Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (15 page)

There was a hard silence. Owen blinked,
staring a little, as if his vision had wavered, and his sweaty
fingers took a fresh grip on the gun.

Somehow, Moore managed a cracked smile. “Do
you want to know what really happened, Owen? Joe came home that
morning a day early, sometime after you left and before I got up.
He went into the office and was going to count out the money for
the payroll—because we were giving them a half day on Friday,
remember? The boys were going into town early to get ready for the
races on the Fourth. Joe opened the safe and took out the sack of
money, but before he could count it out one of the boys came in and
told him he had to come look at some cattle that had come down
sick. Joe put the money in the desk drawer and locked it and went
with him, thinking he’d only be fifteen minutes. He didn’t get back
for two hours…he came back right in the middle of the uproar…told
me where the money was right away.”

Moore added, even more quietly, “I was just
leaving to go and look for you—somehow I felt like I wanted to talk
things over with you, after all that—when I met Bill Anthony. He’d
come back to tell me he’d seen you and he was sure it was all a
mistake—and I knew the story you must have had from him. I never
even got near the sheriff, son. I started right out to find you,
and I’ve been trying to track you down ever since…to find you and
tell you…I’m sorry.”

Almost imperceptibly, he had been moving
closer. His voice was gentle and sure—one would never have guessed
how much of that speech had been put together as he spoke it,
dragged straight from the heart in the extremity of the moment.

“There’s a lot of things been wrong between
us since—your ma died. We’ve both been angry—said a lot of things
we regret.” A pause. “I came looking for you because I—I know how
you must have felt. You ran off because you were angry with me for
doubting you. I don’t hold it against you, Owen…please don’t hold
it against me.”

He had approached so that the gun in Owen’s
hand trembled only a few inches from the front of his coat. Owen’s
head was down. Without taking his eyes from his son, Ira Moore
lifted his hand to the gun; his fingers closed gently around it.
Owen’s hand loosened, and Ira Moore drew the gun slowly, quietly
away, and laid it on the table to his right without a sound.

Owen slowly lifted his head, as if it were a
heavy weight. His face had loosened to shame and exhaustion, his
eyes were blurred with tears. His father said nothing, but he
reached out and put a hand on his son’s shoulder—and Owen leaned
quickly forward into his father’s embrace, his face hidden against
the solid shoulder, gripping his arm tightly.

Outside in the dark hall, Andy Brown drew a
long, deep breath. It was a full half-minute before he decided that
his shaky knees would bear his weight. The door of the room had
swung back noiselessly by itself to within a few inches of being
closed, and he very carefully turned the knob and closed it the
rest of the way. Then he went back downstairs to the desk.

Once there, he did several things. He took
an envelope from the outgoing-mail slot, turned up the lamp, and
held the corner of the envelope in the flame until it caught. He
transferred it to the ashtray on the desk and poked at it with a
pen until it was reduced to gray cinders. Next went several scraps
of paper scrawled with the name “John Smith.” Then he completed his
benevolent forgery, carefully entering the number of the room
vacated at midnight, and then he sat down in the swivel chair and
opened his book.

Gloria Collins reined up her horse sharply,
looking across to where two men on horseback had just emerged from
the brush on the other side of the meadow, where two men on
horseback had no right to be. She looked for just an instant, and
then folded her lips together sharply and spurred her tall bay
gelding forward, heading straight for them. The riders, seeing her
coming, slackened their pace when she was about halfway across the
meadow so they came to a standstill as she drew rein opposite
them.

“What are you doing here?” she asked
abruptly.

The older and heavier-built of the two men
grinned, his close-set eyes flicking over her in a way that made
her dislike him at once. “Why, miss, we’re ridin’. I guess you can
see that.”

“I meant what are you doing here on my land,
and I think you knew that.”

“
Your
land!” he repeated, sounding
surprised, too surprised to be natural.

Gloria fought a quick unreasoning urge to
lose her temper at once. “Yes, my land and my husband’s.”

The man grinned again. “Missy, you don’t
look old enough to have a husband, let alone a nice piece of
grazing land like this.”

“Well, I can assure you, I’ve got both.” The
color had come up a little in Gloria’s face at this personal turn
to the conversation, but her voice remained uncompromising. “But
never mind that; what I want to know is why and how you came
through here when there was a fence to stop you.”

“What fence?”

Gloria’s mouth fell open a little. She put
her clenched hand on her hip with as much dignity as if she had
been on the ground (it happened to be the hand that held her
quirt). “Don’t talk rubbish, please! You know very well there’s a
fence down there, or at least there
was
.”

“Well, it didn’t stop us, so I don’t see how
there could’ve been one.”

The younger of the two laughed suddenly as
if he couldn’t help it, then looked slightly ashamed of himself.
Gloria barely favored him with a glance. “Well, whatever the case,
you’re trespassing, and I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“You people are awfully touchy about
‘trespassers’ round here,” said the bigger man. He swung down off
his horse, lazily; too lazily. “Didn’t used to be that way years
back. You oughtn’t to be so rude to strangers, missy.”

He took a step toward her; Gloria tightened
the reins an inch and the bay swung round so its head was between
them. “I told you to go.”

The man reached out and grasped the bay’s
bridle close to the bit before she had a chance to back her horse,
and pushed around close to the horse’s shoulder. There was still an
unpleasant smile lingering round his mouth. “You talk a lot too
sharp for a little thing. Don’t you think you could be a little
friendlier?”

He reached up toward the reins with his
other hand and his hard fingers closed round her wrist. Gloria had
not expected it and could not use her quirt, which had slipped down
and tangled around her other wrist. The bay horse slewed around
sideways in displeasure at the pull on its mouth, but she could not
twist her hand free. “Don’t touch me!” she said, a little
breathless, hoping her anger concealed a sudden touch of panic.

The younger man put in, though doubtfully,
“Hey, do you think—”

A rifle shot cracked and a bullet kicked up
the sod a foot behind the other man’s riderless horse. All three
horses shied violently; the man on the ground lost his hold on
Gloria’s wrist and stumbled as the bay pulled away, and swore as he
turned round angrily to look for the source of the shot. Relief
leaped through Gloria as she steadied her spooked horse.
Ray!

Ray Collins emerged on foot from the brush
bordering the meadow, a little to the rear of the scene and closer
than any of them had realized, a Winchester in the crook of his
arm. In a few purposeful strides he crossed the intervening space
and joined them, coming up alongside Gloria’s horse. He looked up
at her, catching her eye for a second to see if she was all right,
and then he spoke sharply to the men. “What do you think you’re
doing here?”

“I been getting that question a lot lately,”
said the man on foot, his face still dark with anger. “You crazy,
shooting at us like that? What business you got doing it?”

“You’ve got no business at all trespassing
on my land, or laying your hands on my wife,” said Ray. “Get out of
here before I put another shot a lot closer to you.”

Here the younger rider, whose face at sight
of Ray had registered first surprised recognition and then slight
guilt, cut in. “Hey—Ray—”

Ray glanced at him, his own recognition
failing to make any impression on his restrained anger. Chris
Borden tried to smile uncomfortably. “Gosh, Ray, I didn’t expect to
see you here,” he said. “I’m sorry about all this. I—I didn’t know
she was your wife—”

“And if she’d been somebody else’s wife, it
wouldn’t have mattered?” said Ray cuttingly. “Thanks a lot.”

His glance took in both of them. “You’d
better ride out—now.”

With little else they could do, the two men
complied. The one on foot gave Ray an ugly look, and glanced once
more at Gloria before turning to his horse. “You’ll be sorry if you
ever try something like that on me again,” he said to Ray, and then
turned away.

As the men rode away across the meadow,
Gloria turned her horse back in the direction from which she had
come, towards home, and Ray fell in to walk beside her. His own
horse waited in the brush from which he had fired. Gloria looked
down sideways at him. She had learned to know his moods well enough
in a year of marriage to tell that he was still simmering with
anger, though outwardly contained. He ejected the spent shell from
the Winchester and slung the gun under his other arm. The rifle
shot had shaken Gloria a little, though she could not say it was a
surprise. Ray’s patience had been short lately, for a number of
good reasons.

He looked up at her again after a few
minutes, and the expression in his eyes had nearly returned to
normal. “Are you all right?” he said.

Gloria nodded. “I—I think they may have cut
our fence.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” said Ray rather
bitterly. “McDonough men—they’ve all got a spite at fences
still.”

Gloria gave a half-hearted smile. “Do you
suppose you would, if you’d stayed on working for an outfit like
that?”

Ray was looking down, but she heard his
short rueful laugh. “Maybe,” he said. “But the shoe’s on the other
foot now.”

* * *

The red sunset lit up the flat ground by the
side of the house with an odd, unearthly cathedral-window glow, and
struck gold sparks from the nearest bend of Wanderlust Creek
visible to the west. Ray Collins, with the sun behind him, stared
into the little shaving-mirror hung on the rough plank side of the
house, as he wiped his hands dry on a towel after washing in the
tin basin on the shelf below. He looked at his own face without
really seeing it, his mind turning on other things—a face still
young, but serious, with lines of work and worry round the eyes.
The sunset glow touched the reddish glint in his brown hair that
only showed in certain lights. He stood for a moment rubbing the
damp towel absently in his hands, and thinking. Then he put it down
on the shelf. He ran his fingers through his hair to comb it, the
few droplets of water that had caught there when he washed leaving
streaks of dampness through it, and then he turned and went round
the corner of the house toward the door.

Inside, Gloria was putting supper on the
table. She had not bothered to change out of her dusty riding-skirt
and blouse; it did not seem worth the effort. Most of her working
hours had been spent outdoors this summer. She had nursed her limp
vegetable garden through the hot, dry weeks, irrigating it by hand
with buckets of water from the well, and in the same manner tried
to keep alive the still-spindly saplings Ray had planted in front
of the house last spring. She also spent time in the saddle helping
Ray haze their small herd of cattle from place to place in search
of the least-parched grass. Sometimes her wide-brimmed straw hat
hung down her back; sometimes she remembered to wear it; other
times, like today, she forgot to bring it out at all, and had a
burned face and freckles to show for it.

Gloria set the biscuits on the table and
turned down the damper on the stove. The house had started as a
slant-roofed claim shanty; Ray had built the other half onto it
shortly before they were married. The front room was furnished with
a cookstove, table and two chairs, and the rocking-chair that had
been a wedding-gift from Gloria’s parents and was one of their
proudest possessions; there were two cabinets made of
packing-cases, the shelves trimmed with brown-paper scallops she
had cut to fit, and brightly colored calico curtains hung at the
windows screened with mosquito netting—they had not yet been able
to afford glass for them. The earth floor was neatly swept—how well
she remembered writing gleefully to her mother and sister about
sweeping a dirt floor, a wonderfully humorous thing to a town-bred
girl. The other room was the bedroom, containing a bed, Gloria’s
trunk that had brought her possessions out with her, and a row of
nails on the wall for hanging clothes.

Supper was simple enough—leftover stew, made
mostly of canned goods; sourdough biscuits and vegetables from the
garden—but the table was covered with a checked tablecloth and
neatly set. Gloria’s mother had trained her well. Though she had
been married just over a year, Gloria still felt sometimes like a
little girl playing at housekeeping; the fact that it all belonged
to her was hard to realize. The practice of setting a table for
two, of cooking meals, washing clothes and making a bed for two
still had a sharply sweet significance.

Ray came in as she finished putting the food
on the table. Gloria, turning from her work, met him in the narrow
space between the corner of the table and the door, and he put his
arm around her, his hand behind her head, and tipped her face
gently up toward him. His hand felt soft and cool against the
sunburned back of her neck. Ray had kept up the cowpuncher’s habit
of wearing gloves for most work, and his hands were smooth still.
Gloria closed her eyes as he kissed her, leaning into him
contentedly.