West Of Dodge (Ss) (1996) (19 page)

It was time I had some tobacco. Not that I didn't have some, but Melette was buying supplies and I figured it might be a good thing to know more about him. Also, he was a fine figure of a man and that Ginnie Bacon was working for her pa this morning.

Jim Melette was looking at the trousers when I came in, and Ginnie, she was looking at him.

Lizzie Porter was there and she was talking to Ginnie like she'd been put up to it. "Who's taking you to the pie supper, Ginnie?"

"I don't know," Ginnie said, looking at Melette. "I'm waiting to be asked."

"What about Brad? Isn't he taking you?"

"Brad? Oh ... Brad. I don't know yet."

"All I can say is"--Lizzie never said all she' could say, but she tried hard enough--"I hope that Ross woman doesn't come." Melette didn't react much but I've watched a good deal of human nature in my time and I could tell he was suddenly on point.

"Oh, she won't come! Who would bring her? Not after the way she was treated last time." Ginnie was watching Melette, who was studying some new boots now. "She's pretty enough if you like that snooty type, too good to talk to anyone . . . and she must be thirty, if she's a day."

Jim Melette went to the counter and took a list from his pocket, and Ginnie gave him one of her dazzling smiles. "What's about this pie supper?" he asked.

"It's tomorrow night." Ginnie was batting her eyes like an owl in a hailstorm and Ginnie was a mighty pretty girl. "We'll all be there. They auction pies, you know, and if you buy a girl's pie you get to sit with her. There's dancing, too. You do dance, don't you?"

"Sometimes ... I can hold a girl while she dances. Who's this Ross woman you mentioned?"

"Her?" Ginnie wrinkled her nose. "She's nobody. She moved into the house on Cottonwood Hill a few months ago, and the only visitors she has around seem to come of a night, at least there's lots of horse tracks in and out of her gate. Nobody wants her around, but she came to that last social, bold as brass."

That Ginnie . . . she could make a sieve out of the truth without half trying. Truth was, nobody did want Hanna Ross, nobody but the men. The women looked down their noses at her because she was a stranger who lived alone, but so far as I'd seen none of them had tried to be neighborly.

Thirty years old, Ginnie said, but Hanna Ross couldn't be a day over twenty-four, and was one of the finest-looking girls I'd seen in a coon's age, and believe me, I've seen aplenty.

Ginnie saw me coming to the counter for my tobacco. It was high time because I'd about worn out that saddle, what with turning it and studying it and picking at the stitching. "Oh! Marshal, have you met Mr. Melette?"

He turned around giving me a straight, hard look. "I haven't met the marshal," Melette said, "but I've heard of him."

"Name's McLane," I said. "Folks call me Mac."

"Seems to me I remember you," Melette said. "You've walked the boards of this town quite some time, haven't you, Marshal?"

Inside I stiffened up ... that there phrase "walked the boards" might have been an accident, but from the smile around his eyes it seemed to me there was something behind it.

"Ten years," I admitted, "and we've had less trouble than most towns. The way I figure is to anticipate trouble and take steps."

"Good idea." Jim Melette gathered his supplies. "What do you do when trouble comes that you can't avoid?"

When he said that I had a chill ... for ten years that had been my nightmare, that trouble might come that I couldn't sidetrack or outsmart, and I wasn't as young as I used to be.

"Don't ever worry about that," Lizzie said. "Ben McLane had killed fourteen outlaws before he came to Canyon Gap. Many a time I've seen him toss a card in the air and shoot the spots out."

"That's shooting," Melette agreed. "I've only seen one man who could do that. Of course, I was just a youngster then, must have been thirteen, fourteen years ago."

He picked up the rest of his supplies and walked out and I stood there looking at my hole card, and it had suddenly become a mighty small deuce. After all these years, while things shaped up mighty fine, I'd come to believe I was set for life in Canyon Gap. The town liked me and 1 liked the town, and one way or another, I'd kept the peace. Now it looked like the whole show was going to bust up right in my face.

Walking to the door, I watched Melette stow his stuff in his saddlebags and a sack he had tied behind his saddle. Then he dusted off his hands and started across the street.

A man can only keep the peace by working at it, so I stepped out on the walk. "Melette!" He turned slowly when I spoke his name. "I wouldn't go over there if I were you. There's trouble over there."

Figured first off he'd tell me to mind my own affairs, but instead he walked back to me, and then I was really scared because I thought he'd have something personal to say, and one thing I did not want to do was talk about myself. Not to him.

"All right, McLane, I won't," he said. "Will you tell me where Hanna Ross lives?"

He had called her Hanna, although her first name had not been mentioned inside, so my hunch was right. Trouble was coming to Canyon Gap in the person of Jim Melette. He knew more than he was letting on. I pointed the way up the street to her house.

"For a stranger," I said, "you seem to know a lot about folks. Why do you want to see Hanna Ross?"

He was stepping into the saddle. "Why, Mac, I think I used to know her, so I sort've figured I'd stick around for that pie supper and if Hanna Ross will go with me, I'll take her. You keep the peace, Mac!" And he trotted his horse off toward Cottonwood Hill.

Standing there in the street I knew I was scared. For ten years nobody had come to Canyon Gap who knew me, and I'd begun to believe no one ever would. The days of gun battles were about over, tapering off, anyway, and I'd begun to feel that I had it made, as we used to say in the goldfields.

It seemed to me that I was going to get it from two directions unless I was very careful. Ginnie Bacon had been flirtin' around Brad Nolan for the past several months trying to see what kind of trouble she could help him get into. He was spoiling for a fight, and from the way she'd acted toward Jim Melette there in the store, it seemed like she might try to get the two of them to go at it.

The other thing that had me worried was that I knew who'd been leaving all those tracks around Hanna Ross's house ... it was that crazy-eyed Led Murry. I didn't know what that meant, but I was afraid. Nolan and Murry were some trouble separately, but together they were downright dangerous.

Something like this had happened a time or two before, but I'd been able to break up the dangerous combinations before they realized their strength. Divide and rule, that was my motto, and I made it a point to know about people, and whenever I saw fellers getting together who might cause trouble, I got a girl betwixt 'em, or jealousy about something else, and usually I'd managed to split 'em up.

There's more ways to keep the peace than with a gun, and I'd proved it in Canyon Gap, where there hadn't been a gunfight in ten years . . . and in the month before I took over there had been three. Nor in all that time had I drawn a gun on a man.

Cottonwood Hill was right up there in plain sight at the edge of town, and from town everybody could see who came or went from the place, so Lizzie Porter saw Jim Melette ride through the gate up there, and she went right back in to tell Ginnie.

No need for me to read the playscript to know Ginnie would get mad . . . she had practically offered herself to Melette for the pie supper, and he had walked away and gone to see Hanna Ross.

Things were bunching up on me.

Ten years it had been, and I'm a man likes a quiet life. When I rode into this town on the stage and saw the snQw-capped mountains round about, the shaded streets and pine forests on the hills around, and that stream running right through town, I decided this was the place to spend my declining years. The fact that they mistook me for a gun-fighter and offered me the marshal's job had provided me with a living.

Now, between Hanna Ross, Ginnie Bacon, the Nolan outfit, and Jim Melette, I could see the whole thing blowing up in my face. It was too late for me to hunt up a new town, and I liked this one. And I never had been able to put by much in the way of money.

Worst of all, suppose Jim Melette told around town what he knew about me?

They had ten coal-oil lamps with bright reflectors behind them to light the schoolhouse for the pie supper and dance, and they had two fiddlers and a guitar player out there on the floor.

Pete Jackson, Brad Nolan, and Ginnie were there, thick as thieves, the men passing a flask back and forth, Ginnie talking fast and flashing her eyes. Led Murry was there, too, a-settin' against the wall, missing nothing but a-watching everything.

Outside by the hitch rail I waited to fend off trouble, for I could see the storm making up, and I wasn't thinking only of me. I was thinking of the town. There I was when a livery rig came into the yard and Jim Melette got down and helped Hanna Ross to the ground.

"Jim!" My thumb was tucked in my belt, gunfighter fashion. "I want to talk to you!"

Excusing himself, Jim came over to me. "Don't go in there," I said, "as a favor to me. Brad Nolan's in there and he's spoiling for trouble. So's Murry."

"Sorry, Mac," Melette said. "I've nothing against you, but Hanna and I must go in there. We both figure to live around here the rest of our lives, and we might as well bring matters to a head right now."

"Thaf s one way," I said, "but the wrong way. You two just dig in and hold on and folks will come around. You go in there and you'll make trouble."

"We're going. You don't understand the situation," he said.

"Now, look here!" It was time to be tough. "I--!"

"Mac," Jim lowered his voice, "don't you pull that act on me. When I was no more than thirteen I saw you on the stage in Ticket-of-Leave-Man, and a year later I saw you in Lady of Lyons."

"So I've been an actor. That isn't all I've been. Now look!"

From my pocket I took an ace of hearts. "Boy, I want to show you something."

It was time to go into my act, and it was a good act, which had kept more than one tough man from making me trouble.

He stopped me. "Let me show you something," Melette said. He took the card from my hand and tossed it into the air. He didn't draw and fire as I had so often, but when the card fell he reached over and grasped my arm. I started to struggle, then let up, knowing it was no use. He knew my secret and he was going to have his say about it. Jim Melette slid two fingers into the cuff of my coat, plucking the hidden card out of its hidden clip.

"After I saw you demonstrate your shooting act in front of the theater one day I figured you for the greatest shot ever, but then a stable boy who used to work on the stage showed me how it was done. You just go out in the hills and shoot holes in fifty cards at three-foot range or whatever's necessary and then just carry them around in a holdout, and when you pick up the tossed up card, palmat and hand over one thaf s already been shot."

"Nobody around here has ever guessed," I said bitterly. This was what I'd been afraid of for years, and now just when I needed some luck, things were catching up with me.

"What are you going to do, Melette?"

"I'm going to go in there and have it out with Led Murry. If any of the others want a piece of it, that's their lookout."

Have it out with Led Murry ... I'd been thinking it was Brad Nolan who was going to be the bigger problem.

"You said that I didn't understand--exactly what is it that I don't understand?" I asked.

"Jim and I are married." Hanna Ross had walked over to us. "We've been married for three years."

"We were living near Denver, but I had to go to Mexico on business. I had an accident in a little mountain village. I was laid up a long time."

"I didn't know what had happened. I thought he was dead." She whispered it, looking off into the night.

They told me their story. In hushed tones, Melette's voice often rough with anger, they recounted how Led Murry had seen Hanna on the street in Denver and begun following her around. He'd asked her if he could come courting, but when she had told him that she was married he refused to leave her alone. He lurked around their house and spied on her at night. When she complained to the constables he would disappear for awhile, but sooner or later he was back. All this time Jim Melette was helplessly trying to recuperate south of the border. He tried to send Hanna letters, but was not surprised that none of them were ever received.

Then one night Led Murry broke into Jim and Hanna's house and tried to force himself on her. She fled, and thinking that her husband was dead, she changed back to her maiden name. Finally she found her way to my town, and became the mysterious woman that we all knew as Hanna Ross.

The story had all the elements of a great play, and when Led Murry appeared in our town it was obvious that that play had become a tragedy. Like a character from a Shakespeare play, he had become a man obsessed.

"After a long time I made it back from Sonora," Jim said, "and the postmaster in Denver helped me find where Hanna had gone. Now that I'm here, I've got to put a stop to this.