by Steve Frazee
“I suppose.”
“Why?”
It was a question that Cushman did not care to answer, nor was he sure he could if he had tried.
“Why, Mr. Cushman?”
Belle Drago’s insistence was interrupted by a knock at the door. Big John called, “May I come in?”
He was a smooth, confident man, Big John. He made no pretense of being surprised at seeing Cushman sitting at a table with Belle Drago in the middle of the morning. He was civil enough in his greeting but Cushman felt the man’s dislike of him, and he felt inside himself the subtle, primordial bristling of his own hostility toward Big John.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen you here at this time of day, Cushman,” Big John said.
“And it’s the first time you’ve ever been here during working hours,” Belle Drago said. “Sit down, Mr. Freemantle, and I’ll get you some coffee.”
Cushman decided that he would stay as long as Big John stayed. It would not be much of a contest because when Belle Drago resumed her work she would run them both out.
Big John’s grin flashed under his sandy mustache. “You’re half a century ahead of your time, Belle, and since you’re a woman, you’re doubly in error.”
She poured the saloonman coffee. “What do you mean by that?”
“You’ve crossed the proper boundaries of womanly behavior without going all the way. No unmarried woman is supposed to invade a mining camp with a respectable business.”
“I know. But it would be all right for me to drudge here if I were married to a husband that chased around the mountains looking for gold. He could come home when he was hungry. I could bear him another child and everything would be respectable.”
“Perfectly.” Big John laughed. “You know what I think? I think you know what you’re doing. You came here to make money. You cheat no one, favor no one, and serve everybody better meals than some of these renegades were accustomed to getting at home, if they had homes. I give you credit and speculate no further.”
If they had homes … Cushman gave Big John a hard glance. The man had an Englishman’s arrogance and air of superiority, and maybe he was trying to get personal. But the saloonman was paying no attention to Cushman. He was talking easily to Belle Drago and she seemed to find his conversation interesting.
The woman said, “What’s your opinion on the subject of me, Mr. Cushman?”
“Got none,” Cushman said. Let Big John be the orator; he was better fitted for it.
“You puzzle the whole camp, Belle,” Big John said. “As a dancehall woman or a madam, you could become a legend. In years to come men would tell pretty lies about you. Your beauty would grow beyond description, your kindness to the afflicted would multiply a thousand times, and men would invent some great, sad mystery to explain your past.”
Cushman saw a sudden freezing in the woman’s expression, but it flowed away quickly and she gave Big John an amused smile. “You’re quite a speech-maker, Mr. Freemantle.”
“I’m just a shopkeeper, with a shopkeeper’s estimate of other people. I made my own bad guesses about you, Belle, and then I realized that you were an enterprising woman with courage enough to do something that few women would attempt. It’s a shame, of course, that such beauty should be wasted in a place like this.”
The woman smiled. “Go back to your shop, both of you. I have a washing to finish and dinner for a hundred men to get ready.”
Kenton came in the back door. He was scowling as he dumped an armload of wood into the box beside the stove.
Going out, Cushman glanced back from the doorway. He saw Belle Drago watching him with a puzzled, troubled look, and then she attacked the washing again. In the street Big John stopped to light a cigar. “That Kenton,” he said; “the dolt is in love with her. She ought to sack him and get some youngster to do his work.”
“You followed me in there,” Cushman said.
“Of course I did. You don’t think I’m a man to stand idle and give another the advantage, do you?”
“What advantage?”
“Good Lord, Cushman, don’t act stupid. I’ll do my best to see that you don’t have a chance to be alone with her. ‘What advantage?’ “ Big John laughed. He went across the street toward his saloon.
Cushman walked back to his claim. One of his dark moments flashed across his mind. He remembered watching Beth Clendenin wave to him through the dust of wagons pulling out of Ruby Valley. He wondered if she had married the tall Kentuckian.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WORKING at his sluice one afternoon, Cushman was debating with himself about going to the valley for his horses. The grass was high enough now in the high country around Victory to support the animals. Cushman knew he had no real need for the horses and that they were better off where they were, but he kept wondering about going after them until he recognized the truth: aimlessness was driving him again, the feeling that he should move on and seek something over the mountains.
Jake Dunbar came by towing a pack horse loaded with tools and camping gear. For some time he had been spending two or three days each week exploring the mountains, looking for the lode he was sure was the fountainhead of the gold in the gulch.
“How long this time?” Cushman asked.
“Two, three days, unless I find something promising.” Dunbar dismounted and walked over to the sluice. “Doing any good?”
“I suppose.”
“You suppose!” Dunbar grinned. “How much have you got in an Arbuckle’s can under your bunk? Five thousand?”
“Not that much.” Cushman leaned on his shovel. There was a warmth in Dunbar that pleased him. He was glad when the man was around. For the first time in his life Cushman was admitting to himself that he liked a man at the time of knowing him and not after leaving him.
Suddenly Dunbar’s face was sober. “I asked her to marry me.”
“How’d you ever get the chance?”
“After you and Big John left last night, while she was padlocking the back door.” Dunbar kept waiting for Cushman to make a comment. “Don’t you want to know what she said?”
“Sure.”
“She said no.” Dunbar smiled ruefully. “That wasn’t the first time I asked her.”
Cushman shrugged. He watched the clear water washing the heavy gravel in the sluice.
“When are you going to ask her, Ed?”
“Me!”
“Who the hell else am I talking to?”
“I ain’t the marrying kind, Jake.”
“I knew a lot of men like that in the Army. Every one of them has got a family now.”
Cushman shook his head. “She wouldn’t want me.”
“Uh-huh,” Dunbar said, and his meaning was not clear. “You ever been married?”
“No.”
“I didn’t know. I know who you are now and what you are now and that’s about all.” Dunbar gave Cushman a long appraisal. “That’s quite a bit, I guess.” He turned toward the horses. “Sleep kind of light, with one ear cocked toward her cabin while I’m gone, huh?”
“I generally do.” Cushman watched Dunbar ride up the gulch.
A loud curse came from down the creek. Cushman saw Russian Bob come through the doorway of his saloon, struggling with a man. The man tried to draw a pistol. Russian Bob took it away from him and threw him from the high porch into the creek, and then stood looking down at him for a few moments. Miners along the creek looked up with interest, until the man stumbled out of the water and sat down on the bank.
Ask her to marry him? Cushman had considered the idea warily, but how would Dunbar have known that? She would refuse, of course; everything in Cushman’s life had been refusal of some kind, starting at Gravelly Crossing. You protected yourself by not making requests of life that would be refused, no matter how much you desired something.
Cushman went back to shoveling into the sluice, but now and then he found himself leaning on his shovel and looking toward the restaurant, thinking of Belle Drago
. He did not go to the restaurant for supper. He cooked in his cabin and found the food greasy and unpalatable, although it was about as good as any he had ever cooked.
He sat in his draughty cabin watching the fireplace burn down to grayness. Some time in a man’s life there must be a chance to change, to get out of the channel that carried him on and on toward nothing, but how was he to recognize the chance when it came, or to make it deliberately?
The noises of Victory came through the cabin walls. For a while after Cushman’s first wild night here, it had been a quiet place where tired men turned in at dark, with perhaps only a late card game going on at Big John’s place or in someone’s cabin; but now there was an uproar in Russian Bob’s half the night and petty thievery was common.
Cushman went to bed. Several times in the last month there had been disturbances near Belle Drago’s cabin in the night, and he and Dunbar, and Kenton, who slept in the wagon near her quarters, had roused out quickly to make sure that no one was trying to force his way into her cabin.
That night the dream of the demon bird of Indian legend came again to Cushman. He was a boy again, struggling through the night with his little sister in his arms, when the great bird came whistling down and tried to take her from him. He awoke in a cold sweat and stared into the blackness of the room, lonely and tormented.
The camp was quiet. He heard the murmur of the creek and the gentle soughing of the wind in the trees.
He went back to sleep thinking of Rumsey Snelling and his filthy, bearded face and his whining voice. We got to help each other, Eddie boy … Eddie boy …
Then Rumsey called out to him in terror, “Ed! Ed!” Cushman was wide awake again. The dream had the sharp edge of reality. He heard other sounds, a scuffling somewhere outside and the low, grunting noise of a man’s voice.
It was the sharpness of the first noise that still hung in his mind as he put on his boots and pants and went outside. The door made a rattling noise as it drifted back against the jamb. A light was burning in a tent across the creek. The rest of the camp was dark. From Stapp’s livery there came the sound of a horse blowing hay dust from its nostrils.
Cushman was about to go inside when he heard the muffled cry from the trees behind the cabin. “Ed!” and then there was the sound of a blow and the noise of scraping branches. It was Belle Drago’s voice.
Cushman ran with fear and anger driving him. In the darkness of the trees he heard a man crashing away. The fellow had been out in the darkness longer than Cushman, and he knew where he was going. He crossed a little opening going toward the south fork of Campanero Creek and was lost in the timber on the other side when Cushman reached the clearing. Cushman heard a branch crack sharply and then there was silence.
He went back through the trees toward where he had heard Belle Drago call out. He found her entangled in the bushes, trying to haul herself up by hanging to the branches of a tree.
“It’s me — Cushman.” He pulled her free of the bushes and her clothing tore as he helped her from the tangle. “Are you all right?” he asked harshly, afraid.
“Yes.” She sagged against Cushman suddenly and he felt the fear and trembling in her.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know, Ed.”
“How’d you get out here?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was walking — ”
“In the trees? My God!”
“No! I was in the street. The man came out of the darkness — I don’t know where he was hiding.”
“Kenton?” Cushman asked.
“Not Joe Kenton, no!” Belle Drago stood away from Cushman. “Thank you. I’m all right now.” She started away. Cushman caught her as she stumbled. He picked her up in his arms and went toward the street. One sleeve of her blouse was ripped. Her arm was bare and warm against Cushman’s neck.
He walked stiffly, hurrying.
“No,” she said, “not my cabin. I want to go to the restaurant. It’s almost time to start the fire, anyway.”
“That damned restaurant,” Cushman muttered, and then wondered why he had said it.
He put her down at the back of the restaurant. She opened the door so quickly he wondered where she kept the key. He knew when she lit a lamp inside. The key was on a thin chain around her neck. The front of her blouse was torn. There were bruises around her mouth and a growing lump on her forehead.
As the light came up Cushman saw how frightened and shaken she was. She kept tugging her blouse up and fingering her bruised mouth.
“Where’s Kenton?” Cushman asked.
“I had to let him go this evening.”
Cushman swung around and strode out to the wagon. In the bed of it he stumbled over someone lying on the floor. He lit a lamp. Kenton was sprawled out on his stomach where he had fallen just short of reaching his cot. Cushman rolled him over. Kenton had been in a fight, and it looked as if he had got the short end of it.
After several minutes Cushman knew that the man was dead drunk. He probably had not stirred after he climbed the short ladder and pitched forward on the floor.
• • •
When Cushman went back to the restaurant Belle Drago had draped an apron over her shoulders and pinned it in front to cover her torn blouse. She was building a fire in the stove. Most of her self-control was back.
“You’ve no idea who it was?” he asked.
“None.”
“It wasn’t Kenton.”
“I knew that.”
“Why’d you fire him?”
“I had to let him go. It wasn’t fair to keep him here doing this kind of work.” Belle Drago hesitated. “He asked me to marry him tonight.”
The hope of marrying her was the only reason that had kept Kenton around, Cushman thought. She had used him and caused him to be jeered at, but at least she had made an honest break with him at last. Kenton had gone through his own hell; you couldn’t blame him for getting drunk.
Belle Drago dumped coffee into two huge pots already filled with water. She put more wood into the stove and then she turned to face Cushman. “I know what you’re thinking, that I led Kenton on and used him. That was what was bothering me tonight, why I was walking when I should have been asleep.”
Cushman glanced at the window. It would be light in another half-hour. He guessed he’d better stay that long.
“I know I’m out of place here,” the woman said. “It would be all right if I were working myself to death for some man. That would be perfectly normal and proper.”
“Why are you doing it?”
“To be independent.”
Cushman could appreciate that, but there were bad flaws in her position.
Once more the woman seemed to read his mind. “If it weren’t for men like you and Dunbar and Big John, I couldn’t stay here. You’ve all protected me, and Kenton too. I suppose you’re laughing to yourself because I stand behind your protection and then claim I’m free and independent.”
“You’re saying it, not me.”
Belle Drago stared at Cushman in exasperation. “Do you ever say anything, Ed Cushman?”
“That key. You wear it around your neck.” It was generally something dear or sacred that people wore on chains around their neck.
“It represents independence, not this miserable place where I work myself so tired I can’t sleep sometimes. It means not having to ask anyone for anything, except when it can’t be helped.”
“I see.” Cushman walked over to the window, as if to hurry the dawn. “You’d never give it up, would you?”
Belle Drago did not answer. When he turned to look at her she was studying him quietly. “Yes,” she said, “I’d like to give it up but I don’t think I ever can.”
“You could marry Big John.”
“Yes.”
“Or Jake Dunbar.”
“Yes.”
Cushman saw the trees taking shape slowly outside. “Or me,” he said.
Again the woman waited, forcing him to turn and look at her before
she answered. “No, I couldn’t marry you.”
It was like coming back to the useless wagon at Gravelly Crossing. It was like seeing Beth Clendenin waving to him without meaning as she went away on the California trail. It was all the refusals and all the loneliness of Cushman’s life rushing before him and telling him that this was the way it would always be and that he was a fool to hope for anything different.
His face was grave and without any expression of hurt as he nodded carefully. “I can understand that.”
He thought Belle Drago was going to cry. She was pitying him and that was the last thing that he needed from anyone.
“You don’t understand, Ed, and I can’t tell you.”
“Sure.” It was light enough outside now to leave her alone. Cushman went over to the door.
“You didn’t eat supper here last night, Ed.”
“No.”
“There were almost a hundred men, but I noticed that you — ”
“I was busy, I guess.” There was no use for her to tell him that she had missed his presence in the line of a hundred miners filing past the serving window. It would make no difference in the way Cushman felt because of her refusal.
He went on out. He stood a moment in the cold light, wondering why he had broken his protective shell long enough to be hurt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE MINERS’ MEETING held in the back room of Big John Freemantle’s saloon on the evening of the day Jake Dunbar returned from a four-day trip to the mountains was not to discuss the attempted rape of Belle Drago, for knowledge of that incident, as far as Cushman knew, was still confined to Belle, himself and the assailant.
With scarcely a decision involved, Cushman knew that he would kill the man if he ever found out who it was.
Only fifteen men were present, the veterans of the camp who had lived out the winter in the snows, and who also owned most of the gold taken from Victory. By common assent Dunbar was the chairman, and it was he who had insisted that Cushman attend.
There had been a great deal more thievery, robbery and attempted robbery than Cushman had known about, he discovered as he listened to conversations before the meeting was called to order. There was a general tone of suspicion against a group of ten or twelve men who had cabins and huts and tents on the west fork of Campanero Creek.