Hard Money (16 page)

Feldhake regarded the little man thoughtfully, frowning. He smiled faintly, shook his head, wheeled and went out past Bob. Hardiston made a sudden gesture to stop him, but checked it and simply stood there while Bob came over and picked up the lantern and headed for the door. Suddenly, Bob paused, turned and came back to Hardiston.

“Listen, old man,” he said quietly. “You're a little too old to play out a hand like this. If you got sense you'll clear out of here, clear out now, right plumb now.”

“Why?” Hardiston demanded irritably. “Why? I've got money owing me and I intend to collect it.”

“You won't collect any money from him,” Bob said patiently. “Don't you see, old man? I'm tryin' to help you. Get out of here before you get him riled.”

“But—”

“Sure,” Bob said. “Sure, only you get out. I've seen him shoot a horse for pitchin' with him.”

Hardiston stood utterly still a moment, considering this. “Oh,” he said then. “You don't think he ever intended to pay the rest of it?”

Bob laughed and went out, and Hardiston stood there in the dark. Suddenly, in that hot room, in that unbearably hot room, he shivered.

Minutes after he left Vannie, Seay was aware that he was riding down this same street, but near the edge of town. He turned up the side street and was immediately in sight of the town with its whirl of people. He felt weary and used up and empty, save for a quiet pity for Vannie Shore. Now that he was away from her, he recalled with grim understanding the passion of her, and the bitterness, too. She was a woman who would love a man as she had promised, warmly, and with a quiet depth that would make a man humble beholding it. But not himself. It was all there—the liking for her and the understanding and even the wanting, but it wouldn't work. He tried to back his intuition by reason, and he found himself puzzled and wordless.

In the stream of the main street's traffic he gave his horse its head and watched the ceaseless milling of this throng with a new wonder. Here, even now, were the honest flatbed wagons of the immigrants attracted too late by the wild stories of wealth to this camp where every foot of ore-bearing land was at a premium. Sheep among wolves, he thought, as he noticed the bewilderment on the faces of these wagon drivers. For the quick rough heartiness of the town which was more than confidence, even arrogance, must have been puzzling to these strangers. The long line of freight wagons was as slow and never ending as it had been for two years now. All this wealth had been taken over, and its division settled long since. A substantial part of its men carried the money by hard work, and all the others fed on them, pandered to their vices, and everyone seemed to have fun and money out of it.

There was a tangle of traffic at a four corners that stopped Seay, and while he was waiting impatiently for the stream to move forward he stood erect in his saddle, trying to see over the crowd.

A man in the street said from beside him, “Jimmy Hamp got it, Phil.”

Seay looked down. He didn't know the man, but he had a friendly, work-grimed face.

“He did? Where?”

“In his office.”

Seay nodded his thanks and pushed his horse over to the hitch rail and dismounted. The crowd had clotted around the entrance to Jimmy Hamp's Keno Parlor, but Seay shoved his way through. He was remembering Jimmy's last words to him that night at Combers', and a slow steady anger was whipped alive in him. Jimmy had got it. Because he had been discovered warning Seay of the trouble at the tunnel?

Activity in the saloon was at a standstill. Sober men, their girls on their arms, crowded around the office door. A deputy marshal was keeping them out.

Seay slipped past the deputy and entered the office. Jimmy Hamp, his sagging head just under the circle of light thrown off from the table lamp, sat slacked in his swivel chair, his shirt front blotted red.

Ferd Yates and Hugh Mathias, called from a poker game at the Union House, were standing near him, listening to the story of a bartender.

Yates glanced carelessly at Seay as he entered, and then his gaze steadied, while Seay observed Jimmy Hamp with quiet attentiveness. Then Seay shifted his glance to the smoky window in the side wall. Its pane was broken, shards of glass on the rug below it. Ferd Yates saw that glance, and his eyes changed expression a little, flooding a hard alertness into them.

Then Seay nodded to Yates and Hugh.

“How'd it happen?” Seay asked.

Yates said quietly, “You seem to know already, Seay.”

Seay raised his careful glance to Yates. “Through the window?”

“That what you think, isn't it?” Yates said evenly.

“Ferd,” Hugh murmured.

Yates said stubbornly, “It took me more than five seconds to figure it out when I come in. It didn't take you that long.”

“Maybe that's why you're marshal instead of sheriff,” Seay replied quietly.

“Ferd,” Hugh repeated.

“You was on one wide woolly prod today,” Yates said doggedly to Seay. “Maybe you can tell us who shot him.”

Seay didn't even bother to shake his head.

Yates continued mildly, “It occurs to me that there was some mention of Jimmy Hamp doin' you a bad turn, and if my memory ain't played out, you claimed Jimmy was in with Chris Feldhake. Wasn't it Chris you was huntin' this morning?”

“Stop it, Ferd,” Hugh said quickly. He was cool, immaculate, disinterested, but there was a keyed awareness behind his quick eyes.

“It was,” Seay murmured. “I also said something about Jimmy Hamp. What of it?”

In the slaty attention of his eyes, Ferd Yates saw something coming to a head and, stubborn man that he was, did not heed it.

“Then where was you tonight?”

Seay said softly, “Maybe outside that window with a gun in my hand, a knife in my teeth, dynamite in my pocket, blood smeared on my hands, a crippled horse waiting for me in the alley and seven witnesses with lanterns to watch me.”

With an effort of will, Yates repeated, “Where was you?”

Hugh Mathias said reasonably, “That's a fair question, Seay, considering it's asked by a professionally suspicious man.” A faint smile raised the corner of his mouth.

“At Vannie Shore's,” Seay said.

Yates wheeled, his mouth open to call a deputy, when Hugh put a quick hand on his arm.

“Be quiet now,” Hugh rapped out. “If he says he was there, he was. It's easy enough to check on him without calling him a liar.”

Yates' mouth closed slowly, but when it was closed, it was closed firmly, grimly. Then he said carefully to Seay, “You've made pretty big tracks here for a while, Seay. Just watch out.”

Hugh said quickly, “Nonsense, Ferd.” He put on his hat and skirted Yates and took Seay by the arm. “Have a drink with me, Seay.”

Seay went out with him. Once on the sidewalk, Hugh said, “I meant that. I'd be pleased if you'd have a drink with me.”

Seay shook his head. “Some other time. I'm due back at the tunnel.”

Hugh nodded, watching the taller man with a kind of ironic curiosity. “You have a gift for bull headedness,” Hugh mused. “Maybe it's what makes you what you are. I wouldn't know, but I think I like it.” He jerked his head toward Jimmy Hamp's. “They don't like you here, Seay. That business with Feldhake didn't set well with Ferd. The more he thinks of it, the more he wonders just who was right that night. He doesn't dare ask Feldhake, because he's Janeece's marshal. His conscience absolved you that night, but he's foolish enough to argue with it. I might risk not minding my own business long enough to repeat what he said to you. ‘Watch out.'”

“Thanks,” Seay murmured.

Hugh looked as if he wanted to say more, and Seay waited for him to speak again. Suddenly, each saw what the other was thinking, and Hugh chuckled.

“All right,” he said. “I'll say it. You weren't by any chance unwise enough to misinform Yates as to your whereabouts tonight, were you? Because he'll check up.”

“No. I was at Vannie Shore's.”

Hugh nodded, said good night and left him. Seay watched him lose himself in that crowd, and immediately his mind leaped to Sharon. Hugh would tell her of Jimmy Hamp's murder and what followed. He would also mention that Phil Seay, whom Ferd Yates was inclined to suspect, established an alibi with Vannie Shore to help him.

Abruptly Seay wheeled and swung under the hitch rack and gathered in the reins of his horse, his irritation making his movements quick and troubled.

Chapter Eleven

Sharon had made three trips to San Francisco, each time bearing the hard discomforts of stage travel with a resignation that surprised even herself. She had in her bag the last letter from Hugh, which she had got yesterday morning at one of the stage stations. A driver with the coast mail in the boot recognized her and had delayed the stage long enough to hunt it out and give it to her. Among other things, which she skipped, Hugh had written in his good-humored, ironic vein that the tunnel was progressing with surprising dispatch. At the tunnel head they struck diabase (“which for the benfit of your charming ignorance, I will call a softer rock than hornblende andesite,” he had written), and it seemed that Charles Bonal was at last in luck. At least, he was stretching his tunnel funds further, and the wise and unprejudiced minds in the camp said that, with this progress to show, he stood a chance of obtaining more loans. As it was now, he couldn't hope to finish the tunnel—all he could hope for was hope. There was no mention of Phil Seay in it.

Charles Bonal's letters to his daughter had been kinder. He had not mentioned the tunnel's progress at all, but he had said that he had hauled Seay away from the tunnel last Saturday night long enough for both of them to take too much whisky, after which they watched the last twenty rounds of a prize fight that was not so good as many a street brawl he had seen. The absurdity of their doing it made Sharon smile. Prize fights, she had always believed, were for people of low tastes or for people like Hugh, who got a vicarious thrill from a brutality they themselves never indulged in. But for Charles Bonal, a street brawler in his past, and Phil Seay, a saloon brawler now, to watch a fight was like a miner prospecting for gold on Sunday.

To be able to laugh at it indicated to Sharon that she had come a long way in these past weeks. When she was in Tronah this last time she had taken a quiet pleasure in asking her father to recount his early adventures. And Charles Bonal, humoring her, told of his experiences in the rush of '49, and of the terrible fools' rush up the Frazer years later. They were stories touched by the grimness of Charles Bonal's humor, shaded by tragedy and need, and from them she learned of a whole gallery of people who were legend before she was born, and whom her father respected as heroes of a harder day. She was closer to understanding her father then than she had ever been; and curious now, she began to absorb some of his views and much of his wry contempt for these times of swollen greed when money's only gift was the privilege of plundering a land. She listened to his tales of the first women in this land, women like Maizie Comber, whose manners might be as rough as files, but who showed a harder learning than manners demand. She did not know that, by learning Charles Bonal's views of times and people, she was preparing herself to understand the views of someone else. Or perhaps she did. Afterwards, when she was alone, she would find herself thinking of a different life, a harder, freer life where a man's work was his badge of honor; and then the shallow, febrile pace of her own made her restive and discontented.

These were the times when she slipped off to San Francisco, hoping old faces and old friends and an escape from the brutal desert heat would supply some interest. And each time she returned to Tronah with a new eagerness, only to find that it, too, had no real place for her. At times, in her confusion, she could not identify the right people with the right places. The men who courted her in San Francisco she expected to meet on the streets of Tronah, and then she recognized the irony of it and laughed at herself and was suddenly sad and furious. Hugh could not understand her. He was engaged in a silent but nonetheless deadly fight for control of the Dry Sierras Consolidated, he said. Perhaps these easy, graceful dinners, the occasional parties, the relaxing nights of gambling, were enough for him. Perhaps they took his mind from his cares, but they were not enough for her. They held an implacable boredom for her that Hugh could not understand. She often wondered if Vannie Shore had conquered this boredom in her own sensible way.

But if Hugh understood little of what she was thinking, she understood even less of him. Two weeks ago, the hoist cables on the cage of the Dry Sierras' main shaft had broken, sending sixteen men plunging thousands of feet to an indescribable death. Hugh had shrugged philosophically and had ordered the man responsible dismissed. But Sharon could not help but contrast Hugh's cold sympathy with the hot and savage anger of Phil Seay when nine of his men were threatened with death. Perhaps Hugh would have slaved days and nights without sleep if some of his men could have been saved, but, with that new skepticism taken from her father, Sharon doubted it. She knew she was changing, but she had nowhere to turn. The one man who might have helped her with his friendliness she avoided like the plague. And she did not know why.

The night stage let her out at the Union House, and she instructed the hotel help as to the disposal of her baggage, then went upstairs. Her father was not expecting her, and she felt a small glow of pleasure as she anticipated the surprise he would show at her return.

She did not knock at his office door, but opened it gently, and the drone of her father's voice coming across the long room was dear and nostalgic.

Bonal must have seen the door open, for his talk ceased, and Sharon opened the door fully. Bonal was rising, a mixture of surprise and delight on his face. He skirted the desk, and she was in his arms. The warm smell of cigars and whisky was about him, and she hugged him to her, wordless. After a moment, it occurred to her that her father could not have been talking to himself when she opened the door, and that therefore someone else was in the room.