Hard Money (15 page)

Seay pondered this as he packed and lighted his pipe and lifted one foot out of the stirrup to stretch. The stars were close tonight, and the heat giving off from the rocks around him seemed to lift toward the night sky in invisible waves that made these stars dance fitfully. A rat scurried off in the stunted brush by the road, and his horse shied, and he spoke sharply to him.

How could Sharon Bonal face this bad news from Hugh? Like a woman whose love has already acknowledged the imperfection of her man, and to whom forgiving is now easy because at first it was so hard? Abruptly he was angry with himself and put Sharon Bonal and Hugh Mathias out of his mind.

Approaching Tronah, as he was passing the humble street of miners' homes, he heard the provocaive, throaty laugh of a woman hidden in the shadows of a tiny porch, and it disturbed him oddly. For a brief moment fancy tried to explain the reason for that laugh, husky, teasing, warm, and immediately he thought of Vannie Shore. That might have been her laugh.

He reined in a little, his face musing, and he rammed his cold pipe in his pocket. Of a man on a side street, away from the town's clamor, he found where Vannie lived. Anyway, he thought, here is a woman who will let me thank her in my way for a friendly service.

The street was ugly, the afterthought of the town's greed, and it ran aimlessly beyond the alley which separated it from the town's main street. Its houses, some of cut stone, were close to the street, and iron and picket fences tried to cover up the meagerness of the bare yard.

It was at one of these that Seay dismounted and looped the reins of his horse over the iron hitch rail in front.

The house was dark, but he could make out a white blur on the porch which moved and then became immobile as he opened the gate.

“I wondered if you asked questions for nothing,” Vannie Shore greeted him at the steps. “Would you rather sit out here? It's hot inside.”

Seay murmured something and took the half of the leather cushioned porch sofa that was vacant beside Vannie, letting her first pick up the knitting she had laid there.

She did not speak for a moment, but her silence did not come from awkwardness: it was that she found it hard to shake the habits of loneliness, Seay thought, and thinking it, he asked gently, “You have no one with you, Vannie?”

“Cat,” Vannie said. “Cats and knitting.” She laughed easily, warmly. “I'm almost into the ways of a widow woman, Phil.”

“Rot,” Seay said quickly.

Vannie put her knitting aside and stretched out her long, full legs now and rested her head on the back of the sofa. Seay watched her, unable to see her fully, but the rich fragrance of her was all around him in the night, and he felt his blood strangely quickened.

“Not so much rot as you think,” Vannie said quietly. “Maybe I like it.” She was silent a moment, and then added more softly, “Maybe I have to like it, so it's just as well.”

“But you like men,” Seay mused. “They like you. They can't help it.”

“It's the women,” Vannie said, and without bitterness. “All the men I would like have women—here or somewhere else. And the women here have made it hard for them to know me.” She looked lazily toward him. “All except you.”

“And I can't—not as well as I'll want to.”

“That's the trouble,” Vannie said with gentle irony. “The men I would like haven't time for me. And that's all right, too. I'd only expect them to have time for me if they more than liked me.”

“You make it hard for me to thank you for this morning, Vannie,” Seay replied, and his tone held a good-natured truculence. “This is a rough town, where a man hasn't time to take a step for fear he'll take his foot off the neck of the man below him.” He said more seriously, “Why don't you leave then?”

“I own a mine.”

“A man could run it for you.”

“Not as well. Besides, it's the one thing I hold to—a kind of a lifeline keeps me from drowning in self-pity. For ten hours a day I'm alive, with a sense of power, success. I'm thankful for that. What happens during the rest of the day isn't so bad,” she added, looking full at him. “You must know the feeling, Phil. It's almost your life.”

“Not the self-pity.”

“Nor mine. I say it keeps me from it. And you're not a woman, so you wouldn't know about that part of it.”

Seay rose and walked over to the single step and rammed his hands in his hip pockets, his old restlessness upon him. The things Vannie said always had the power to disturb him. He said over his shoulder, “Tell me, Vannie. Is self-pity the lot of a woman?”

“Of my kind, unless we're careful,” she said after some consideration.

“Your kind?”

“Yes, the kind that gives like a man, wants like a man and yet has to play out her life being a woman.”

He half turned to her, roused by something close to passion in her voice, and Vannie knew it and said more. “There are women, Phil, who can be ladies all their lives until once their pride cracks because of a man, and they let him have that human glimpse of them. And there are some men who are so used to that ladylikeness that they are confounded by the glimpse of humanity. That is what they call love.”

A faint anger stirred within him, and curiosity, too, for he read this to mean Sharon Bonal and her actions this morning. If he had thought this same thing, drawing no conclusions from it, then Vannie had supplied those conclusions for him.

“Pin that down, Vannie,” he murmured, walking toward her.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

“I meant Sharon.”

He looked down at her, strangely without anger. “How?” he asked. “How?”

Vannie rose now to face him. “Phil, is your memory so short that—” She paused. “How short is it?
So
short, is it?”

Seay didn't answer.

“Do you want me to tell you what she said to you this morning, Phil? She said that you were acting like a boy, that you were playing out a hand that Servel Janeece had dealt you, and the way he wanted you to. She said that you were carrying more than your own life on your shoulders. She said to wait, wait for the time when you were free to square your accounts. Didn't she? Didn't she say that?”

Seay said angrily, “You were listening?”

Vannie laughed shortly. “Not listening, Phil. I know, because I said the same thing to you myself not a minute before she came. And which of us did you listen to?” She paused, and he could hear her labored breathing. “You listened to her, Phil. You didn't even hear me. And you didn't hear me because you knew that was what I would say. Tober had said it already. You'd already said it to yourself, but you were so stubborn you couldn't hear. It took Sharon Bonal to make you listen.”

“You hate her, Vannie?” Seay murmured.

“Not hate her. I envy her,” Vannie said bitterly. “She gives so seldom that when she does, it can startle you to life. I give because it's my way, Phil—a man's way, Tober's way, your way—but you can't hear me. Don't you call that love?”

Seay gripped her arms tightly. “Don't say that!”

“I'll say that and more,” Vannie said quietly. “Wake up, Phil. You're a grown man, and know yourself. I've known it since I first set eyes on you at Maizie's. You were friendly with me because I was friendly with you, and you were starved for kindness from a woman, a handsome woman. And all the time you were being so grateful to me for liking you, you were thinking of Sharon Bonal and her pride, watching for her, hungering to be tramped on. And when she threw you one bone today, you are so grateful—so pathetically grateful.”

Seay shook her in his anger.

“That's right,” Vannie said, her voice breaking. “God help me if it isn't! And I could give you much more than the pitiful little she gave you, Phil. That's what hurts. I could give you love. I could warm you with it, Phil, so that the sight of her cold little pride would turn you back to me. I could give you so much—if you only wanted it!”

Slowly, Seay let go her arms, and then she was close to him, her arms around him, her head against his shoulder. For a moment she held him so, and then she raised her face to his. The warm softness of her lips was like a drug rioting through him, and he could feel the soft fullness of her body next to him; and then, bringing his hands up, he roughly freed himself of her arms.

Vannie was conquered. She stepped back and turned away, and Seay put a hand on her arm and drew her around.

“It's no good, Vannie,” he said huskily. “I—it's no good.”

“I know,” Vannie murmured, watching his face a still moment. “I didn't think it would be. I—I had to fight, that's all.”

“It wouldn't work.”

“Oh, it would, Phil!” she said passionately. “It would!” She ceased talking, and Seay could feel the spirit go out of her. He stepped over and picked up his hat and came back to her.

Vannie said, “If you apologize for kissing me, Phil Seay, I will hate you!” She laughed shortly. “Besides, it was I who kissed you.”

Seay put a hand on her arm. “Believe me, Vannie. It wouldn't work. If I thought it would …”

“I know. You are full of her, Phil. Well, go on, and God bless you, you poor fool. And when you know her, Phil, and if it isn't too late, I'll be here.”

When the tramping of boots in the harness room approached the door, and he could hear the fumbling with the lock, Hardiston groped in the dark for his gun. He found it and sat bolt upright, holding it awkwardly, cringing back against the dusty oat sacks.

The door opened, and light washed the room. The lantern moved into the room, and above it Hardiston could see the thick, high shoulders of Chris Feldhake. Feldhake swung the lantern high to look around him, and he grunted at sight of Hardiston atop the oat sacks stacked almost ceiling high. Then he set the lantern on the floor in the middle of the cleared space among the sacked feed and turned and watched while four other men followed him into the room. The last one closed the door.

Hardiston knew three of them, not by name, but by sight. They were the three who always came in with Feldhake, who had come in this room a dozen times in the last four days—hard, quiet men who let Feldhake talk and ask questions. The fourth man was always someone new, and the questions Feldhake asked of this fourth man were always the same. Hardiston lay back on the feed sacks, waiting for the questioning to begin. His face was stubbled with a gray-black beard, and his black suit was powdered with dust. He scratched continually at the oat husks that had worked into his clothes, his hair. He listened now.

“Kirk, you was drivin' a carriage that night out at Comber's party, wasn't you?” Feldhake began. Hardiston turned his head to look down at the men below. Feldhake half sat on a feed sack. The stranger stood by the lantern. The other three lounged against the door and squatted against feed sacks.

“Sure. The Widowses were out there that night.”

“You boys were out in the carriage house eatin' what Ben brought out to you, weren't you?” Feldhake went on in a casual voice.

“Not in it. We was talkin' there by the wall,” Kirk said.

“You see anybody ride up on a saddle horse durin' the evenin'?” Feldhake asked. Hardiston looked over at him. He had a straw stuck in his mouth, his hat cuffed back off his forehead. His face was sleepy, brutal, almost smiling, but he contrived to give an unobservant man the impression of wholly friendly curiosity.

“Yeah, I seen a man ride up,” Kirk said slowly, trying to recall. “Why?”

“Remember who it was?”

“I never paid no attention,” Kirk said.

Feldhake shifted his thick shoulders faintly and went on. “He was ridin' a buckskin, wasn't he?”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“Hear him say anything?”

Kirk scowled now and took off his hat and scratched his head. He was a middle-aged man with an amiably plain face.

“Yeah, he asked us to send Ben over.”

“You wouldn't remember the voice?” Feldhake persisted gently. “Think you ever heard it before?”

There was a long pause before Kirk answered. “Maybe. I dunno. I never paid no attention, Chris.”

“Think,” Feldhake insisted. “You can't recollect anything more about the man, except he was riding a buckskin? Was he fat or thin? Did his voice sound excited or not?”

Kirk shook his head immediately. “I dunno, Chris. He was out in the dark, there. There was a light in the carriage house, and I seen the color of his horse when it shied back into the light. I just figgered it was somebody from town with a message for Ben. I never paid no attention.”

A shadow of suspicion crossed Kirk's face. “Why you so anxious to know, Chris?”

Feldhake laughed and reached in his pocket and drew out a gold piece, which he flipped to the man leaning against the door. “You win, Bob,” he said easily. To Kirk, he said, “Bob's sparkin' the help out there at Comber's. He claimed he wasn't out there the night of that party, and I claimed he was. But this man wasn't Bob, I reckon—not unless Bob stole a buckskin.”

“Hell, why didn't you say so?” Kirk said, grinning. “No, it wasn't Bob. I know that.” He turned, and Bob opened the door, and Chris waved lazily as Kirk went out into the saddle room. Bob closed the door behind him. The three of them looked at Feldhake, who was plucking absently at his thick lower lip.

“That's four that said buckskin,” Feldhake said presently.

“It was Jimmy Hamp, all right,” one of the men said.

Feldhake nodded imperceptibly. “Yes. I reckon so.”

Immediately the two men squatting against the grain sacks rose and went out. Bob waited while Feldhake lounged off the sacks to follow them.

“Feldhake,” Hardiston said, and Feldhake stopped while he scrambled down the oat sacks and crossed over to face him.

“I've been waiting four days now,” Hardiston said. “When do I get the rest of the money?”