Presently the door opened and Zane appeared, squeezed into clothes that were too small for him. He closed the door and-said, “I saw your light and needed shelter.”
“You’re welcome enough,” Brand said to him, but in a guarded tone that he hoped would warn the man. By the way Zane’s sharp eyes met his, he felt he had got his message across. “I’m Jim Brand.”
“I know,” Zane said. “I’ve seen you a time or two.” That was odd; Brand didn’t remember ever having seen Zane before, and he usually prided himself on his memory. He pointed his finger at the room’s occupants and named them one by one, for Zane’s benefit.
“Now we are all buen amigos,” Elias said after these brief introductions. “Sit down, señor, and relax.” A fresh toothpick rose jauntily from his mouth; he showed his teeth in a smile.
Zane sat down and began to tug his boots off. “Who’s the dead man in the barn?”
“Deputy from Arrowhead,” Wayne Lutz said.
“Who killed him?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Un-huh.” Brand had the feeling Zane’s indifference was feigned. “I was up the mountain in a mine tunnel. When the storm let up a bit, I tried to make it down here. But the blow caught me in the open, and I got soaked.
Lutz broke in with the booming, demanding voice that Brand had been expecting. “What were you doing up in these hills, friend?”
Zane gave Brand a glance that seemed to hold some meaning. He fingered the part of the shirt where a badge would hang; and said, “I was trying to follow back the gold veins from the old mines to the mother lode. It’s back there somewhere.”
“You don’t look much like a prospector to me,” Lutz said.
“He ain’t no screwball,” old Manning said. “There’s plenty of gold up here. You find it in patches now and then. What you think me and my girl live on?”
“Stealing,” Lutz said bluntly. “Everybody knows it, Ned—why cover it up? The only reason nobody’s run you off is everybody on this side of the divide wants to sleep with your daughter.”
The old man was stiff in his chair, squinting angrily at Lutz. Brand noticed that the kitchen door was closed; he wondered if Michaela had heard. “I’ll thank you,” the old man said, “to keep your filthy thoughts to yourself while you’re in my house, Lutz.”
“Such a happy household,” Elias murmured, grinning around his toothpick. “Lutz, why don’t you pick on somebody your own size, eh?”
“I’ll pick on you quick enough if you want it, Elias.”
“You are welcome to try, señor.” Elias said with exaggerated courtesy, stroking his scar. The knife hilt jutting from his boot top was very evident. He reached down lazily and balanced his knife in his hand.
“Put that thing away,” Brand told him, and went back to the table to pick up his deck of cards. Elias chuckled and sheathed the knife. The newcomer, Zane, had both boots off and now put his feet up closer to the warm stove. The wind was an undulating cry sweeping the land.
CHAPTER XIII
BRAND TOOK HIS dinner plate back to the stove with him and sat down beside George Zane, with whom he would share the supper. At the big table the others all sat down to the scanty meal Michaela had prepared—bear meat, overwatered sour dough biscuits, boiled beans and hash-browns sliced from badly sprouted spuds.
Michaela spoke no apology, and the others seemed hungry enough to ignore the quality of the fare, until Lutz, rubbing his big hands together with histrionic gusto, forked up a chunk of meat, chewed with effort, and spat it out.
“Jesus,” he said. “Spring cub, is it? Try cooking the springs out next time, woman.”
Michaela gave him a blank look. Brand watched from a distance, angered by the servile treatment Lutz was giving her. The girl said, “You don’t have to like it, Wayne. I’ll be happy to let you spoil your own grub after this.”
“I will,” Lutz said. “I could do better with the hide and brains.” Then he added, as an afterthought, “Maybe you’d do better with a roast dog, eh?”
The slur at her blood line was not lost on the girl, but only a faint tightening of her full lips betrayed her. Brand noticed that young McCasford laid his fork down carefully and stared straight at Lutz, and it came to Brand then that the girl had affected McCasford strongly.
“Bear makes good eating after a month on high jerky,”, McCasford said.
Lutz appeared unconcerned; he did not took up. The girl smoothed the apron over her thighs and began to eat.
Balancing the tin plate on the chair arm so that Zane could reach it, Brand ate slowly and thought. Beyond the thin protection of the stout tog walls, the norther galloped about, whistling and trembling. He could hear beams and boards creaking in the night. The flare of the blaze in the fireplace made a bright scarlet panorama of the room, and before him the stove’s isinglass window glowed a wicked red.
Brand chewed methodically and looked through slitted lids at the shapes huddled round the table. McCasford had his eyes on Michaela; McCasford was riding a high fence and probably getting rump-sore with it. In his soured reaction to an unfair stroke of fate—the toss of his arm—the kid might go wrong, and drag others with him. Circumstance had pushed him into bitter straits but the kid had a strong level streak in him.
It was hard to tell which way he might turn; he seemed to be just approaching the verge of that moment when the fluidity of his youth would be crystallized into its final form. Would he choose the road of Armando Elias? A lot could depend on that; Brand had seen before what could happen to a small group of people thrown together by chance and forced into each other’s company.
Today he had already seen the beginnings of that strain, in the raw and growing conflict between Lutz and Andrews. How would all that affect McCasford?
Brand’s eyes slid to Elias. The scar-faced man had something amiss in his head—he had a cruel sense of humor and a complete absence of scruples. For the time being it suited the man to act docile and friendly; but deadly as a coral snake, Elias was doubly as dangerous because he was completely unpredictable. What would happen to a man’s strange patterns of thought when the intimate confinement of a blizzard’s imprisonment began to rub him raw—what would happen then might be explosive.
There were, too, the gathered pokes of gold beneath the floor boards in Michaela’s room. One of the others might stumble across the treasure. That could precipitate a fevered struggle for money. Or the feud between the arrogant Lutz and the petulant Andrews might come to a head—and who would be caught in the crossfire?
Jim Brand trusted none of them enough to be able not to worry about these possibilities. It had been a part of his life not to mix in anyone’s troubles but his own. He had learned long ago, from bitter lessons, that to avoid grief a man had to remain sufficient unto himself, ask no favors and give few, and depend on no one. In occasional thoughtful moments he realized that his kind of existence was not a particularly pleasurable one, but it was a life and he clung to it.
Now, though, through no fault of his own he was at the center of a beehive full of impending stings. The accidental encounter with a dead man on the trail, and the angry buzz of buffalo bullets, had taught him that nothing in his precariously balanced life was nearly as certain as he had begun to think it was.
In spite of his resolution to remain independent and bound to no one, he was caught up in a whirling intermingled web of threats and intrigues—-a web that might yet entrap him if he did not use extreme care.
It was an endless circle, the line of his thought; it got him nowhere. Perhaps after all the storm would blow over and he would ride on, presently to forget all this.
And perhaps not.
“Buffalo hump,” old Manning was saying, gnawing at a greasy bone with teeth like yellow snags. “Back fat and tongue and haunch. Gall for sauce and sweetbreads for spice. That’s real eatin’, buffalo. I mind the days when the big herds were big black clouds on the plains. We used to cut out the best parts and leave the rest for varmints
.” He ran his tongue around his lips and it lolled a little with an old man’s vacancy while his eyes grew dim and faraway. “Goddamned hide hunters ruined those days. They just left bleached-out bones.”
The old man’s voice droned vacantly on. There was an uneasy rattle of cutlery on dishes. Old Manning could pipe up shrewd and alert and hearty till the threads of present and past twisted crosswise and moods came on him that betrayed deterioration.
Brand glanced briefly at Michaela. Her face was bent above her plate, half-hidden by the black tangled frame of hair. She was all that was left to the old man. Without her he would be helpless as an infant, having lived that full circle. It was, Brand saw now, Michaela s task to steal for him and care for him and fill her days with mounting bitterness—not against the old man, but against the world that shut her in.
The girl got up and collected a few dishes and went into the kitchen. At the far end of the table, Elias had finished his meal and now spun up a cigarette arid was learning back in his chair, one boot cocked on the table while he stabbed idly at the seat of his chair with the big knife.
“He used to be called Pesquiera, didn’t he?” The murmured words hardly reached Brand’s ears; they startled him. It was the first time George Zane had spoken since his first words.
“You get around, don’t you?” Brand said.
“That’s my job. What did you do with the star?”
Brand reached into his watch pocket and brought out the badge, concealed under the curve of his palm. He dropped it into Zane’s big-knuckled hand and saw it disappear under the man’s coat.
“Thanks for that,” Zane said. “Quick thinking.”
“They’re all primed and cocked,” Brand said. “It wouldn’t take more than sight of a badge to get their backs up. I just didn’t want to get in the way of stray ammunition.”
“I see,” Zane said drily.
“You up here chasing somebody?”
“Mail robbers. The Spanish Flat coach was ambushed three days ago on the flats. I tracked two horses up to the edge of the mountains before the storm hit.”
“Might be Elias and McCasford, then. They’re together.”
“So I noticed,” Zane said. The whole conversation took place in a murmur too low to reach the others in the room. “That black saddle with the missing saddlebags would be the Mex’s, I reckon.”
“Sharp eyes.”
“And the dead calico?”
“Mine. I packed double coming up here.”
“Oh?”
Brand told of how he had found the deputy’s body and brought it with him. “Was he hooked up with you?”
“Never saw him before,” Zane said. “I’m a federal officer. The only reason I’m here is that the stage was carrying mail.”
“You expect to arrest Elias and the boy?”
“They won’t go anywhere,” Zane said casually. “Not until the storm lets up. If I threw down of them now, I’d just have to guard them until the weather clears.”
“You’ll have to watch them anyway.”
“Unnecessary advice,” Zane murmured, scraping a hand over the beard stubble on his jaw. “I believe I’ll just let Elias dig up those saddlebags from wherever he hid them before I show my hand. Save me a good deal of hunting around.” Zane had the air of a mild, unhurried man; but in his eyes there was the flatness of a hard soul.
Across the room, Wayne Lutz belched and yawned loudly, stretching his arms. “About that time, I reckon. It’s been a day. Ned, you got enough cots for your guests?”
The old man was looking emptily at the tabletop. Michaela said, “Pa.”
The old man jerked. “How’s that?”
“Cots, Ned,” Lutz said.
Old Manning rasped a vague palm across his hair and nodded. “Sure. Plenty beds back along the hall there. Take your pick.” His narrow shoulders jerked. “No company, though, boys. You should have come by six, seven years ago. We had ’em stacked up four to a room in those days.”
Lutz rose massively and strode to the door at the end of the bar. It occurred to Jim Brand that during the afternoon search he had not inspected those rooms on the ground floor; he shrugged it away; it was of little importance.
When Elias uncoiled and went toward that door, George Zane stood up and followed^ probably wanting to keep close to the man in case of a break. Mitch Andrews then heaved his bulk upright and started walking toward the bar; by the time he reached his bottle, a pasty white-lipped expression took his face and his throat was working. He slapped his calloused palms on the bar and bent over atop it and was sick.
It did not surprise Brand. The man had been swallowing Manning’s powerful rotgut all afternoon. Once again, Brand wondered what was eating at Andrews.
Andrews muttered a thick-tongued oath and stumbled after the other men toward the calm of offered beds.
Old Manning rose, thumping to the stairs, and paused. “You coming, daughter?”
“In a while,” Michaela said, and went into the kitchen.
Through the open door Brand could see her bending by the wooden sinkboard to bring up a pail from under it. She cut chips from a bar of yellow lard-soap, shaved them into the pail and poured water into the pail from a pump handle. Armed with old rags, she came forward and set to cleaning up the mess on the bar, her dark oval face impassive.
Brand watched the supple curves of her body in motion, the firm roundness of her arms and upper body, the pride with which she tossed her head back. On the staircase the old man was climbing laboriously, and presently disappeared overhead.
Zane came back into the room and sat down for a moment beside Brand. At the dinner table one man remained: Billy McCasford, scowling into his coffee cup. Zane said softly, “He’s put to bed, the Mex.” He lifted his voice toward the girl. “Ma’am, this place got an outback?”
“At the end of the hall,” she said, not looking up, and thereupon Zane got up again and went back the way he had come, packing a pipe and lighting it before he went into the hall.
The storm pushed around the building; it was a monotonous sound and did not register very often on Brand’s consciousness now that he was used to it. He stood up and said to McCasford, “Think I’ll check on the horses before I turn in. Come along?”
McCasford shook his head in negation. “Reckon not.” Brand nodded and turned, and went into the tackshed carrying a lantern. When the door closed behind him he felt the biting chill of the night.
CHAPTER XIV
McCASFORD GAZED IDLY at the closed tackshed door for a moment; then his glance shifted to the girl at the bar. She dumped rags into the pail and took it away into the kitchen.
Alone in the room, McCasford dexterously spun up a cigarette with his one hand and sat back with his eyes half-lidded against the rising smoke. He felt a slight chill and moved to the fire to throw more wood on it; then he crouched down before the fire, his side to it, and let it warm him thoroughly. The wind shifted, banging the eaves.
Brand came back into the room, nodded to him briefly, and went straight on through the doorway to the hall, carrying his blankets. The door closed behind the gambler’s bantam shape and shortly after that, Michaela returned from the kitchen, drying her hands on her trousers.
McCasford removed his cigarette from his lips and cocked his head a little to one side, and said, “You like this place?” She took her time about answering him; she went down to the far end of the room and crouched to put wood in the stove, then came back across half the length of the room, and finally said, “It’s a place to live.”
“How come you haven’t moved to town?”
“What town?”
“Anywhere. Wouldn’t it be easier?”
“Not for a breed girl,” she said bluntly.
McCasford waved the cigarette around deprecatingly. “A pretty girl’s a pretty girl. You get along all right—not many folks would demand to see your pedigree.”
“You think not?”
“Why should they?” He took a drag dee
p into his lungs and expelled smoke toward the ceiling. “I wouldn’t.”
The girl uttered a brief, sour laugh and sat down across the table from him, bracing her elbows against the table-top, linking her fingers together.
“Ah,” McCasford said softly, “I know what you’re thinking, girl—a crippled one-arm and a breed girl, good company. But I wasn’t figuring it that way.”
“I see,” she said drily.
With a short glance of disappointment, McCasford ground out his cigarette under his toe and immediately proceeded to roll another. He said, “You don’t see much you can like in anybody, do you?”
“Should I?”
“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe not. Nobody’s been too good to me either.”
“A couple of misfits,” the girl said, “feeling sorry for ourselves. Maybe we go together pretty well, at that.”
“Sure,” McCasford replied, but he did not move or raise his eyes. He held the fresh unlit cigarette and rolled it restlessly back and forth between his fingers. He said after a while, “It gets pretty hard not to trust anybody.”
“Who can you trust?” she countered. “Look around this place—what do you see? Andrews, drunk and scared half out of his mind. That what’s-his-name, George Zane—if he’s a prospector then I’m John C. Frémont. Your Mexican friend. He’d cut a throat as soon as look at it. Lutz.”
“What about Lutz?”
“I don’t even want to talk about that son of a bitch,” she said. McCasford blinked. “And the gambler,” she concluded.
“What’s wrong with Brand?”
“He doesn’t believe in anything.”
“Well, then, maybe he doesn’t.” The youth looked up. “But do you?”
“What?”
“Do you believe in anything?”
“Sure,” she said. “I believe in myself.” She stood up and took a restless, long-legged turn around the room.
When she came back, McCasford was looking steadily at her eyes and now said, “You didn’t mention me in your little list.”
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