The Man Who Lost the Sea (25 page)

The truth, then, is that the satellite fading here is Phobos, that those footprints are your own, that there is no sea here, that you have crashed and are killed and will in a moment be dead. The cold hand ready to squeeze and still your heart is not anoxia or even fear, it is death. Now, if there is something more important than this, now is the time for it to show itself.

The sick man looks at the line of his own footprints, which testify that he is alone, and at the wreckage below, which states that there is no way back, and at the white east and the mottled west and the paling flecklike satellite above. Surf sounds in his ears. He hears his pumps. He hears what is left of his breathing. The cold clamps down and folds him round past measuring, past all limit.

Then he speaks, cries out: then with joy he takes his triumph at the other side of death, as one takes a great fish, as one completes a skilled and mighty task, rebalances at the end of some great daring leap; and as he used to say “we shot a fish” he uses no “I”:

“God,” he cries, dying on Mars, “God, we made it!”

This is about Jim Conlin the Badlands Bookkeeper. He was, according to the journals of the time, a terror, a menace, and a scourge. He was, in the flesh, a mild man, young and balding early, with diffident horizontal lines across his brow.

He hid in the hills with his half-dozen riders, all but one of whom outweighed him, but then that one was only a three-quarter breed Nez Perce, and hardly counted. These men, each to his taste, fought and gambled, drank and wenched, always providing they had Jim Conlin’s advance permission and pursued the hobby somewhere away from Jim Conlin’s hideout. A long way away. There was a town, Dead Mole Spring, eight miles away as the crow flies, where nobody had ever seen Conlin or any of his crew—a good example of the way the Bookkeeper of the Badlands arranged things.

Jim Conlin figured. He figured everything, the Bookkeeper did. He never moved until he was ready, and when he was ready, it was altogether. In some sleepy mountain town, just when the marshal was out and the sheriff drunk, and the bank heavy with cowpokes’ pay and prospectors’ dust, Jim Conlin’s men would whirl up out of the ground like dust devils and be gone like smoke, the gold with them.

The only similarity between one job and another was that element of perfect planning, perfect timing—the only clue, most of the time, as to who the robbers were. Unless, of course, Conlin wanted it otherwise, like the time he took the Rocky Summit Bank three times in one week, just because everybody was so positive he wouldn’t be back.

He would have been caught for sure the time rumors got around that he was going to rob the express between Elwood and Casson’s Quarry; the train was loaded with law and the tracks lined on both sides with one of the biggest posses the West had ever seen, which
was fine with Conlin, who was busy at the time robbing another train on another railroad.

He would certainly be remembered in large type, like Butch Cassidy and the James boys, if it were not for his concentration on fine detail—this got him only into fine print. As a man, he was colorless to the point of invisibility; as a desperado he was too methodical to be remembered. Probably the largest two reasons his reputation has faded with the newspapers of his day were these: he never killed a lawman, and he was never caught.

There came one night to Jim Conlin’s hideout, Arch Scott, invited and escorted. Scott had something of a reputation locally: cautious, sober, with special skills in safes and lockboxes. He could use a gun, and didn’t, which was a high recommendation to the Bookkeeper; and Scott’s ability to do nine consecutive jobs with the methods of nine different people clinched it.

Although the Bookkeeper occasionally took on a brace or two of drifters for special jobs, letting them go afterwards, he liked to keep a half-dozen regulars with him; and there was a vacancy just now, one Farley Moore having succumbed to romance. (That was Conlin’s name for it; actually it was tetanus, contracted after a Rocky Summit housewife, mistaken for a doxie by Moore, removed his ear with an iron skillet.)

So Conlin gave Arch Scott his guided tour and his most careful examination, introducing him around, watching him, making his estimate. He liked Scott—liked him, that is, the way a man likes a well-made saddle or a clean rifle. The Bookkeeper had human feelings, but he had a place for them, and he kept them all there. Which introduces Loretta Harper.

She was the only woman permitted at the hideout, except for a few squaws who washed clothes and swept out. Conlin had found her working in a place she was glad to get out of—especially with a man who knew enough about her to ask no questions and saw to it that she got more of the things she liked than she could hope for working in town. He had something for all her hungers but one, and that one was beyond his comprehension. It was beyond hers, too, until Arch Scott came.

“This here’s Loretta,” Conlin said when he brought Scott in, and Scott saw a carving come to life, silk and ivory and ice, as out of place here as a leaf from
Godey’s Lady’s Book
tacked to a haybarn; and Loretta saw a neat man with heavy shoulders and good teeth and eyes you couldn’t keep secrets from.

And that should have been that. It would have been, as far as Arch was concerned. He was there on business, and business came first. And Loretta felt nothing, just then; Jim Conlin’s men came and went and his steady crew was always there. This was another one, only another one. As Conlin and Scott left she turned back to her mirror, and if anyone had asked her, she probably wouldn’t have remembered the new man’s name.

Conlin and Arch Scott went down the mountain for fifty yards or so to the cabin and went in. “Henry Little Hawk,” said Conlin, nodding at the slight figure squatting by the door.

“Howdy,” said Scott. “I’m …”

“Yuh,” grunted the little man. He looked like an animated piece of mahogany, and seemed to be composed mainly of eyebrows, nose, and sharp shinbones.

Conlin chuckled. “He knows who you are. He’s the one found you for me. Or anyway, he’s the one who found out it was really you who did the jobs you say you done. He sees everything and everybody, Henry does, and nobody sees him.” He went to the back wall of the cabin and put his boot on it. It swung aside. “Havin’ Henry around’s like having your eyes out on stalks forty mile long,” he said, motioning Scott through the opening, then closing it. “Only a misfit Nez Perce breed, but God what a memory! Look at a town he never saw before, ride all night, draw you a map so fine you could go there and jump over a yaller dog blindfold.”

They were standing at one end of a section mine tunnel, with the wooden cabin wall behind them and a rockfall at the other end. The long room was fitted out like a bunkhouse, but with a fire in the center, its smoke curling upward to be lost in a fissure overhead. All evidence of the old mine workings had been carefully removed from the outside and the weather-beaten cabin, scarcely large enough for two men, substituted. Any posseman willing to believe the evidence
of his own eyes would call you a liar if you told him you had seen a bunch the size of Conlin’s disappear into this hillside. Not that a posse had ever been within miles of this place, of course.

“Can sleep eleven here in a pinch,” Conlin said. “Ain’t but four now—Henry, he don’t bunk here. Suit you?”

Scott swept the place with a glance. “Fine, Conlin. I slept in worse and paid money for it. Where’s the …”

He was interrupted by a blast of language, English and Spanish, profane and obscene, packed tight as grapeshot and twice as loud. A tall man, hidden until now by the end bunks, sprang to his feet, snatching a coiled bullwhip from a peg on the rock wall. He was a blaze of color and fancywork, Mexican weaving and tooled leather. On his shoulder blades, held by an elaborately braided thong, perched a hand-blocked silken felt worth six months of a cowpoke’s pay.

He shook out the whip and brought it whistling back, and in that split second Conlin was behind him, grasping the lash. The whip flicked out of the man’s hand and Scott, still standing by the wooden wall, had to step aside to avoid the loaded handle.

“Now, Al, you know better’n that,” said Conlin quietly. He drew up beside the bunks and looked down. A blanket was spread on the floor, and on it was gold money and a deck of cards. A second giant knelt by the blanket, scowling. His eyes were red, very small, very wide apart, and at the moment full of kill. Conlin’s appearance had arrested him halfway to his feet with a nickel-plated .45 halfway out. He came to his feet now, but slowly, and when he stopped moving, his gun was holstered and his hand clear of it.

The man with the fancy hat, Al, began to splutter at Conlin, something about wart-hogs, something about an inside straight, something in Spanish. Conlin shook his head gently, stooped, and picked up most of the cards. Deftly he stacked them, cut them, and tore the pack in two, letting the pieces flutter to the ground.

The two big men watched the pieces fall. The red-eyed man bit his lower lip silently with square yellow teeth. The other one ran out of splutter and simply stood there, breathing hard. If Arch Scott expected anything else to happen, he was disappointed. Conlin motioned to him and said, “Scott, this here’s Big Ike Friend.” The
red-eyed man glowered at the stranger. “And Al Coe.”

“Arch Scott. Howdy.”

“Howdy,” Coe grunted. He walked past the others and went for his whip. He came back, coiling it as he walked, not looking at anybody, and hung it on the peg. “Seen you before, Scott,” he said with his back turned.

“Don’t think so.”

“Ever down Taos way, or ’Dobe?”

“I come from the Dakotas,” said Arch Scott quickly, “where folks don’t ask questions.”

Big Ike Friend produced a harsh brief snicker from the depths of his flat nose.

“Tell you something,” said Conlin in a voice so mild in the sudden tension that Scott nearly jumped with shock. “We don’t fight among ourselves here. Anybody wants to rassle, go pick on a stranger some place else. You ain’t learned that, Scott, and you and Big Ike forgot it, I guess, Al. We don’t gamble here, we don’t drink—not enough to get drunk on anyways—and there ain’t no women allowed. I got nothing against them three things, but they’re the three best reasons for fightin’, and that kind of fightin’ is one thing I ain’t got time to keep books on. Scott, you need anything, you ask Big Ike or Al Coe here. I’m going back to the house.”

And he did, without so much as a good night, leaving all the makings of a three-sided donnybrook. But then Arch Scott laughed—not at the two big men, but in an indefinable way with them, so that he was no longer a stranger, but part of a crew which had just seen a hundred and forty pounds of mild logic putting out a fire. Big Ike laughed too; Al Coe did not, but he relaxed visibly.

“Where do I bunk?” Scott asked.

Big Ike pointed out the empties. Scott selected one and sat down on it, looking quizzically at the others. “How does he do it?”

“By bein’ right,” said Al Coe reluctantly.

“Lots of hombres go around being right, nobody listens,” said Big Ike.

“Those are the guys that don’t pay off,” said Coe. “Bein’ right is nothin’ by itself.”

And there it was, in as neat a nutshell as anyone could pack it. There’s no point in disagreeing with a man who’s always right, who also put money in your sock.

Arch Scott fell asleep that night knowing he wouldn’t be bothered.

The horses were corralled in a narrow dry gulch a quarter of a mile away, visible from two places—inside, and straight up. Like the rest of the spread, it was only another scar on the hillside.

Conlin went down there in the morning with Loretta, to cut out a gentle horse for her. It was early, but Arch Scott was already up and about, standing just inside the narrow throat of the gulch, his hands in the back pockets of his Levi’s and his hat on the back of his head. “Morning.”

Conlin nodded to him. Loretta didn’t say anything. Scott glanced at her, then took his hands out of his pockets and removed his hat. His tardiness was understandable. When Loretta rode, the carven goddess was folded up and put away. She wore Levi’s and a shirt and a soft leather vest, and her bright hair was hidden under a wide-brimmed man’s hat; and from twenty paces she looked like a country boy out to bark squirrels, which was the idea.

She stood by the rails near Scott and waited while Conlin went in with a bridle over his shoulder and a rope on one arm. Scott glanced at her once, but she seemed to be watching Conlin, so he said nothing. He watched Conlin too, and he liked what he saw.

The Bookkeeper did what he had to do without waste motion, and better than anyone he might have ordered to do it for him. He took a roan gelding on the first cast, reeled him in, and had the rope off and the bridle on in what looked like one movement. He led the animal to a shed by the rocky wall of the cut and went in for a saddle.

“Scott.”

Arch looked at the woman. She had not moved, and was certainly not looking his way. Her voice had been just loud enough to reach him. He sensed that this was no casual approach to a casual conversation, so he took her cue and stayed where he was. “Ma’am?”

“Waterhole called Green Spring,” she said, hardly moving her
lips. In spite of its softness she had a surprisingly full voice. “Find it. Be there at two o’clock.” Before he could answer or acknowledge, she had slipped through the rails and was walking toward Conlin.

He watched her mount and wheel the horse. He gathered his wits and dropped the bars for her as she rode out. She passed as if he did not exist. Scott replaced the bars without looking after her.

“We’re going out on a little job today,” Conlin told him when he came up.

“We are?”

“We are—Henry and me and Al and Big Ike. Moko and Gus, that’s the two you ain’t met yet, they’re waiting for us.”

“I do something wrong?”

Conlin seemed to think the question quite natural. “Hardly had a chance yet, have you?”

“ ‘What do you want me to do while you’re out?”

Conlin swept out his arm in a wide circular motion. “Smell out this spread. I want you to memorize every rock and bush and cut and hogback within ten miles of here. They say a couple big glaciers carved up this country, Scott—I wouldn’t know about that myself; but whoever done it was working for us. You’ll see. You’ll find out that this country can lose a Injun tracker with a pack o’ hounds, if you know where to go. Nobody ever trailed us in here, and nobody’s about to, because every man of us comes and goes a different way and knows a hundred more. You got to get to know this country like the inside of your front teeth.”