room’s set on a hair trigger. I keep waitin’ for somebody to pull it.”
Nerves. Then he wasn’t the only one to feel it, Brand saw. McCasford reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of coins, which he placed on the table. “How about a penny-ante game, to pass the time?”
“Why not?” Brand gathered up the cards and shuffled the deck. “Stud poker suit you?”
“All right.”
Brand dealt and scanned the room. No one was within hearing distance. At the fireplace, old Manning had come awake and was having a desultory conversation with Lutz, who in turn was keeping his suspicious attention pinned on Andrews at the far end of the bar, leaning heavily there and looking half-drunk.
Elias was an equal distance away at the opposite end of the room, keeping near the stove—perhaps to warm his cold blood. Michaela was out of sight in the kitchen preparing a meal. And so, when he picked up his hole card to glance at it, Jim Brand said, “I haven’t heard your story yet.”
“Buffalo guns and deputies.”
“No story to tell.” McCasford looked at his own hole card. “I’ll bet a nickel.”
Brand met the wager and dealt a third card to each. “How’d you come to fall in with that slick tinhorn?”
“Who?”
“Augustin.”
“Augustin?”
“Armando, then.”
McCasford shrugged. “My pair of fours showing—I’ll lay a quarter on it.”
“Done.”
“Elias bailed me out of a bad scrape in Galeyville,” McCasford said slowly.
“So now you string along with him. Nothing better to do. That it?”
“Might be.”
“My pair of sevens is high,” Brand said. “Ten cents. Let me give you a piece of advice—don’t ever turn your back to him.”
McCasford’s bleak eyes lifted, crossed Brand’s, and dropped again. He turned up a corner of his hole car and studied it, and met Brand’s ten-cent bet. “What’s your piece of this?”
“I know your friend from a long time back. He’d cut your throat for a peso.”
“He hasn’t yet.”
“Wait.”
“We get along all right,” McCasford said. “I mind my business and he minds his.”
The last card fell. Three fours showed in McCasford’s hand, and a pair of sevens in Brand’s. Only the hole cards lay concealed. Brand said, “You betting?”
“Half a buck, I guess.”
“I’ll raise you the same again.”
McCasford’s hand paused; his eyes lifted. Then he shook his head. “You can have it.”
Brand raked in the small pot. “You bluff too easy,” he said. “I didn’t have the third seven.”
McCasford’s frown lowered but he said nothing. Brand said, “Another time?”
“Sure.”
Brand mixed the cards and dealt. “Tell me something.”
“What?”
“Who’s after you two?”
McCasford’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Brand tipped up his hole card and nodded with satisfaction. He said in an idle voice, “It occurs to me that two rough-and-ready gentlemen like you and your friend wouldn’t be this far off the main trails unless you had a reason. There’s nothing up here you could want. It narrows down to one thing—you’re on the run. Who from?”
“Your nose is pretty long, ain’t it?”
“Long enough to look out for my health,” Brand agreed. “I’m still trying to puzzle out what the deputy was doing so far from home with a blizzard coming up.”
“I doubt he was after me,” McCasford said without much concern.
“You intend to bet?”
The youth tossed a nickel into the pot. Brand matched it and dealt the next card. “What are you wanted for?”
“Who said I was wanted?”
“The writing on your face.”
McCasford shrugged. “In Colorado there’s a man who says I stole his poke.”
“Did you?”
“No. I was handy when they went looking for somebody to pin it on. Hell, I don’t roll drunks, mister. I ain’t sunk that low yet.”
“A dime,” Brand said, “on the strength of my ace. How’d you lose that arm?”
“Jesus,” McCasford said, pushing out ten cents, “you sure are a curious bastard.”
“I’m still alive, too.”
“You might breed a nice bruise on your nose one day.”
“Forget it,” Brand murmured. “I didn’t mean to step on your corn.”
“If you got to know,” the young man said dourly, “I was a good rough-string breaker once. I got my arm smashed trying to break a wild horse for a ranch I was working at.”
Brand nodded. “And afterward they didn’t have much use for a one-armed cowpoke, so you went on the drift. You figured the world did you a bad turn, so you hit back. They run you out of Colorado, you get in another scrape down in Galeyville, so you tie up with Elias and now you’re learning the trade from him.”
“I never liked guessing games much,” McCasford said. “Say we drop the whole thing?”
“Want to bet into my pair of aces?”
“No. The pot’s yours—I’m out of change anyway.”
“You could borrow a few toothpicks from your friend there,” Brand suggested with mild irony. “That way you can fill the part out right.”
McCasford flushed angrily, and then Brand said sharply, “Listen—tell Elias I’ll be ready for him if he decides to try at me with a knife after dark. That would be his habit.”
McCasford planted his palm on the table and shoved to his feet. “Tell him yourself,” he said with quiet coolness, and walked away, leaving the whiskey bottle behind.
The undiminished gale resentfully slapped against the massive solidity of the building, wheeling and roaring in stifled anger. The stove and fireplace made the room warm and that warmth made Jim Brand mildly sleepy, giving him a false sense of well-being that rang a warning bell in his mind. No one in this room could be trusted.
When he hauled out his watch and opened it, he was amazed to learn it was only five in the afternoon. He snapped the watch cover shut and put it away in his vest pocket.
Outside, the storm made a hell of the world, and he knew that cattle and horses by the hundreds would be wiped out. That might account for the red seething anger on Wayne Lutz’s big square face. This was the kind of weather that could wreck a cattleman overnight, drive his herds blindly over cutbanks to their death, freeze them solid. Even those animals lucky enough to have shelter would face starvation, with all available forage covered and frozen.
As if in punctuation, a great blast of wind shook the roof and rattled the building; and the wind howled on, blue and wailing.
There was a brief lull in the storm, with the song of it diminishing for perhaps ten minutes, and then it rose up again to all its former fury, and struck vigorously against the embattled saloon once more.
Shortly thereafter the tackshed door was flung open and a man, blue of face, stumbled into the room.
Without hurry, Armando Elias got up and walked around that man and shut the door, and went back to his chair.
The newcomer stood motionless in his frost-mottled great coat, as though the cold had eaten into his very joints and rendered him immobile. Only his eyes showed life. He was a big-boned man with a black stubble of beard and triangular, level eyes; that was all it was possible to tell, since the hat was scarfed down low on his face and he was almost lost in the bulky shapeless coat, soaked and mottled with ice.
Jim Brand got up and went to him, and said, “Get out of that coat, friend, and start walking around before your feet freeze up on you.”
The other made no answer. His lips fluttered with breath; his eyes were a little dimmed. Brand pulled the coat off him, meeting no resistance, and underneath it he found battered and water-soaked range clothes.
Pinned to the jacket was a dull metal badge. Knowing the temper of this room, Brand immediately unclipped the badge and slipped it out of sight into his own pocket. From the angle at which he stood, he was sure no one else in the room had seen the marshal’s badge.
The newcomer shuffled near the stove. Michaela came into the room from the kitchen and stared a moment at the stranger without expression, then turned back to her cooking. Brand said, “Stamp your feet, friend.”
The man went into the motions of walking, standing in one place. His feet went up and down with mechanical rhythm. Brand watched a moment, then spoke. “Feel anything?”
“Not much, I’m afraid.” The man’s voice was hoarse from cold. “A little prickling, that’s all.”
“Keep moving, then. Don’t get too close to the stove.” Brand reached forward and pinched the man’s cheek. “Feel that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re all right then. What’s your name?”
“George Zane.”
“A
pilgrim,” muttered Mitch Andrews. Andrews was pretty drunk by now. “A goddamned pilgrim. Welcome, pilgrim, to the far side of the Styx.”
“Where?” said Billy McCasford.
“Never mind,” Andrews said thickly.
Brand wondered what it was that weighed so hard on Andrews that he had to drink to ward it off. It might be anything from a crop failure to a killer’s conscience.
George Zane was still performing his awkward little dance, trying to send the blood back into his feet. He had worked his gloves off and now he removed the hat and scarf. His hair was long and straight, shot with gray; his skin had the toughness of old saddle leather. His face screwed up and he sneezed. A touch of ruddiness was coming back to his cheeks.
Brand said, “Old man, maybe you’ve got some dry clothes that will fit this gent.”
Grunting with stiffness of bones, Manning left his chair and hobbled toward the stairs. His wooden leg clumped hollowly as he ascended.
“I haven’t got another plate,” Michaela said from the kitchen door.
It made Brand grin wryly. “That’s all right,” he drawled “Maybe we can get Lutz and Andrews to share one. Right, boys?”
“Shut up,” Lutz said. “None of us like your humor, Brand.”
“You’ll have to share mine then,” Brand said to George Zane.
Zane waved a hand vaguely. The old man came bumping down the stairs with an armload of clothes and handed them to the newcomer. “You can change in the tackshed.”
“Obliged,” Zane said, and turned toward the door with the clothes. He carried a double-action revolver belted high at his waist, backhanded for a cross-draw. The sickly blue shade had warmed up to a weathered brown on his face. It had been close with the man, but he was all right.
While Zane was out of the room, Lutz got up and frowned darkly. “Anybody ever see him before?”
“I think I have,” McCasford said. “Can’t say I place him, though.”
“Maybe that’s your deputy-killer, Brand.”
Brand doubted it, but he said nothing. He had a curiosity to find out what the lawman was doing here, but common sense held him back from going into the tackshed. The others might suspect any private tête-à-tête between him and an ostensible stranger so soon after the stranger’s arrival.
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