Coroner Creek (6 page)

“Let's see those dodgers,” he demanded.

Sheriff O'Hea pulled out two lower drawers of his desk and tiredly lugged them across the room and dumped the contents on the table, which was already cluttered with ore samples, newspapers, boxes of cartridges and miscellaneous gear.

Younger followed him, and Ernie, watching a moment, said, “You figure he's wanted?”

Younger turned to him. “If we can find a reward dodger that fits him, we can claim he is.”

“Then what?” Ernie said, scoffing mildly.

“Load him on a stage and ship him out of the country, then turn him loose. He'll drift.”

Ernie yawned, and then said idly, “Hell, there's one way to deal with a saloon bum like that. Rough him up. Give me Stew and Bill Arnold to stand off that Henhouse crew and I'll break a single tree over him. Let him crawl out of the country after that.”

“That's just what I don't want,” Miles said coldly. “This'll be legal and respectable, nothing rough. He insulted Mrs. Miles. It could have been any other woman. We push him out of the country, and we're rid of him. Rainbow hasn't showed in it, and it's all quiet.”

MacElvey said dryly, “Maybe it's quiet.”

Younger shifted his glance to him. “Why won't it be, Mac?”

Mac said, “He looks to me like the kind that wouldn't go anywhere unless he wanted to. Maybe he won't want to go.”

Younger regarded him thoughtfully, as if he were giving his statement respectful consideration. “What would you do, Mac?”

“Ignore him.”

Younger smiled faintly, without humor. “Hell, I'm going to get Henhouse, Mac. I'm going to move in on everything those two women haven't got title to, and then I'll buy 'em out. All legal. And I don't want a nosy, sorehead puncher stirring them up to fighting. No. He goes.”

“Listen to this,” O'Hea interrupted, and he quoted: “‘About six feet tall, weighs one seventy, age about 30. Dark complexion, surly appearance, light gray eyes, black hair. This man is quarrelsome and dangerous, armed or unarmed. Wanted for horse stealing and brand changing by the Jackson County authorities.'” He looked at Miles. “That close enough?”

“For Mrs. Harms and Della, yes,” Miles said dryly. “Arrest him and put him on the Petrie stage tonight and dump him over the mountains, O'Hea.”

Ernie said jibingly, “O'Hea and who else?”

The three of them regarded O'Hea now, and he glanced at Ernie with a quiet hatred and moved back to his chair. He sat down with the slowness of a sick man who knows he will move slowly until he dies. He said, not looking at Miles, “I'd like help.”

“I bet you would,” Ernie scoffed.

“Quit it, Ernie,” Younger said absently. He scrubbed his face with the palm of his heavy hand, frowning, and then he looked at MacElvey.

“Mac, you work for me, but they like you around here, and you're a steady head. They'll figure O'Hea's doing it the quiet way. He's entitled to a deputy. What about it?”

“You pay me,” Mac said laconically.

Miles looked at him closely, and MacElvey returned his stare evenly, his green eyes unblinking. Miles turned away then and said, “Then you and Ernie get the horses.”

MacElvey and Ernie rose and went out, and O'Hea began the slow process of putting the dodgers back in the drawers. He replaced the drawers then and sank wearily again into the chair.

Miles, standing in the middle of the room, moodily lighted a cigar, and when he had it going well, he reached for his hat on the table.

“Make it stick,” he said briefly to O'Hea.

O'Hea poked at some papers on his desk, looking sidewise at them, and said without looking up, “Got a minute, Younger?”

Miles had his hat on. He paused in the middle of the room and said “Sure.”

O'Hea said, still jabbing gently at the papers, “Ever stop to think this wouldn't have happened if Abbie hadn't been drinking?”

“I've thought about it.” Younger said coldly. “Have you?”

O'Hea looked at him now, a faint surprise in his face. “She's your wife.”

“You raised her. I picked her up when she was baking pies for a living at the hotel and hadn't had a new dress in three years. What's the matter? Is good food, all the money she wants, a new home and the respect of the country a little too strong for the O'Hea blood?”

“That's what I'm gettin' at,” O'Hea said doggedly. “What's the matter with her?”

“She's trash,” Miles said brutally, and he watched the color mount in O'Hea's cheeks. A faint anger stirred in O'Hea's eyes and faded slowly, and Younger went on, no mercy in his voice, “I don't give a damn what happens to her, O'Hea, just so she doesn't drag my name into the muck. Because, by heaven, I'm going to be respected. I married her and gave her a home. I bought a bunch of cows for you and run them on shares with mine, free. All I ask for pay is that she keeps out of the gutters and you go through the motions of bein' a sheriff. That's asking a lot, it looks like.”

O'Hea said nothing, and Miles went to the door and paused, his hand on the knob.

“Just hold on a little longer, O'Hea. I'll be big enough to name my own sheriff in a year or two. And by God, I won't have to marry his daughter, either.” He went out.

O'Hea ceased playing with the papers now and stared somberly at his hand. He noted, with a sick bitterness, that it was old and veined and trembling. He clenched his fist slowly, and then with more strength, and then more, until his lips were drawn across his teeth with the violence of his effort. Then he unclenched his hand and looked at it. The fingers still trembled. Presently, his glance lifted to the window and his eyes were dead, without hope, resigned.

CHAPTER V

The Box H stood just away from the foothills where they leveled off onto the Blackbow Flats; and lay at the foot of long sloping bald hills. It was a small, well weathered place, built of logs, square and practical, its few trees big and startling on the bare face of the flats. The outbuildings were modest, too, and Danning, looking at the place in the bright morning sun, could almost guess its history. Harms had probably come out here with a young wife and baby looking for poor man's grass. He'd homesteaded here on the Flats, thrown up a crude sod shack to get his family out of the weather, and then borrowed to the limit on cattle he could graze in the mountains. This, then, was the place he had finally built, the first triumph of a stubborn man, and, Danning thought, it might have been the way he would have started.

They came off the bald hill into the shaded yard. A massive cottonwood cast a wide pool of black shadow behind the house, and Della pulled under it and reined in the team. Against the sunny side of the house was a pretty bed of flowers and Chris noted the curtains in the windows. Only this, and the absence of men's gear in the yard, gave it a touch of the feminine.

There was a long slanting lean-to on the rear of the house, and a woman stepped out the door of it and came out to meet them. Mrs. Harms was a grave-faced woman of fifty, straight, inches shorter than Della, with a kind of stern optimism in her eyes. She wore a gay apron, and Danning saw her hands were rough, capable and work-worn.

“Mother, this is our new foreman, Chris Danning,” Della said.

A faint surprise showed in Mrs. Harms' face in spite of herself, but her gaze never faltered from Chris' face.

He stepped out of the saddle and took off his hat, and accepted Mrs. Harms' warm, hard hand.

“I'm glad you're here, Mr. Danning. We've needed you.”

Chris said, “Thank you, Mrs. Harms.”

Della said, “Chris, if you'll dump that sack of groceries on the porch, I'll show you where to unhitch. The crew is scattered this morning.”

Chris shouldered the sack of groceries out of the buckboard and tramped over to the lean-to door.

When he was out of earshot, Mrs. Harms looked up at her daughter, and for a moment they regarded each other in silence.

“Since when did we start hiring men of that stripe, Della?” Mrs. Harms asked calmly.

Della answered promptly, without smiling, “Since we acquired Younger Miles for a neighbor, mother.” She paused. “What's wrong with him?”

Mrs. Harms didn't have time to answer before Chris returned. Della drove on to the wagon shed, passing the small log bunkhouse on the way. She showed Chris where to put the buckboard and hang the harness, and then told him to come in for dinner when he was finished, and left him.

Chris watched her walk away from him, striding purposefully toward the house, and he guessed she would have much to explain to her mother. For Chris sensed that Della had come to as sudden and reckless a decision this morning as he had, and that it was a momentous one for her.

He unhitched the team and turned them into the corral and noticed, now, the Box H brand on one of the horses. It was a large square with the letter H inside, and with only a little imagination it could seem like a square-fronted shed with the door in the middle. It was plain enough why it had come to be called Henhouse.

He unsaddled his own travel-leaned sorrel gelding and his pack horse, and turned them in the corral and then paused a moment to look at the layout around him.

One thing was answered for him immediately. The crew wasn't slipshod. The place was in repair, the fences good, the corrals clean, the gear stowed out of the weather and everything under roof that should be. He wondered idly what these three men he would boss were like. He tramped over to his bedroll and hoisted it to his shoulder, and went on toward the bunkhouse.

It was built of small logs, and was the least weathered of the ranch buildings. He stepped into the open door, and then came to a halt and looked about him. Here, he saw in an instant, was his answer to the kind of crew Box H employed.

For the room was neat as a military barracks. Three of the six bunks against the back wall held blankets, and these blankets were made up. Clothes hung neatly from nails in the wall, and the board floor was swept and had lately been scrubbed. The tattered magazines on the big table in the center of the room were stacked in trim piles, and the barrel stove in the front corner was polished blackly. He crossed the room and dumped his bedroll and warbag in one of the top bunks and then went over to the overhead kerosene lamp above the table. He pulled it down and looked, and then hoisted it back in place again. Yes, even the lamp chimney was clean.

He stood motionless a moment, measuring this evidence and not liking it. He hadn't seen these men yet, but he knew them already, for this bunkhouse, home to three men, was clean, neat, swept up, picked up; it argued that its tenants were settled and satisfied and comfortable—and soft. He could guess their ages at between thirty and fifty-five, three men who had found haven in this quiet job where they were fed and paid well by two women, and where they paid back these kindnesses by painting buggies or building cupboards or transplanting flowers. He thought meagerly,
I won't get help here. I'd better kill him and then get out
, and for a moment he stood hesitant.

The clang of the dinner iron moved him at last. He washed at the bench and bucket outside the door and tramped across to the lean-to, entered, and seated himself at the big table there. After the custom of the country, he turned over his plate, helped himself to the food and began eating. The clean, flowered oilcloth and the matched china plates and cups he noted, and he felt an indefinable irritation at sight of them.

Presently Mrs. Harms came out, took the seat next him nearest the kitchen and Della sat down across from him. He ate steadily and silently, taking no part in their conversation, not even hearing it, and when he was finished he excused himself, about to rise, when Mrs. Harms said, “Smoke here, Chris. All the boys do.”

Chris patiently rolled and lighted a slim cigarette, knowing Mrs. Harms wanted to quiz him and knowing, too, that this was the price he must pay for a kind of security. He could tell that Della was worried about her mother approving him, but that it wasn't going to change her plans.

Mrs. Harms started it by saying, “Have you worked around this country, Chris?”

He moved his dark head in negation. “No, Ma'm. I put in six years as trail boss for a drovers' outfit in Texas. Three years at Hashknife—Texas, too. I worked around before that, mostly in dry country.”

“Have you ever run an outfit before as big as this?”

“If you run more than three thousand head, I haven't, Ma'm.”

A faint smile touched Della's lips, but she did not look up.

Mrs. Harms persisted. “I'd think with your experience, you'd own your own place.”

A wicked flicker of anger mounted in Chris' eyes and died, and he did not answer.

Della looked at him pleadingly, as if trying to tell him to have patience, as Mrs. Harms moved her plate aside and put both elbows on the table.

She said now, “I suppose Della's told you why we hired you.”

Della put down her fork and, looking at Chris, said, “He's here to fight Younger Miles, mother. He understands that.”

“You shouldn't say that, Della,” Mrs. Harms said quietly. “It's just that—Well, it never hurts to carry a big stick.”

“Chris is here, mother, to keep what we've got and get back what's ours. Let's not pretend,” Della said firmly.

Mrs. Harms shook her head. “You make it sound as if we've gone out of our way to hunt trouble.”

Chris said quietly, “You have, Mrs. Harms. If Della hasn't told you that, she should. I'm trouble. And she asked me to come. I didn't ask her.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and his gray gaze didn't falter. It was Mrs. Harms who looked away first, and there was a quiet despair in her eyes. She rose and went into the house and Della, watching her, half started out of her chair and then settled back. There was a stubbornness in her face now as she went on eating, and Chris thought grimly,
She won't like any of it, Della
.