Coroner Creek (7 page)

A pair of riders passed under the big cottonwood and Della looked out and saw them and called, “Mother, Leach and Andy are in.”

There was no answer. Chris excused himself the second time, and now Della rose with him. “Come out and meet them,” she said.

As they stepped out of the lean-to into the sun and headed for the corral, Della's face was somber, and Chris knew she was thinking of her mother and of the decision her mother couldn't face.

Presently she said gently, “Chris, there's just one thing you've got to promise in all this. I'll take your word for it.”

Chris waited, wondering what this new condition would be.

“That you'll finish this with Rainbow. I don't know why you hate Younger Miles, and I don't care. And I don't care what it costs us, but, in the end, you've got to leave us safe.”

Chris was silent a few steps, pondering this, and then he said, “I'll promise that,” and made his condition. “If you move your mother to town, Della, I'll promise it.”

Della looked swiftly up at him, something like fright in her eyes, and did not answer.

The two riders had turned their horses into the corral and were coming toward the house. The smaller man was the older, and Chris didn't even look at him but watched the tall man with the big hands. As they came closer, Chris' hopes suddenly died. The big man was in his middle thirties and wore clean, wash-faded levis and calico shirt. He had an open, simple face, and nothing showed in it except the placidity of a drudge. Chris had seen his kind, the hired man of the Kansas homesteads who plows another man's fields for thirty years in order to get a field of his own where he dies, questioning nothing.

The other man was different, and when they halted before Della, it was this man she introduced first.

“Chris, this is Leach Conover. And Andy West. Boys, this is Chris Danning, our new foreman.”

Leach put out his hand, but it was done reluctantly, and an immediate hostility crept into his eyes. His browned face under his high-crowned Stetson was old with the lines of defeat and forgotten bitterness.
A tired old dog lying in the sun
, Chris thought without pity, for he knew Leach liked his life and himself the way they were, comfortable and forgotten.

Andy West said, as he shook hands, “You're workin' for a wonderful boss, Mr. Danning.”

“Yes,” Chris said.

Leach was eyeing Della almost with accusation but she did not see it.

She said to Chris, “I'll help mother, and then we'll talk, Chris.”

They left him, and he cut slowly over to the bunkhouse.
The Henhouse
, he thought quietly. It was a good name, perhaps, with Della the reluctant mother hen. Yet somewhere here there must be some iron in somebody besides Della. The two men he'd met would shun responsibility instinctively and, if given it, would drift. There was a third man, then. Perhaps he would be what Chris wanted and had to have, but Chris expected nothing.

Inside the bunkhouse, he looked about him again and chose his bunk, the top one closest the door. He dumped out the contents of his warbag on the floor and hung his few clothes on a vacant nail, and then unlashed his bedroll.

As he worked, he heard a rider pass, and supposed it was Leach or Andy. He was picking up a pair of boots from the remaining-gear on the floor when he heard a man enter the room behind him and, boots in hand, he turned.

The man hauled up at sight of him, and they looked at each other a long moment. Recognition came to them both at the same time.

“You stopped me this mornin',” the man said. “There at Melaven's, you told me about Mrs. Miles.”

“That's right,” Chris said. This, then, was the third man of the Box H crew. A kind of sardonic amusement rose in Chris then as he remembered his hopes, and he silently chucked his boots in the bunk.

The third Box H hand, Frank Yordy, had a bluff, self-important manner about him that could never, Chris thought bitterly, deceive even' a child. He was heavy, but with soft flesh hanging on his bones, and he had the ruddy complexion, the challenging eye and the bold voice of a man who has discovered he can live by his mouth and nothing much else. He was the sort who knew all the saloon gossip and was full of vast schemes and hard luck stories, and who charmed women of all ages with his calculated gallantries.

Yordy, standing just inside the door now, watched him as he picked up a worn jumper and fumbled in its pockets.

“What're you doin' in this place?” Yordy demanded then.

“I work here.”

For a full ten seconds Yordy was silent. Chris finally looked up and surprised the expression of amazement just fading from Yordy's florid face.

“Not after this morning, you ain't,” Yordy announced.

Chris didn't say anything. He went on sorting out his gear.

Yordy came into the room, put a hand against the wall and crossed his feet. He shook his head pityingly and said, “You don't have the sense God gave you, fella, after what you did this morning. If you had, you'd be clean over the Blackbows right now. We don't take your kind of talk in this country.”

Still Chris didn't say anything, and Yordy came erect. “You'll be out of here in ten minutes, soon's Mrs. Harms knows about this morning.”

He turned and went out and, unsmilingly, Chris watched him go. Here was the Box H crew, the men Della promised would back him up. A clumsy, slow-witted hand fit only to break horses, a burnt-out and bitter old man who wanted only to sit by the stove each night, and a blustering fool. Two were useless, the third dangerous, and he was expected to beat Rainbow with them.

He went to the door and watched Yordy swagger importantly toward the house, and he thought with a gray disgust,
He'll have to go
. He'd made a bad bargain, and he'd worsened it by promising Della to finish it with Rainbow, so Box H would be safe. Yordy, though, was too much.
I'll drift
, he thought suddenly.
Miles won't do anything more to her now, if I leave, than if I hadn't been here
.

About to turn, a movement atop the low, bald hill where the road came down caught his eye. He waited, then, until he made out two horsemen, and curiosity held him still in the doorway until he recognized Sheriff O'Hea and the red-headed man in Miles' store as they reined up under the cottonwood.

A slow suspicion held him motionless as he watched them dismount and meet Della, who came out of the lean-to. Moments later, Yordy came out, too, then West and Conover and finally Mrs. Harms. Presently, he saw Della turn to look at the bunkhouse, and Yordy gestured sweepingly toward it.

A kind of cross-grained pride held Chris there while Della fell in beside O'Hea and walked with him toward the bunk-house. The others, all save Mrs. Harms, dropped in behind them.

Chris stood full in the doorway, hands at his sides, as Della and O'Hea halted before him.

Della had a piece of folded paper in her hand. She said in quiet distress, “Chris, Sheriff O'Hea wants to talk to you.”

Chris looked at O'Hea.

“Have you ever been in Jackson County, Wyoming?” O'Hea asked.

Chris looked from him to MacElvey, whose expression was one of sardonic watchfulness.

“I have,” Chris said.

“Then I guess that settles it, son,” O'Hea went on, a kind of thin and forced authority in his voice. “They want you there, and I'll have to send you back.”

“He means you're under arrest, Chris,” Della said. She looked at O'Hea. “Don't you tell him what for?”

“Brand changing,” O'Hea said.

“He's a horse thief,” Yordy said bluntly. “No drifter ever bought a horse like he turned into the corral, not on chuckline handouts.”

“You don't know that, Frank!” Della said sharply. She turned to Chris and held out the paper, which Chris now saw was a dodger. “Do you want to read it?”

Chris only shook his head in negation. “Do you believe it?” he asked her.

“I—” she looked searchingly at him. “I would hate to.”

“And you still want me for a foreman?”

“Yes, if this isn't true.”

Chris lifted his gaze directly to MacElvey, watched him a moment and then said quietly to him alone, “Don't get in this.” His gaze now shifted to Yordy, standing next O'Hea.

“You,” he said flatly to Yordy, “saddle up and clear out of here. We'll leave your stuff at the hotel. Only get out of here. Now.”

An expression of blank and furious amazement crept into Yordy's heavy face. He glanced quickly at Della, who was not looking at him, and then at O'Hea, who was watching Chris, and only afterwards did he look at Chris. He had calculated the risk and accepted it, and said flatly, “Not when any horse thief tells me, foreman or not.”

Chris stepped out of the bunkhouse, not fast, took the three steps to Yordy and with his left hand fisted a wad of Yordy's shirt for purchase. He pulled Yordy toward him and slapped him once across the mouth with the flat of his hand. His blow carried his hand past Yordy's head, and he brought it back, slapping Yordy again with the back of his hand. He slapped him a third time, then, deliberately, and let his hands fall to his sides, waiting.

Yordy hesitated long past the surprise of it, and then, crowded by pride and fear, hit him. The rest of it was violent, utterly silent, so brief there was no time for those watching it to move. Chris hit him in the belly, and when Yordy jack-knifed, Chris' shoulder, low and lifting, caught him under the chin. As Yordy straightened, head back, Chris chopped in a blow from the side that almost swiveled Yordy's head on his neck. Yordy went down, not on his back, but like a man dropped, without volition and without struggle. He lay against Chris' shins for a moment, and then pushed himself to his knees. On-all fours, he shook his head slowly three times, and then lurched to his feet, and without looking at them, he walked uncertainly in the direction of the corral.

Chris half turned now and looked at O'Hea, and his face was still hard with stirring anger.

“If you want to take me out of here, sheriff, try it,” he invited.

The transition was too sudden for O'Hea; he was still looking at Yordy, so that when he caught the sound of Chris' voice and shifted his glance to him, the astonishment was still in his tired face.

In the long moment of silence that followed, with them all looking at him, O'Hea's expression changed slowly to a fleeting anger which was now only the dregs of an old courage, and then the tired defeat was there again. He seemed to gather up his pride and all his authority as he said, without moving, “Put a gun on him, Mac.”

“If you do, you better use it, Red,” Chris said to MacElvey.

“After you, O'Hea,” MacElvey said dryly.

Nobody spoke or moved and, when Chris had given O'Hea his chance and it had not been accepted, he said with a brutal directness, “Get Miles off your back, O'Hea, or quit. Tell Miles to work it rough and in the open from now on. He knows how.”

He looked at MacElvey, since this was for him, too, and he saw that MacElvey was watching him with strange speculation in his green eyes.

O'Hea tried to put a kind of dignity in his words now, and a threat too. “You won't come?”

“No.”

O'Hea said to Della, “I think we'd better have a talk, Della,” and he tramped past Chris toward the house. MacElvey fell in beside Della, who gave Chris a frightened sober glance as she passed him.

That left Leach and Andy with him, and Chris regarded them with a quiet irony in his gray eyes. “You don't like it, Andy,” he said dryly, his words a statement, not a question.

Andy West's still-puzzled face altered now. He flushed, reading the jibe rightly, but his answer reached far behind his disapproval and surprised Chris. “Was he right? You on the dodge?”

“No.”

Andy's slow mind turned this over, balancing all that he had seen and understanding only now the implications.

Chris helped him. “The door's still open. Walk out if you want, or stay and fight Rainbow.”

Andy nodded almost to himself. “I ain't ever shot at a man.”

Chris didn't say anything, but looked at Leach. Yordy was riding past now. He looked neither to right nor left of him, but held stubbornly to the wagon tracks and walked his horse.

Leach watched Yordy a long moment, and then met Chris' gaze. “I been in trouble,” he said meagerly. “I don't like it.”

“Want your time?”

“Did I ask for it?” Leach demanded.

Chris moved his head in negation, acknowledging Leach's way of accepting this, and said then, sealing it, “I want to ride boundary tomorrow. Who shows it to me—Della?”

Leach and Andy looked at each other, and it was Andy who made the decision. “I do, I reckon,” he said quietly.

CHAPTER VI

Frank Yordy didn't even look back at the place he'd worked these five years as he topped the bald hill above Box H. He spurred his horse impatiently, but soon, alone now and with the bright silence of midday around him, he relaxed and rolled a cigarette. The process of building his smoke took some concentration, since the hand he'd hit Danning with was sore and stiff already, and he thought of it with a small pride. He'd hit him, anyway. He wondered morosely why Danning had been standing there, no guard on him, when he'd ridden out, and he figured O'Hea had made a mistake.

Once his cigarette was lighted, he pasted it in the corner of his loose, sullen mouth and took stock of his situation. He knew now where he'd made his mistake. If he'd taken Della's orders to accept Danning as the new foreman instead of arguing with her, he'd be all right now. So he was out of a job now, an easy job that had given him good food, pleasant society, just the right amount of work, influence over two women and the complete domination of two men. The anger, this time at his own black luck, came back to him again, and he thought of. Danning and the Harms women with a hot and bitter hatred.