Coroner Creek (3 page)

So now he was almost finished. As full night came Chris thought of that with an odd tranquillity—he was at the end of his search.

He heard the near horse whicker now and felt the pace of the buggy quicken, and moments later he saw the dark forms of several riders loom up ahead of him. They were traveling at the easy jog of men who had ridden long, and they broke ranks to let him pass through them.

And then, almost leisurely, one rider leaned out and caught the bridle of the near horse and pulled the team to a stop, calling, “You all right, Mrs. Miles?”

Chris said, “She's all right,” and watched the four riders pause at this strange voice; then, as one, they put their horses up to the buggy. A match was wiped alight on the trouser leg of the rider nearest Chris, and then he was squinting into the glare of it, looking at a young puncher whose mouth was going slack with surprise. The match died and the puncher said wonderingly, “Who the hell is that?” just as a man on the other side struck another match. He held it close to Abbie Miles and said disgustedly, “She's drunk, Ernie,”—and Chris shuttled his glance to the brand on the man's horse. It was three concentric half circles, and he knew this would be Rainbow and that he was not breaking faith with Kate Hardison in letting these men see Abbie Miles.

He said, “I'm taking her home,” and waited, while the match died.

Ernie was the man who had stopped the team. Now he pulled his horse up alongside and flicked a match alight with his thumbnail. Chris saw a big man whose bleach eyes in his long and narrow face regarded him briefly, dispassionately.

“So she lets strangers get her drunk, now,” he said in a soft Texas voice. “Get out of that buggy.”

“I'll talk from here.”

“Get out of there or I'll kick you out,” Ernie said flatly.

The match flame wavered and faded, and in that instant Chris knew that Ernie meant what he said. He knew, too, that the sudden darkness after the match flame died would mean a moment of blindness for the Texan, and when the match guttered out, he gathered his feet beneath him, dropped the reins and hurled his body at the black bulk on the saddle beside him.

His near shoulder caught Ernie in the chest and he wrapped his arm around his neck, locking his head in the crook of his arm. They fell off the horse that way, on their sides, Chris' weight dragging them to the ground. The breath was driven from Ernie in a great grunt, but he fought immediately, strongly, trying to bring his knee up into Chris' groin. Chris rolled away from him and they both came to their feet, Chris an instant sooner than the Texan, and he lunged again, this time swinging savagely and blindly in the dark. His first blow caught Ernie in the face, but Ernie came on, grappling with him, and they fell, locked in each other's arms. The nearest Rainbow rider was calling the others.

Ernie was on him now, slugging great sledging blows at his face and chest. Now he half rolled over, swinging his arm up and catching Ernie around the chest. He rolled the rest of the way then, and Ernie came down with him. They were both on their sides, hitting blindly and futilely at each other when the Rainbow crew landed on them.

Chris felt his arms seized, and he was dragged off Ernie, fighting stubbornly against his two captors. They hauled him to his feet and he struggled silently, raging, and then subsided, breathing deeply. He heard the third man haul Ernie to his feet, and Ernie said thickly, “Get a fire built.”

While the third man beat out in the mesquite brush alongside the road for fuel, Chris waited for what was coming. His anger was steady, unspent. The puncher returned with an armful of dry brush, threw it in the road, tramped it to kindling and touched a match to it. In its mounting flare, Chris saw Ernie standing spraddle-legged and hatless, his shirt ripped half off him, one hand, on his hip. With his other hand and sleeve, he was wiping away the blood steadily dripping from his nose, and his bleak eyes were baleful and wicked. Chris, seeing it, crowded him.

“You build up a big enough fire and we'll finish it,” Chris invited. He tried to shake off the man on either arm, but they held him.

Ernie didn't say anything immediately, and in that pause Chris saw his indecision.

Ernie said, “What are you doing with Mrs. Miles?”

Chris told him curtly of Kate Hardison's request, and Ernie said slowly, “That better be so.”

It was over, Chris knew.

One of the men holding him, a squat barrel of a man whose round legs almost split his trousers, said, “You never gave her a drink?”

“She's been that way since I saw her.”

Ernie grunted and turned and went over to the buggy and looked in the seat. When Chris had jumped, Abbie Miles had fallen on her side in the buggy seat. She lay there, still asleep.

Ernie turned and looked speculatively at Chris, and then said, “I reckon we've made a mistake. Let him go.”

The two men took their hands off Chris, and Ernie said, “Ray, you drive her home. I'll bring your horse.”

A wiry middle-aged puncher took over the reins, and Chris accepted his gun the Rainbow hand offered him, and rammed it in the waistband of his pants. The team was driven on, and Ernie said to Chris, “Take his horse,” and went over to his own mount. Chris stepped into the saddle of the extra horse and fell in with the others, and they headed back across the flats toward Triumph. He knew Ernie was unforgiving and unafraid, and that his pride would not let him drop this here. Beside, he had given away a secret that should have been kept.

Ernie's soft Texas drawl broke the silence presently. He tried to make it pleasant. “Ridin' through, or do you figure to drift?”

“Haven't made up my mind yet.”

“We're short-handed at Rainbow,” Ernie said. “If you figure to stay, think it over. Miles is a good boss, and about tonight—well, I reckon I made a mistake.”

This was a concession, Chris knew, and yet there was not a jot of apology in Ernie's soft voice.

Chris said, “I'll think it over.”

They fell silent. To the east the light of a ranch showed briefly, then was lost behind a tangle of corrals, and soon they were in sight of the lights of Triumph.

And Chris waited for the rest. When it came, Ernie was open enough about it.

“Mrs. Miles is worried, I reckon. Her father is goin' to die, and she knows it. He's sheriff.” Ernie paused long enough to let that, and its implication, sink in. “So if she drinks some whisky once in a while, it's nobody's business but Rainbow's. Nobody's.”

Chris turned this over in his mind, and then said quietly, “I don't talk about a woman.” And he added just as bluntly, “But if I wanted to, you wouldn't stop me.”

He saw Ernie's head swivel toward him but nobody said anything. They were on Triumph's main street now, and when they were abreast the hotel, Chris pulled up and dismounted. Ernie reached down for the reins of his horse and Chris handed them to him. Their glances met briefly, and Ernie's pale eyes held neither dislike nor respect. He had done a necessary job within the limits of caution, and he was ready for any consequence. He said equably, “Remember Rainbow if you're lookin' for a ridin' job.”

“I will,” Chris said, and Ernie pulled Chris' horse away.

Chris went into the lobby. A puncher was asleep on the sofa against the wall, hat over his eyes against the light from the overhead kerosene lamp, and a pair of townsmen were playing checkers at a table against the wall. Chris took the key from his pocket and consulted the number on its tag, and went upstairs to his room. He lighted the lamp and found his warbag on the chair. Kate Hardison had evidently seen his name on the register.

Stripping off his shirt, he sloshed water from the pitcher into the bowl, and had his upper body soaped when the knock came on the door.

Kate Hardison's voice followed immediately. “Come down for supper when you're through.”

“All right,” Chris said, and went back to the washing. The soap smarted in his knuckles and he glanced down and found a couple of them skinned rawly. Afterward, he put on a clean shirt from his warbag, and then looked in the mirror. “He ran a hand over the black swirl of a two-day beard stubble, and then combed his ragged black hair. Finished, his hands sank slowly to his sides, and the images that had been ribboning through his mind this while took shape, and he thought,
If I work for him, I can pick the time and the place to kill him. And tell him why
.

A minute afterward, he turned down the lamp and descended the stairs, his body slack with weariness and hunger.

There was a lamp on a rear table in the dining room, a place set by it. Kate Hardison poked her head through the kitchen door, and by the time he was seated, she was bringing him the food. A platter of steaks, and bread—because she knew he would be tired of biscuits—and potatoes, with thick juice gravy, a double wedge of green-apple pie and a plate of pale butter and a pot of coffee were set before him.

She left him, and came back only when the edge was off his appetite. Pouring herself a cup of black coffee, she took a chair opposite him, and as he reached for his sack of tobacco he looked up and surprised her watching him.

Kate Hardison said, “You couldn't have made Rainbow. Who did you meet?”

“The crew,” Chris said. “They took over.”

“Which one of them did you hit?”

Chris looked up quickly, and when he saw her glance level upon him, he knew she'd seen his knuckles. He wiped the edge of his cigarette across his tongue and put it in the corner of his lips and said, “Ernie somebody.”

Kate only looked at him searchingly and laughed then. It was a real laugh, too, with an inexpressible merriment in it that puzzled Chris, who watched her unsmilingly.

“Everybody wants to hit Ernie and nobody does,” Kate explained. “People with reasons, I mean.”

He said nothing, and Kate said, with a sudden shrewdness, “He thought you'd got her drunk, didn't he?”

“Something like that.”

“Whoever is giving her whisky is going to get hurt,” Kate said.

Chris touched a match to his cigarette and inhaled deeply, and he felt an obscure irritation. But he was indifferent to Mrs. Miles' habits, and once more his thoughts settled back into the gray taciturnity of habit. He knew Kate Hardison had poured her coffee and sat down across from him because she wanted to talk, and yet he could feel no interest in her. Somewhere along the line he had lost the knowledge of the social niceties; he knew of nothing he wanted to say to this girl, pleasant as she was. He studied the table, musing, indifferent, not even knowing he was doing so, and he was lost in his gray contemplation.

When he heard her chair scrape, he yanked his attention back to the present. She was standing, collecting the dishes. He rose and took his share, and followed her back into the kitchen. It was a spacious place, clean, with a massive shining black range against the back wall.

He said, out of the desire to appear friendly, “You run this hotel yourself?”

“Everything but the cooking and cleaning. That doesn't leave much.”

Her voice was now reserved and cold: she had wanted to be friendly, and had been rebuffed and had accepted it. He would have liked to tell her that he'd meant nothing by his silence, that it didn't matter, that he was only part of a man and not what she thought, that the only hing in the world he wanted was to kill a man, and that his waking hours were spent in pondering how that death could be made an exquisite agony.

When she was finished tidying up, he followed her through the dining room and into the lobby. She paused at the sofa where the puncher was sleeping, hesitated a moment, and then turned again to Chris. “I hate to wake him. Would you help me once more?”

Chris nodded, and she went ahead of him up the stairs. She waited for him at the head and explained in a quiet voice, “My father is bedridden from a fall several years ago, but he spends all day on the gallery so he can be outdoors. Fred, the man asleep down there, helps me move him in each night, but I didn't want to wake him tonight.”

At the first door of the corridor she went in, Chris following. It was a big corner living room, comfortable with bright curtains and rugs and furniture worn with use.

Kate opened the wide door that let out onto the gallery and Chris followed her out.

The gallery was unroofed and open to the sky, railinged its length, and there were some chairs and a table here. Under the window on a pallet faintly lighted by the lamp inside lay a man who had once been big. Even now he was not thin, but the erosion of age had started. His hair was white, clipped short, like his even mustache, and the sun and the weather had browned his skin deeply and bleached his hair. He had sharp, uncomplaining eyes, and when Kate said, “This is a new one. Walt—Chris Danning,” he smiled and held out a firm brown hand.

Chris shook hands and Kate's father said immediately, dryly, “So you're the hand Ernie Coombs wants for Rainbow? How are you, son?”

Chris looked soberly at him and said, “You've got good ears, Mr. Hardison.”

“A cripple's pastime,” Hardison said, without rancor.

“If you come to see him tomorrow, he'll know your footsteps before he sees you,” Kate said, and she smiled fondly at her father.

Hardison said, “I said that about Ernie because I've been tryin' to figure it out since I saw you.” He hesitated. “You don't look like a Rainbow hand, somehow.”

“He's not,” Kate said bluntly. “Mr. Danning beat up Ernie tonight, and Ernie would rather have him with him than against him.”

Hardison grunted and looked searchingly at Chris, who shifted his feet faintly. “What'll you do, son?”

“Likely take it. My stake's gone.”

He felt Kate's glance on him, and could even feel the reproof in it, but he did not look at her.

“There are other outfits,” Kate said quickly.

“None that's offered me a job.”