“Bob Heseltine,” I said.
“Heseltine? No wonder Pete never had a chance. You say that was Bob Heseltine? The man Shell Tucker is chasing?”
“It sounds like him,” I said, and filled my cup again.
Heseltine had been here last night, might even still be here. But what about Kid Reese?
“You mentioned a woman? Wasn’t there another man with him, too?”
“Come to think of it, one of the boys was sayin’ there was a man rode in with him. He’s taken sick, or something. I hear he’s over to Doc Macnamara’s place.”
When I’d finished eating I went outside. It was sunny and bright, quite a few people were walking up and down, and there were several rigs and saddle horses around. I stood under the awning in front of the theatre and studied the town from under my hat brim.
Once I’d gotten my outfit back I’d shifted into some better clothes, but the trip had been hard on the duds and it was time I picked up some jeans and a coat. The weather was turning cold in the evening.
Down the street I saw Doctor Macnamara’s sign. After a moment I strolled down to his office door, and stepped inside. His waiting room smelled of stale cigar smoke, and there was a worn copy of the
Police Gazette
on a stand, along with a
Harper’s
and several week-old newspapers.
The door to the inner office was partly open, and the doctor thrust his head out. “Be with you in a minute. If you’re bleeding, stand off the carpet. I just paid fifty cents to have it cleaned.”
“I wanted to ask about a patient of yours.”
“Which one? Most of the folks around here have been patients of mine. Trouble is this here country’s too healthy for me to make a living. Why, over at Pioche they had to shoot a man to start a graveyard.”
“The man I am asking about is Kid Reese. Came in here a day or two ago, with another man and a blonde woman.”
“Him?” He studied me for a moment, his eyes suddenly alert. “Are you a friend of his?”
“No,” I said bluntly, “we’ve shot at each other a couple of times. I want to know what kind of shape he’s in, and I want to talk to him.”
“Have you been traveling with him?”
“Chasing him,” I replied.
“I won’t have any trouble around here. Anyway, he’s a sick man…a very sick man.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Stomach trouble, he says. My guess is arsenic poisoning.”
“Arsenic? From bad water?”
“I doubt it. A man would have to drink more often than he has from one spring to get all he’s had. I think somebody has been feeding it to him for quite a while.”
Ruby Shaw…! Well, that would be one way of getting rid of him.
“He said he only had one enemy he knew of, and that enemy hadn’t been anywhere near him in some time. I told him in a case like this you didn’t worry about your enemies, but those you thought were your friends.”
“Can I see him?”
The bedroom off the office had four beds for patients. Only one of them was occupied, and the man who lay in it was Kid Reese, all right, or what was left of him.
His face was thin, his features were drawn, his eyes hollow. He stared at me, and then reached under his pillow as if for a gun.
“I’m not going to shoot you, Kid,” I said. “Looks to me as if you’ve got trouble enough.”
“I got nothing to say to you.”
“At least I didn’t fill you full of arsenic.”
“That’s a lot of nonsense. Who could do that? Who would have any reason to?”
“What about Ruby, Kid? Without you, she’d have Heseltine and the money, and with Bob—”
“Are you crazy? Ruby? How could she? And anyway, she dotes on Bob. You’re tryin’ to fill me with bad thoughts about my friends. You just wait until—”
“How could she? I’ll lay you five to one she’s been making the coffee lately. And the kind of coffee we drink out here is poisonous enough without adding arsenic. And I’ll bet she hasn’t been drinking much of it herself.”
“That’s a damned lie! That’s—” His voice trailed off, and his brows drew together with sudden awareness.
“I don’t want you, Kid. I want my money, and I’m going to get it.”
Deliberately, I sat down. Doc Macnamara looked at Reese, and then he said, “I know nothing about your troubles. There is arsenic in some of the water out here, but not enough to poison you the way you have it. I would say—and I have had such cases before this—that you had been fed increasing doses over quite a period of time.”
The doctor shrugged. “However, I am surmising. I would have to perform an autopsy—”
“Not on me, you don’t!” Suddenly Reese said, “Doc, am I going to get well?”
“I think so. That is, if you don’t get any more of it. This man is supposed to be your enemy, I believe, but if I were you I’d take his advice and never go near those people again.”
He didn’t like it, but it was obvious that he believed us. He had believed me even before the doctor spoke, because evidently he remembered who had been making the coffee.
“I ain’t got any of your money,” he said, his tone surly.
“They’re takin’ care of it for me.”
“I’ll bet,” I said dryly.
“You think I’m a damn fool, don’t you?” he said.
“Nobody has a corner on being a fool, Kid. We were all fools back there in Texas when we stood around shooting off our mouths about how big and tough we were going to be. You two were fools when you tied in with Heseltine, and he was seven kinds of a fool for going to Ruby Shaw with that money. I’ll bet she’s argued against you dividing it, all along.”
“Maybe she has. That cuts no ice.”
“What will you do when you get out of here, Kid? Go back to them? Will you have the guts to warn Heseltine that he’ll be next?”
Reese was silent. The doctor went into his office and began puttering over some papers.
“Where are they, Kid? I owe those folks back in Texas and I want to get my money.”
Reese did not answer for a minute, then he said, “You’d go against Heseltine? You actually would?”
“Of course.” Even as I said it, I suddenly realized that I would do just that. A lot had happened to that boy who had left Texas on a cattle drive. And then I added, with sudden surprise to realize it was true, “Bob Heseltine will be more worried about facing me than I will about facing him.”
He looked hard at me. “You figure you’ve put on some weight, don’t you?” But he didn’t sneer. I could see that Kid Reese believed it, too. “I won’t deny,” he added, “that Bob’s almost had his fill of you—you hangin’ on his trail and all. He ain’t sleepin’ so well any more. Fact is, none of us have been.”
He turned his eyes on me. “If I cut free of them, will you lay off me?”
“I don’t want you, Kid. I never did. You knew that was our money and you knew that was our horse, but I just want the money back.”
“What did those folks in Texas ever do for you?”
“Nothing.” But then I said, “I take that back. They did do something for me—or for pa, which is the same thing. They trusted him. You’ll find out that counts for a lot, Kid, a lot more than buying drinks for a lot of rum-pots or shady women to show how big a man you are.”
“Maybe you’re right. All right, I’ll tell you something. Bob Heseltine’s got him a hide-out up back of Bridal Veil Falls, near Telluride.”
“Where’s Telluride?”
“It’s a new camp. A man named John Fallon staked some claims up there, and she looks like she’s going to boom.”
That was all I got out of him, and I was not too sure of that. He had no reason to tell me the truth, and enough reason to lie. On the other hand, somebody had been feeding him arsenic, and perhaps he already knew what had happened to Doc Sites.
Two days I stayed on in Eureka, scouting the town, making inquiries. Heseltine and Ruby had been in town, all right, but they had pulled out, headed east.
I switched horses and went after them, making good time. Several times I thought I was coming up to them, but each time it turned out to be some other people.
It was a wild and beautiful land through which I rode, but the trail was becoming crowded. Three times during the first day I passed freight outfits, and several riders passed me, as well as a stage going each way. It was getting so a man could scarcely ride five miles on that trail without seeing somebody.
In Utah I sold Zale’s horse, but I had become too attached to the dun and the grulla to let them go.
That day had been a cool one, and I was wearing a short thick wool coat when I rode up to the stage station. It was getting on for evening and I was hunting a place to stay. The station stood in the open without so much as a cottonwood tree nearby. Just a stone corral, the stone house and the trail that bent in toward its door.
There was a water trough and I rode up to it. A man peered from the doorway then came over.
“Howdy! Passin’ through?”
“Maybe. Have you got some good food in there?”
“Sort of. Fact is, I’ve got me a new cook, if she’ll stay. That’s what I came out for. She’s lookin’ to buy a hoss, and I was wishful you’d not sell her one of yours. I see you’ve got an extra.”
“I’m keeping my horses.”
I tied them, and as an afterthought, considering what he’d said, I tied them double tight. When somebody wants a horse real bad there’s no use putting temptation in their way.
He went ahead of me, and when he stepped through the door he said, “Ruby, there’ll be another mouth for supper.”
It was Ruby Shaw.
She saw me at the same minute I saw her, and her face went cold and hard. She began to swear, and she could swear better than any mule-skinner I ever did hear. I stood quiet a minute, and then I said, “Mister, I’ll not stay for supper, and if I was you I’d not eat her cooking either. The last man she cooked for is dying of arsenic poisoning.”
“Damn you!” She spat the words at me. “Damn you to hell! You turned a good man into a yellow dog!”
“Not me,” I said. “You.”
I turned around and went back to my horses, and the man followed me. “What was all that about? Do you know her?”
“Her name is Ruby Shaw. She must have come in here with a man. What happened to him?”
“He left, right after she fell asleep. He was not a well man, if you ask me. He stopped out there, right where you stand, all knotted up with pain and holdin’ his belly. When I asked him about the woman, he said I was to keep her or get rid of her, and then he lit out. He took her horse, too.”
Untying my horses, I thought bitterly of a cold camp somewhere in the mountains or desert ahead, then I swung my leg over the saddle and was off.
She came to the door and called after me, but I did not look back.
Chapter 21
I
F BOB HESELTINE figured on hiding out in the mountains near Telluride he had better hurry. The season was getting on and that was country where the drifts piled deep. Once back in those mountains, he would be there for the winter, unless he was a good man on skis or snow-shoes, and had them with him.
Skis were something I’d never attempted, but men who carried the mail through the mountains had been using them for years; and out California way, Snowshoe Thompson had made himself a reputation carrying the mail on them.
There’d been a growing chill in the air that made me think of hunting a hole. If I was going to see Vashti before snow flew I was going to have to forget about Heseltine and make time.
Frost had turned the leaves, and the mountainsides were splashed with golden clouds of aspen. Great banks of them poured down the steep slopes as though the earth had suddenly decided to give up and pour all her gold out to the waiting hands of men, only this gold was there for everyone to have—they had only to look. It was the kind of wealth that stayed with a man down the years, the kind you could never spend, but the memory of it waited in your mind to be refreshed when another autumn came.
I was going home, I was thinking now. Home? Well, for me home was where Vashti was, and it had taken me a while to know it. The only trouble was, would she still be there? Would she think of me as I did of her?
All the time I’d been covering country I’d seen a lot of men who had settled down to building businesses for themselves. Here I was, wasting time chasing after a couple of thieves when I should have been building something for myself.
Men were ranching, farming, mining. They were making names for themselves like those Yankees who came first to California, men who were going to be respected when most of the gun-packing lot were only remembered…remembered, but ignored.
Well, it was all right to sing in the sunshine, but I’d seen too many old men sitting on porches in their shabby clothes to want to be one of them.
Respect those men who were doing things to make a future? You bet I did. Most of them were busy building, opening new country, and making it better for those who would come after. They’d done the hard work, built the roads, opened the mines, dug the wells, guarded the cattle, and built the railroads. I was willing to do my share, but I wanted to be there when the payoff came.
The trail made a turn and there ahead of me was a crossroads settlement, half a dozen buildings, and a stage coming my way that had just stopped. The dust hadn’t even settled, nor the dogs stopped barking.
Folks were starting to get down from the stage when the dun ambled up to the hitchrail and I stepped down from the saddle.
It wasn’t much of a place. The stage stop was also a saloon and a restaurant. There was a corral, a couple of shacks and a second saloon. There was also a place with a sign over the door that said
BEDS
in big letters.
A square-built man with a square, hard-jawed face was standing on the porch watching the passengers step down. He turned to me as I walked up, brushing the dust from my coat. He was wearing a badge.
“Shell Tucker?”
“Yes.”
“Come inside.”
He went behind the counter, opened the door of a big old iron safe and took out a sack. He put it on the counter in front of me.
“A man came in here, sold his horse, and bought a ticket on the stage. Then he came over to me, bought me a drink, and put this sack on the table.
“He said, ‘In a few hours, or maybe in a couple of days, there’ll be a man named Shell Tucker come riding in here.’ He described you mighty well. ‘When he comes in you tell him to take this and lay off.…Just tell him to lay off.’