The Eye of the Hunter (3 page)

“I'm saving it to read with my beer.”

“You'll find the bar on your right as you enter. I suggest carrying your beer into the baths—I'd recommend two beers, Logan, judging by your color!” He gave the sharp, snarling laugh again.

Henry tied his big army horse before the hotel as Ambrose drove off with his baggage.

The Frontera Hotel was thronged with ranchers, cowboys, army men in polished boots, and men who might be mining engineers, wearing hard-brimmed army-style hats and clean work clothing. Someone was playing a piano. There were no women. Here and there two or three men seemed to be huddling over business matters. The oiled wooden floor was patterned with vivid Mexican rugs, and the tall narrow windows were hung with net drapes. The room smelled of floor oil and tobacco smoke. Overhead, a ceiling fan turned silently.

Henry passed through a door into the bar, bought two steam beers, and carried them into the barbershop. An old Mexican man with white revolutionary-style mustaches led him into a room in the rear with three big zinc tubs.

While the old man and a boy filled his tub, bucket by steaming bucket, Henry undressed to his underwear and sat on a stool. He started on the first beer. Cold and clear and red, it flowed down his throat like a blessing. He sighed. Then, feeling restored, he dug the telegram out of his coat pocket. It was from John Manion, and had been sent the day after he left Kansas City: “Mrs. Parrish writes husband missing. Circumstances dictate caution. Advise discuss with her only. ”

Henry thought, Aha! The fact that Parrish had not personally cashed his checks for eight months had to mean that he was unable to—because of illness or absence. Clearly John's last letter, threatening to turn off the money spigot, had accomplished its purpose, jarring the widow or wife off dead center.

He sipped some more beer. So his business was going to be with Frances Parrish. He wished he knew more about her, how to approach her without antagonizing her and putting her on guard. Since the tub was not ready, he opened his leather portfolio and found Parrish's first letter to John, dated nearly three years ago.

My wife is quite the horsewoman, and a dead shot. She used to go everywhere with her father, who was a country doctor, so the backwoods of this ranch don't scare her. The canyons are crawling with mountain lions, smugglers, and thieves, but Panchita, as the maid calls her, goes right out there, alone, to look for lost cows....

Again, Henry scrutinized the wedding picture. Could hints to the woman's nature be found there? The fact that the studio was in Sonora, that her gown was pretty but informal, suggested some rather hasty arrangements, a spur-of-the moment wedding. Shotgun, maybe? No: At least Rip had scarcely hit Nogales when he had married her. He tried to see in her face the brush-popping frontierswoman, but her arrestingly pretty features defeated him. The face was flawless—in his opinion—her hair brushed back and waved in the style of a Greek marble, her eyebrows dark and arched; the pale eyes would have to be gray or blue. They quirked up a little at the corners—charming, he thought! Exotic! Physically, she looked to be a lightweight; but frail little women had been manipulating men since Eve. Though it was almost impossible to believe, she might be a husband killer.

A dead shot, as Rip had said....

The old man called something in Spanish.

Henry slipped into the hot water with a sigh of pleasure. Soaping, he tried to recall in Rip's last letter a forecast of trouble breeding like a germ. Some trivia—a slight fever, harbinger of a lethal disease; an angry encounter with someone. But he remembered nothing of that sort.

Rip was missing, and Mrs. Rip was willing to talk about it. But only to him, evidently. And he would bet his money belt that she had a story to tell, too....

Nogales, A.T.: August 1899

Frances Parrish was saddling her little buckskin mare in the yard of the ranch house fifteen miles up the Santa Cruz River. She wore a divided leather skirt for the long ride ahead, a frilled white shirt of her father's, and blued Chihuahua spurs on her boots. Her dark hair was pinned up because of the heat, with a straw boater atop it.

Her old Mexican maid, Josefina, held the bridle of her horse as she tied a blanket roll behind the cantle. She had known Josefina since she was a child in Hermosillo. The women chattered breathlessly in two languages, the horse eyeing the Mexican woman as she waved her hand to emphasize what she was saying.

“Panchita, no es necesario esto! Alejandro lo puede
. He can ride like a monkey, and if he has to ride all night, it won't matter to him!” Alejandro was Josefina's grandson, only fourteen.

“Alejandro has to work on the big rock, Josefina.
Ademas
, I can ride like a monkey, too, and I'm taking all I need to stay overnight.
Oiga!
—if anyone comes past on the way to town, ask him to bring me some black powder—
no se cuanto, pero
—maybe five pounds,
que piensas
?”

“No se, Panchita
. But there are lions out there. You must take a rifle!”

“All right—bring me his carbine,
la chiquita
.”

But when she held the carbine in her hands, and Josefina was lacing the scabbard to the saddle, she looked at the weapon in doubt. Like everything else Rip owned, the carbine was shamelessly decorated—engraved and inlaid, the scabbard hand-carved and dyed yellow, green, and red. Rip would be furious when she caught him out, and when he was angry he drank; when he was drunk he tried to drag her to bed, and she would have none of it anymore. They were finished.

Could she trust herself with a gun? If she actually had to fight him off, would she shoot?

Yet it was true that there were mountain lions in those canyons a half day's ride west, and, more to the point, smugglers and wandering cow thieves. Finally she checked the magazine, put a shell in the chamber, and set the gun on safety. She took a deep breath, reached down to squeeze the hand of the Mexican woman, and said,
“Adios, Josefina!”

“Adios, Panchita! Que te vayas bien!”

The previous night, the minute she laid eyes on the treasure map in Rip's boot, she had finally realized what he was up to: digging for the famous treasure of the Jesuits, like an army of men before him!

Ever since they were married, he had made frequent trips into Sonora to buy cattle, leaving her for months at a time to run the whole show, with nothing for help and protection but a Mexican woman and a boy too young to raise a mustache.

But the few cattle Rip brought home were sorry-looking critters. Once he had brought a leather bag with a couple of hundred silver pesos in it, which he admitted he had won on a bet of some kind. It was about as close as he had come to earning any money in all the time they had been married. The ranch was going downhill and they owed every innocent merchant who would trust Rip.

But what could you expect of a man you met in a graveyard and married a month later? Marrying any man named Rip had to be the act of a crazy woman. But she had been half insane with grief, visiting the churchyard every day to sit on a camp stool and commune with Papa, reading him the poems he loved and keeping wildflowers in a jar on his grave.

And now, at last, she understood that she had leapt from the frying pan into the fire, like a lot of women before her. For Richard Parrish was a gambler, a part-time drunkard like his uncle, a skirt chaser, and a trifler. Her father could have told her—anyone could have. All the clues were there. His preposterous behavior in the graveyard! She simply had hypnotized herself into thinking he was heaven-sent. She had been in a half-mad condition....

A number of other people had come and gone that day, two years ago, a few of them Mexican, more of them Anglo. Some of the Mexican people brought flowers, but most of them were uneasy in the Protestant cemetery, and they lit candles for him in their own church instead.
El Doctor Weemgard
had understood the Mexican people and their language, having practiced during winters in Sonora and summers in Nogales, after the desert got too hot. But of the gringos, only she brought flowers to the grave of Dr. John Wingard, who had delivered babies in this town and kept a lot of people out of this very graveyard. No one else came to pay his respects; not one hypocritical, Bible-quoting person!

Then one day a tall, high-shouldered man she had never seen before showed up carrying flowers. He wore a fringed leather coat and dark gray pants, a teal-blue Stetson with a silver band, fancy boots, and elaborately engraved spurs. His dark hair was abundant, with a few threads of gray, and his jawline beard and down-curving mustache made her think of Tennyson, one of Papa's favorite poets. His spurs clinked as he walked down the aisle to another new grave. Surreptitiously, Frances watched him stop at a weedy plot marked only with a small galvanized iron stake and a card behind glass. He was an arresting figure and she could not keep her eyes off him. She caught her breath as he drew a pint bottle of whiskey from his coat pocket. It was still sealed, and he cracked the tax stamp, drew the cork with a squeal, and, after a lift of the bottle toward the grave, drank some of the whiskey. As though it were a part of a ceremony, he poured the rest of the liquor on the gritty earth.

Frances covered her mouth to keep from giggling. He was having a drink with his—with whoever it was!

Solemnly, then, he thrust half the flowers he carried into the neck of the bottle. Frances was charmed.
Half!
What would he do with the rest? Take them home to his wife?

For a full minute she watched as, hat off, head bowed, he stood at the foot of the grave. Once he cleared his throat, and she heard him say, “
Adios
, Uncle Hum. Acey-deucey-dicey, you old varmint!” The grave was unmarked, but Frances knew it was that of a man named Humboldt Parrish, an occasional patient of her father's who had owned a little ranch up the Santa Cruz River road. He had died only weeks before her father. An enigmatic, free-spending man, an occasional drunkard, Hum Parrish had won the ranch in a poker game. So this man was his nephew.

Frances brought herself back to the business of grieving, closing her eyes and asking God to forgive the ungrateful citizens of Nogales, Arizona Territory, for faulting a doctor who had done nothing every other doctor in the nation had not done, which was to prescribe drugs that turned out to be habit-forming. Nor was the new drug law his fault.

Suddenly she sniffed an intriguing blend of bay rum, whiskey, and Mulford Violets in the air. When she opened her eyes, she saw that the stranger was standing beside her. He smiled, nodded, and reached for her hands to help her up. There was no question of refusing. She actually had the thought that God had sent him here to take Papa's place. He was a foot taller than she, and gazed down into her face with a warm smile. His eyes were blue, his nose long, and the mints he was chewing were somehow an important part of the picture of this intriguing stranger.

“If you don't mind, ma'am,” he said, “I've heard a great deal about your father, and I'd like to pay my respects. May I place these flowers with your own?”

“I can imagine what you've heard!” Frances burst out. "In this town what could you hear but the most scandalous—I'm sorry, I can't help being resentful.”

“I considered the source, Miss Wingard, and ... it was something about a Viennese Wine?”

“The Viennese Doctor's Wine of Coca.” Frances nodded. “Every doctor in the country had his own pet remedy, catarrh powders that were plain narcotics! Dover's Powder, Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, morphine sulphate—but don't you know they blamed Papa because he practiced in Hermosillo as well as here? They considered him ungrateful to his own race. The Viennese doctor was a psychologist, a Dr. Froyd, it's spelled F-r-e-u-d, who wrote articles in the literature on the benefits of regular use of cocaine. Ha!” she cried. “Benefits, my eye!”

“Where is this Hermosillo, Miss ... is it Wingard?”

“Yes. Frances Wingard.” Demurely, eyes downcast.

“Richard Parrish. A pleasure.”

“Thank you. Why, Hermosillo is the capital of Sonora, and we lived there in the winters. Hardly anything but lizards can live there in the summer, and even they wore straw hats. The people there needed good doctors, too, and it was an interesting city—lots of European people. The oldest university in North America, by the way! And the miserable hypocrites take it out on me because my father sent me to college! Can you imagine?” Then she put her hands over her mouth. “I'm sorry! Have I embarrassed you? But you see, there's no American person I can talk to, and I ...”

“I understand, I surely do,” Richard Parrish said. “I saved a few posies for your father, Miss Frances, and I hope you won't mind if ...”

He went to one kne[data miss]nd placed his flowers in the bowl with Frances's own.

“Why, aren't you nice, Mr. Parrish!” Frances said, her heart melting toward him. She bit her lip and turned her head away but failed to keep from sobbing. Richard Parrish had put his arms around her and held her, patting her back and murmuring to her as though she were a child.

Barely a month later, Frances and Rip Parrish were married. Frances went to live on the ranch Rip had inherited from his Uncle Hum, the gambler, out of reach, at last, of the hypocritical tongues and puritanical eyes of the unappreciative townspeople of Nogales.

But now the dream become nightmare was over, and it was simply a question of informing him that she was leaving him, and wanted a little money for all the improvements she had made in the ranch, with what little cash her father had left her. And God forbid she should ever meet a man in a graveyard again!

Henry found the boarding stable Ben Ambrose had recommended at the north end of the business district, a large tin-roofed adobe barn with a liver-medicine advertisement painted on the side. With a black iron bolt he rang a horseshoe hanging by the door, and then set to work unsaddling. In a moment a big shirtless man in bib overalls emerged. Ambrose had said his name was Budge Gorman. He wore a black Grand Army hat pulled so far down on his face that he bad to tip his head back to see Henry, which caused his mouth, innocent of upper teeth, to gape. He had long, hairy arms and a face like a hound.