Fiddlefoot (20 page)

He paused now, apparently seeing the reluctance in her face. Now he leaned over and said swiftly, earnestly, “It's important, Tess. I can't tell you how, only you've got to believe me.”

Tess leaned back slowly in her chair and looked at him with pity in her eyes. She said, finally, “You can quit being afraid, Frank. He didn't die.”

A startled look came into Frank's face now. He said cautiously, “Who didn't die?”

“Pete Faraday. You didn't kill him. He's hiding in the McGarritys' empty stable. I saw him, but too late to stop you signing over Saber.” She leaned forward now and put her hand on his. “Frank,” she said passionately, “get that look out of your eyes, now! Laugh once more! He's not dead! You've signed away half of Saber because you thought you killed him. Now, stand up and fight back at Rhino! It's over!”

Tess was expecting anything but what she saw now. An expression of black and bitter despair came into Frank's face then, and there was a dead hopelessness in his eyes. He only shook his head.

“Then that's not what you are afraid of?”

Again Frank shook his head in negation. He rose now and walked slowly across the dining room. Halfway across he paused, as if his mind was made up, and he came back to the table and leaned both hands on it and looked at her and said vehemently: “Tess, don't look at me that way any more! I'm doing what I have to do. Would it do any good if you knew some of it, some of the reasons why I have to do it?” His voice was low, deadly in earnest.

“If you want me to know,” Tess said quietly.

“All right, I did a shady job for Rhino, a job that would lose me Carrie if she ever found it out.” He paused, and then went on stubbornly, “She's the only kind and decent person I've known, and I've treated her badly. I'll do anything—
anything
to keep from losing her. I've bought Rhino's silence with half of Saber. I'll buy it with all of it if I have to, just so I don't lose her! Now do you understand why I'm afraid?”

“No,” Tess said bluntly. She started to rise, but Frank put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her down in the chair. They looked in each other's eyes for ten full seconds, and Tess's gaze did not falter.

“Say it,” Frank said slowly.

“All right, you love Carrie. You want to live with her the rest of your life. But can you live with yourself the rest of that kind of life?”

Frank frowned. “What do you mean, Tess? Be plain.”

“Where's the end to this blackmail? There isn't any. Are you going to cringe until you die? Nothing is worth that, Frank. Not even Carrie! Don't you see that?”

Frank straightened up, and his hands fell to his sides. His glance had never left her face. “If I tell her the truth, I lose her. I know that.”

“Does she love you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you won't lose her. You wouldn't lose me. You wouldn't lose any woman that's really a woman.”

There was no belief in his face, she saw, and her heart was suddenly sick. She understood him now, understood his desperation and fear, and she pitied him more than she had ever pitied anybody—but she did not intend to let that pity alter her decision. She rose wearily, and this time he let her; she said in a voice, oddly without emotion: “No, Frank. I won't give you the key. I wouldn't, even if I knew what's behind your wanting it. I won't lie for you, either. If you can't tell her, you're already lost, and nothing will do any good.”

She went past him now, and at the door she looked back at him. He was standing just as she had left him, looking at the table.

It was the clerk's footsteps pausing in the dining-room doorway that finally roused him minutes later. He reached down and picked up his hat and put it on, and then moved unseeing past the clerk through the lobby and outside. He paused here under the veranda beside the abandoned barrel chairs and automatically reached in his shirt pocket for his tobacco sack. It was sodden. He threw it into the gutter, and then stared at it, thinking,
It's come. I've fought it up to here, and this is the end of the road
. He moved out to the edge of the boardwalk and stared out into the wet night. Tess was right in one thing. Where was the end to this blackmail? There wasn't any end to it; he'd attempted the impossible. He might keep it from Carrie for months or for years, but sooner or later she'd find out. Tess's words came back to him:
Are you going to cringe until you die?
Yes, he'd even do that, if it would do any good. But it wouldn't, and he saw it now.

His horse jerked his head impatiently in the rain, and Frank glanced at him. Well, there was his horse, and there was the whole wide world before him. He could ride out quietly tonight and be out of this. Carrie would write him off then. A fiddle-foot, no good. It was a kinder judgment than the other, after all.

But he knew he wouldn't ride out. He'd come this far and he would go the rest of the way. She could hate him, but she couldn't say he'd dodged this. He untied his reins, ducked under the tie-rail, and stepped into the wet saddle.

The street was a mire of mud, and his horse splashed noisily as he turned him and headed up the street, toward Tavister's. In a little while now he would be hearing the words that he had been fearing to hear all along. That was as far as he would let himself think ahead.

He turned into Tavister's street, a kind of apathy in him.
Suppose Tess is right?
he thought.
Suppose she takes me anyway?
No, there was no use hoping; he'd been doping himself on too much of that lately, he thought wryly.

There were lamps lit in Tavister's house. He dismounted at the tie-rail, which was sheltered by the big pines in the yard, tied his horse and went up the walk and knocked on the door.

Carrie answered. When she saw who it was, she exclaimed, “You idiot, Frank! What are you doing out in this flood?”

“Waiting to be asked in.”

Carrie pulled him inside and shut the door. She took one look at him and said, “The kitchen for you, son, with that slicker.”

She headed for the kitchen and Frank fell in behind her. The dress she was wearing was one of his favorites—a long-sleeved maroon dress of flowered silk.

In the kitchen he shucked out of his slicker, tossed it into the sink, and then turned to look at Carrie. She was staring at him, and he looked down at his clothes. They were muddy and wet; one leg of his pants was torn from the scuffle with Albie.

Carrie said, “Well, a woman's work is never done on the day of a rain. Come on in and dirty up the parlor.”

She waited until he came up to her, and she kissed him, and then she went on ahead. Frank followed her silently into the parlor. For the first time, it seemed, he was seeing the richness and the quiet elegance of this house. The rug was deep, the furniture black and polished. The overflow of books from the Judge's study lined a back wall. Carrie had been sitting in a big chair by the fire, mending. The log in the fireplace softly caved into the ashes now, and the flames stirred brightly.

Carrie went over to her chair and picked up one of the Judge's shirts. Frank thought,
This is my last look
. He went over to Carrie and took the mending from her hand and laid it in the sewing basket.

Carrie laughed, then, and put her head back against the chair. “Lord, I'm an old maid. I mend even when you're around.”

Frank toed a footstool around in front of her chair and sat down facing her. He looked into the fire, and presently Carrie said, “You look tired, son.”

He glanced at her and his smile died. Now was the time, but how was he to begin? He plunged. “Carrie, you were pretty proud of me taking in Rhino, weren't you?”

“I think he'll do you good.”

“Want to know how I happened to take him in?”

Carrie nodded. Frank folded his hands between his knees and looked at them and began to talk.

“After that last row with Rob when I left Saber, I got work with Rhino. Know what I did for him?”

“Bought horses, didn't you?”

Frank still looked at his hands. “No. There were four of us—Hugh Nunnally, Pete Faraday and Albie Beecham and myself. Rhino had stolen an Army uniform somewhere. It fits me. It was the uniform of the cavalry, with the bars of a second lieutenant on it.”

He looked up. She was listening, and his glance fell to his hands again. “I wore the uniform. I posed as Lieutenant Harding from Fort Garland. I was traveling through the country looking for cavalry mounts. You know, don't you, that the Army pays a hundred and twenty-five dollars for any horse that meets its standards?”

“That's good money for a horse, isn't it?” Carrie asked.

“Yes,” Frank answered. He looked at her expectantly, waiting for the first sign of protest. There was none; she was listening carefully.

“I would go into a town alone, as Lieutenant Harding, and ask to see horses. The ranchers and the farmers would bring them in for me to see. Hugh Nunnally was always in the crowd that watched me look at horses. But I never bought any. I always rejected every horse showed me, but I had a code word when I rejected them. If I said the word ‘sound' when I rejected the horse, Hugh always knew the horse was a good horse, that the Army would take it.”

He looked up again. Carrie was watching him intently; she was understanding now.

He went on: “I disappointed a lot of ranchers and farmers. Sometimes they were pretty bitter when I rejected their horses. I was nice about it, but stubborn. I'd move on out of town. Hugh Nunnally would go up to the men who owned the horses I had rejected with the code word. He'd admire the horse, and start bargaining for it. He'd offer the standard price for a sound horse. That was forty dollars. Since the ranchers had just lost the chance to sell to the Army for a hundred and twenty-five dollars, they usually accepted Hugh's money.”

Now he looked up again. He could see nothing but interest in Carrie's small face. What had he forgotten? He cast back, and he thought he'd said everything, but he went on doggedly: “Albie and Pete Faraday held the horses in one bunch in some safe canyon. When we had a bunch of them, we brought them back and Rhino sold them to the Army for a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

Now he waited, watching her face. She said then, “How very, very clever.” There was no irony in her tone; she meant it.

He stared at her a long moment, then took a deep breath. “You don't understand,” he said patiently. “I was wearing an Army uniform. I was impersonating an officer. That's a prison offense.”

Carrie came alive then. She sat up straight and said, “Who knows it? You were never challenged, were you?”

Frank sat there, stunned. Carrie rose, at the look in his face, and he rose too. “Frank,” she said swiftly. “Nunnally's not threatening to give you away?”

Frank said slowly: “You still don't understand. I was crooked. I swindled honest men out of the money rightly theirs by claiming to be an Army buyer.”

“But that's horse-trading, isn't it?” Carrie asked. “You were just smarter than they were.”

“You think so?” Frank asked slowly.

“Yes. Weren't you?”

Frank stood there for ten stupefied seconds, staring at her, until Carrie shook his arm. “Frank! What's the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?”

He turned then, without a word, and walked out into the kitchen. He shrugged into his slicker, picked up his sodden hat, and came back into the hall, where Carrie was waiting for him.

He stopped before her, feeling the torrent of words welling up in him, gathering like an avalanche, and running through his mind like some idiot refrain was the thought,
She hasn't forgiven me because she doesn't even know I've done wrong
.

“Frank,” Carrie said tartly, “what's got into you? Where are you going? What's the
matter
with you?”

Frank shook his head, and rubbed the back of his neck slowly with the palm of his hand. “I've got to get some sleep,” he said gently. “Good night, Carrie.” He brushed past her and went out.

He was halfway down the walk when he heard her calling, “Frank, come back! Frank!”

He didn't answer. Mounting his horse, he rode back the way he had come. There was a kind of numbness in his mind. It refused to think, and all he knew was that he had not lied to Carrie when he said he had to have sleep. He thought of the hotel, and rejected that. He might see Tess, and he didn't want to face her now.

The McGarritys' rooms were empty. He headed for them and at the small woodshed in the rear of the building, which the McGarritys were using for a stable, he dismounted. There was a horse inside already. Frank shoved him over, moved his horse in beside him, and then tramped up the stairs in the darkness.

He opened the door and stepped inside and called, “John?”

A sleepy voice said, “Who is it?” from the back room.

“Frank. I want a place to sleep.”

“Help yourself,” John answered sleepily.

Frank went into the dark front room. He didn't bother to light the lamp, but stripped off his wet clothes and crawled under the blankets of Jonas's bed. Lying there listening to the rain on the roof, he thought it might be slacking off.

He thought of Carrie now, and in his mind there was a quality of unbelief in the happenings of this evening. But they were true. She didn't think he'd done wrong. He had broken with Rhino and threatened him, he had hidden Rob's killer, he had submitted to loss of half of Saber, he had lied a hundred times, he had almost been murdered today, he was partners with a horse thief, he had been blackmailed twice over, and he had cringed—all to keep from Carrie the fact he had been a swindler. And now she knew, she didn't think he'd done wrong.

He laughed aloud then, the irony of it coming to him.

He heard John's footsteps in the hall, and then they paused in the doorway.