Gambling Man (13 page)

Her voice sounded weak. “I don't know. I've never known any gamblers.”

“Maybe you'd like me to do something else,” he said shortly. “Maybe I could learn to clean your pa's stables.”

The tone of his voice angered her. “You don't have to clean stables,” she replied cuttingly. “Your uncle was good enough to teach you a trade.”

He grew rigid, high color flushing his cheeks. “I don't want to talk about the Sewells! I don't want to hear their name mentioned!”

They rode in stiff, uncomfortable silence for several minutes. At last he said, “Amy, I didn't mean to bark at you. I'm sorry.”

But it was not the same after that. Amy was angry with herself for coming with him; doubly angry because she knew that she would do it all over again if he asked her. She tilted her chin haughtily and refused to speak to him or look in his direction.

“Well, there it is,” Jeff said flatly when they reached the ridge. There was a broad valley on the western side of the scrubby slope. The land was a thick carpet of grass, dotted here and there with cottonwoods and willows that grew along a shallow creek. Jeff was surprised at the lush-ness of his new holdings. Amy saw a boyish excitement in his face as he dismounted from the buggy and stood looking down at the spread of grass. Despite her determination to stay angry, she felt herself thawing.

“Look at that!” he said huskily. “Grass belly-high on a four-year-old steer, and that nester was trying to farm it!”

He handed Amy down from the buggy and both of them stood on the edge of the ridge gazing down in amazement. Amy pointed toward the opposite slope. “Isn't that a house over there?”

“The nester's shack, I guess. Already falling down.”

“It doesn't look as if it had been farmed,” Amy said, puzzled.

“That's why the nester was willing to gamble it. Too lazy to make enough improvements to hold it.”

“And now it's yours?” she asked, as though she was trying to get used to the idea.

It was then that they saw the lone horseman streaking across the flatland to the west. Both of them watched the trail of dust kick up over the prairie and slowly drift away with the wind. The rider's strong gray covered ground fast and soon disappeared in the afternoon sun behind the ridge.

Jeff glanced at Amy and shrugged. “A poor way to treat horseflesh in this kind of heat. Well, I guess we've seen all there is to see.” They returned to the buggy, turned around on the rocky slope and headed slowly back to Plainsville.

Out of curiosity, Amy looked back over her shoulder as they neared the stage road, but there was no sign of the lone rider. She dismissed the incident from her mind and turned her imagination to that valley of grass that now belonged to Jeff. She could close her eyes and almost see a neat, white painted house there on the green slope, and cattle rolling in fat grazing contentedly in the deep grass along the creek. She visualized the beginning of a new brand in Texas—the Blaine brand.

“Jeff, what are you going to do with that land?”

He snapped the lines over the horse's back and clucked his tongue. “I don't know yet. Sell it, maybe. Two sections of land's not good for anything but farming, and I'm not a sodbuster.”

“I didn't expect anything,” she said, but Jeff could see that she had. They rode for a while in silence, and when Jeff tried to take her hand, she pulled away from him. Angrily, Jeff kept his eyes on the road ahead. He wished that he could forget Amy Wintworth. He could never please her. She always wanted the impossible.

But he no longer denied that he liked being with her. She was not easy to get along with, but she was always there when he needed her, which was more than he could say for anybody else. Even his pa.

Oh, she got mad at him sometimes, but she didn't stay mad. Like that affair with the Jorgensons, and the fight at the dance. She could cut like a whip when riled, but he didn't mind that so much because she always got over it.

Only recently had Jeff begun to realize that things between himself and Amy were not the same as they had always been. Not for several years had he thought up elaborate schemes to ignore her; now he found himself thinking up excuses to be with her. For a long while a thought had been growing in his mind. Despite the fact that they often fought and she was almost impossible to please, the feeling that he would never be able to forget her had grown stronger and stronger within him. At last he had admitted it to himself, grudgingly—he guessed that he was in love with Amy Wintworth.

It was not an easy thought to live with. For one thing, Ford Wintworth was against it—and Todd, too, who used to be Jeff's friend.

Sometimes when Jeff thought about it an emptiness grew inside him until he felt that he was nothing but a hollow shell, lost and desperate. Too much of his life had been spent in anger, there had been too many reasons for hate. Today he could walk the streets of Plainsville, up and down and across, and never meet a person he could call a friend.

They feared him because of his pa and because his name was Blaine, despised him for his shield of arrogance; some hated him for what they themselves had done to Nathan. Grizzled cattlemen would make room for him at a gambling table because of his gun and reputation; Bert Surratt would serve him at the bar for the same reason. But not one of them was his friend. Only Amy understood him.

At times he wanted to tell her the things he felt. He wanted to show her what right he had to hate this town and everybody in it; but if spoken, the words would never sound the way he heard them in his mind, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

Some day he would think of a way to settle with Beulah and Wirt Sewell. He would think of a plan to even the score with all the others who sneered at him. Some day his anger would spill over and he would be rid of it, and then perhaps he could tell Amy all the things he wanted her to know.

As the buggy jolted along the deep rutted stage road, Jeff was surprised to see a group of horsemen break out of a stand of brush and head toward them.

Amy looked at him. “Isn't that Elec Blasingame in front?”

“Looks like it,” Jeff said flatly.

“Aren't you going to stop? They're headed in this direction.”

Something in Jeff's face went hard. “If they want to talk to us, they can catch up. I don't figure I'm in debt to any law in Plainsville.”

Amy did not show surprise. In a way she could understand Jeff's hostile attitude, because of what had happened to his father. Looking back she saw the horsemen spur to a gallop as they moved west toward the stage road to cut them off. There were seven of them, all Plainsville citizens, headed by Marshal Blasingame and his day deputy, Kirk Logan.

“Thanks for waiting for us,” Logan said with dry anger as the group reined up alongside the buggy.

“You're welcome,” Jeff said flatly, and color rose in the deputy's face.

Then Blasingame kneed his mount in on the inside, between Jeff and Logan. “None of that!” he said shortly, after touching his hatbrim to Amy. “We're looking for a man, Blaine. Heavy-set, about forty. We followed his trail this way out of town but lost it on the shale bed to the south of here. You happen to see anybody to fit the description?”

Jeff raked the riders with a glance, noting the ropes and rifles. “Was he riding a gray?” he asked mildly.

“By hell, that's the one!” Kirk Logan said. “Where'd you see him?”

“Can't say what the rider looked like; he was too far off. Me and Amy were over toward Stone Ridge. Saw him scooting across the prairie like he had a burr under his tail.”

Blasingame wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve.

“Sounds like the one, all right. Which direction was he headed?”

“East,” Jeff said casually. “Due east.”

As he said it, he shot a glance at Amy, stopping the words that were on her lips.

“Thanks, Blaine,” the marshal said, and the riders began pulling their horses around. “He won't get away from us now.”

“Wait!” Amy called. But she was too late. The marshal and his posse were pounding back to the east and her voice was lost in the thunder of hoofs. She fixed Jeff with her flashing eyes. “The man we saw was headed west! You know he was!”

She hardly recognized the man beside her as the Jeff Blaine she had ridden with from Plainsville. “There are a lot of gray horses in Texas,” he said coldly. “Maybe he was the wrong man.”

“But what if he was the right man? What if he's a killer?”

Jeff took her arm and tried to make his voice gentle. “Amy, I'm not the law; that's Elec's job. But remember that I saw them catch the wrong man once and try to bang him. I'm not going to help them catch another one.”

Amy felt futility well up inside her, knowing that nothing she could say would erase his bitterness. An uneasy wall built up between them as the buggy rolled again toward Plainsville. “Jeff,” she said at last, “my father talked to me today. He asked me not to see you again.”

Jeff shot her a glance, waiting for her to go on.

“Maybe he was right,” she said, and he held his silence.

To Jeff, it was just another shooting. They were not rare in Plainsville these days. He was still mad at himself for not patching up the fight with Amy before letting her out at her house. But like mules, both of them had refused to give, and they had parted in anger.

If she can't understand the reasons I have for hating this town, he told himself, maybe it's just as well I find it out now.

But he didn't believe it. As he walked toward town from the livery barn, he felt his anger leaving him, the ache of loneliness pulling at his nerves. He tramped the plank walk to the Paradise eating house and made his supper on stew and sourdough bread. He had the thought to go back to the Wintworth house and make it up with her, but he didn't know what to say. Anyway, Ford would probably want to put in his own word and make him madder than he already was.

Well, he told himself, she'll get over it.

But this time he wondered. He had not liked the look of hurt in her eyes, the coldness with which she had drawn away from him. He dropped some silver on the counter and walked out of the restaurant.

The sun had died behind the lip of the prairie; lamps and lanterns were being lighted, and there was the familiar smell of woodsmoke in the air. Jeff's lonesomeness and discontent thrived in the gathering dusk.

He stood in front of the Paradise for a while, watching a group of Snake hands ride whooping in from the north. Jeff envied them their gaiety, the sense of freedom that was always with them. When he first left the Sewell house he had thought to get on as a cowhand with one of the big outfits, as Nathan had done so long ago. But the common hand's pay of six bits a day and chuck did not appeal to him—he had learned quickly that he could do much better at Surratt's gambling tables,.

But his boyhood notion of the cowhand's life was strong within him, and he could still smile at their loud talk, their vanity and swagger. He noted that some of the hands were no older than himself, eighteen or nineteen at the most. In this country they were not looked upon as boys.

The cowhands disappeared into the new Green House saloon, and Jeff lingered for a few minutes longer in front of the Paradise. The pungent smell of woodsmoke brought back memories. On the slope to the east of town he could see the straggling barefoot “cowboys” bringing in the family cows. Not long ago he had been one of them, a tow-headed kid with hardly a care in the world. “The sight of Wirt Sewell on the other side of the street brought his bitterness into sharp focus. Coming out of Baxter's store, Wirt looked old and somehow shrunken, but he wrung no pity from Jeff Blaine. The very sight of Wirt could send him into a rage, and now Jeff turned stiffly and faced in the other direction so he wouldn't have to look at him.

Jeff had heard with bitter pleasure how Wirt's tin shop was going to ruin. That was the town's way of punishing Beulah for making a fool of it. Even the grangers were canceling their orders, sending all the way to Landow for their windmills and water tanks and tin piping. They said it was only a matter of time before he went broke and would be forced to leave Plainsville; they said he spent his days piddling with buckets and tubs which nobody would buy.

Not until it was too late to escape did Jeff realize that Wirt had crossed the street and was coming toward him. He felt something inside him go cold and hard as Wirt said, “Jeff, won't you talk to me?”

Jeff turned angrily and faced a sagging, defeated shadow of a man. He said tightly, “We have nothing to talk about.”

“Jeff, can't you ever forgive us?”

He said shortly, “No!”

Wirt's face was flabby and blank. “I didn't think you would. But I had to ask. I'm not standing up for what Beulah did—it was a terrible thing. It was wrong—she knows it now—but at the time she thought it was the best thing for you. That's why she did it, Jeff.”

Jeff laughed harshly. “Is that what she's telling people?”

Wirt shrugged wearily. “She tells them nothing. She hasn't seen anybody since you left us. She won't talk—not even to me.” Nervously, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Your Aunt Beulah's sick, Jeff. She's shut herself up as if she was dead and that house was her tomb. If you'd just go over and see her—”

“But I won't,” Jeff said cruelly. “One day my pa will come back to Plainsville, and if he wants to forgive her, that's his business. But I never will!”

Wirt shrunk before the hate in Jeff's eyes. His head dropped, and after a moment he shuffled back across the street.

Jeff felt his nerves quiver. He turned on his heel and walked stiffly toward Bert Surratt's.