Case and the Dreamer (13 page)

“Mister Shadd,” said Charger, because if Shadd had to call him Sheriff, he had to call Shadd Mister. “Mister Shadd, I am just through telling you what the law is here. Now a law that rests on the turn of a dollar is no law at all, so I cain’t play it like that.”

Shadd’s nostrils expanded a whole lot and from them there issued a sharp strong hiss. Charger knew that one well. So did Juicy, who spat danger. The sheriff held tight until he saw Shadd’s mouth open to say the one word that would commit everyone to one course or the other, and then cut in swiftly but softly: ‘Why tote guns? Ain’t you-all the match for unarmed townsfolk without ’em?” But he smiled a little while he said it.

Shadd exploded with a roar—it was a tense two seconds before anyone could be sure that the noise was laughter. He was not laughing so much at the ludicrous picture the sheriff had conjured up as at the ingenuity of the trap Charger had set for him. With a suddenness that made the sheriff’s gun-hand cramp, Shadd clapped his hand to his belt … unbuckled it, handed it down. And before he collected the others, Charger unbuckled his own. Juicy spat wonderment.

“Have a good time,” said Charger, mounting the walk with his load of belts.

It was a noisy night. Before it was done everyone hated Ev Charger—or so he thought. Mrs. Finnan sent word for him to come see her right now, and what crazy idea he had in his head about her and one of Shadd’s men he wouldn’t admit even to himself. But she was safe and sound, bolted snug inside her darkened drygoods, peering out to look for him. When he came she shot the bolt back, spun him inside and whipped the door to again as if the invaders were not men but a grasshopper plague. “You’ve got to stop it,” she said angrily.

“Stop what?”

“All that noise in the saloon.”

“Noise, Miz Finnan?”

“And cursing and swearing.”

“What they been saying, Miz Finnan?”

“You know I wouldn’t repeat any of it!”

“ ’Course not,” said the sheriff. “I just wanted to be sure you heard anything.”

“You know trail-riders!”

“Yep. Ma’am: Just what did you hear?”

“They were singing,” she said defiantly.

He concentrated very hard on his hat, which his hands were turning round and round without really being told to. He said, “Miz Finnan, a trail rider is up an’ around before the sun is. He finds his horse in the dark an’ most usually he’s got three hours hard work before he gets so much as a mug o’ coffee. Whatever’s lost he finds. Whatever’s busted he fixes. He cain’t be everywhere at once but he tries. He rides when it’s wet, when it’s cold, when it’s both at once an’ muddy to boot. He eats dust an’ everything in the world smells of cow, an’ he don’t get to town much at all. An’ when he does, are you goin’ to begrudge him singin’ a song?”

None of his words were angry words but apparently his tone of voice betrayed him. He hadn’t shouted but she quailed as if he had, and then marched to the door and snapped it open. “You’re as bad as they are, Ev Charger. You used to be one of them and you still are.” He went out and walked back up the street. He had a funny thought: folks sometimes said “the face of the city,” in the papers or a book. He’d never thought of Chayute having a face, and he wondered now if its face looked like Martha Finnan’s. If it did it was mad at him, and not in any way he could do anything about.

His office was next door to the doctor’s. The doctor had the only place in town with a doorway set back from the walk, and someone was in the doorway. It wasn’t the doctor because the place was dark. Charger paused and heard a couple of people talking quietly. It was a weird way of talking:

Priss Willow’s soft smooth voice: “I had five whole years of schoolin’ already, and I’ll get two more at least.”

Hank Shadd, with his father’s grate already begun, but overlaid with unsureness, shyness: “I didn’t exactly get shot. I got powder burns all over my hand.”

“Maw says my apple pies as good as hers. She says if I get the trick with the crust it’ll be better.”

“Woke up in the first light, there’s this diamondback not two feet away.”

“I could become a dressmaker too, if I wanted. But I druther—no, I won’t tell you that.”

“Wasn’t coiled up yet so I knew I c’d git to him before that first strike. So I grabbed him right behind the head.”

“Maw says I should be a schoolteacher. She says schoolteachers git the best kind of husbands.”

“Helt him to the ground with the one hand, got m’ gun with th’other, blowed his head off.”

“Daddy’s like that too, but he just likes the idea of me teachin’.”

“Burnt m’hand, scared h—uh, beg pardon, scared the boys half out of their skin and my dad too.”

Charger went quietly into his office without bothering them, and wagging his head. Priss a-rambling on one line, Hank on another, and both of them doubtless thinking something else. He remembered something Billy once said: “Don’t never listen to a word folks say, Ev—listen to what they mean.”

He took a medicinal shot from the quart in his bottom drawer, thinking a little wistfully what it was like in the saloon, not that they’d mind if he walked in, but it couldn’t be the same. He started out. He didn’t mean to be extra quiet, or maybe he did.

“They’re sayin’ it’ll all be Herefords and the longhorn’s on the way out.”

“It was blue with little gores here and some lace.”

“Hereford don’t even look like a beef. Like a oversize dog.”

“Took off the sleeves and put in darts so they’d puff way out.”

“Ride in steam cars like a dude.”

What that really is, Charger thought as he moved upstreet, is railway talk. The two rails don’t ever meet either, but they get along together just fine.

Then he began to run. The noise he heard wasn’t a loud one, and he barely heard it at all what with the bumbling roar issuing from the saloon. It was one short syllable, but the kind of forced, sharp sound that means trouble.

He ran past the saloon and up to the livery. In the dark mouth of the entrance was a flicker of movement, and hard breathing. Two figures were locked together back there in the spilled hay, and as Charger slid to a halt one of them—Barney, the livery’s owner—broke free and dived toward him. No, not to him, but to the shelf over the bill table. He reached between two account books and his hand came out with a gun in it. He whirled toward the other man, who was on his feet ready to rush.

Charger had a hard arm around Barney’s throat and the other hand on his gun wrist before anyone, including the sheriff, knew he had moved. “Drop it, Barney. Drop it!”

“I’ll kill the—”

“The hell you will.” Charger gave a sudden surge, bent the elbow, surprisingly released the grip across Barney’s neck and used the freed hand to take the gun.

The other man was one of Shadd’s riders, one that Charger didn’t know. He was a tall thin one, round-shouldered and gaunt, and he was wall-eyed mad. Not so much that he couldn’t check himself, though. “What’s this about?”

“Come in here an’ found him stealin’.”

The gaunt man took a leaping pace nearer—but stopped. “You’re a stinkin’ liar,” he said, and knocked wet off his chin with the back of his hand. He spoke to Ev: “I come in here and knocked and hollered and there wasn’t nobody. All I wanted was oats for my hoss, he hasn’t had good grazing in three days now. An’ this bastard comes out of no place and licks me with a ax-handle.”

Charger didn’t believe him. With total enthusiasm he did not believe him. On the other hand who was to prove the truth? And if Barney came by for a look and saw a stranger fanning through the back bins, who could blame him? But then—he wasn’t going to think of what would have happened in Chayute that night if a town man had shot a rider he himself had disarmed.

“You get on back to the saloon,” he told the rider. “Barney, you’ll get your gun back in the mornin’. No guns after sundown means you too.”

They both opened their mouths to protest, looked at each other and then at Charger, who wasn’t holding the gun on them but sure hadn’t put it away. The rider spat near their feet and went on back to the saloon.

“You shouldn’ta gone for this, Barney.”

“Guess you’re right, Ev, but what would
you
do?”

Charger grinned briefly. “Same thing.” He clapped Barney’s shoulder and went out. A running man half-knocked him off his feet. “Billy, f’God’s—”

This was a Billy Willow he’d never seen before, out of breath, frantic. He clutched at Charger’s leather vest. “Priss’s gone!”

“Now you jus’ git yourself together an’ come along with me.”

Billy began to shout. “I didn’t raise that girl to run with the likes of that sprat of Olman Shadd’s. I tell you he’s going to deal with me, I’ll see to it he never fouls my nest or anyone else’s. He—”

“Now hush,” said Charger, but it didn’t work, or not soon enough. Three Shadd men had been drawn out of the saloon by the ruckus, and one of them was the Old Man himself.

“I’ll handle it,” Charger said as he propelled Willow on by. It came out like a warning.

“ ‘Likes of that sprat of Olman Shadd’s?’ ” The Old Man turned to a rider. “You hear something like that?”

It was Juicy, who spat yes.

Charger pointed into the doctor’s doorway. “There you go, Billy.” And immediately there emerged a frightened Priss and a lowering Hank. Charger flicked a glance behind him. The three had followed them, and more besides.

Billy Willow snatched the girl by the shoulders and whirled her half around. “You git yourself home and go to your room. I’ll deal with you later.” With a terrified look at Hank, the girl fled. Billy whirled on the blinking boy. “As for you, you rotten randy little goat, you’ll stay away from my Priss or you’ll answer to me. If ever I see you—”

“Stop right there, Billy,” Charger said coldly. He had never in his life spoken to this wise, happy little man like this, but then it was a Billy he’d never seen before.

Then the Old Man was there like a tidal wave curling and about to break. To Billy he grated, “He really ain’t good enough for her, that it? Well, let me tell you something, he don’t need to sniff around any pasty-faced, bandy-legged—”

“You too, Shadd,” snapped Charger, and found himself immensely astonished. “Anything you say now you’ll wish you hadn’t in the mornin’ an’ you both know it.”

Young Hank Shadd spoke up. “I’m here to tell you I never—” and as if the same string had pulled them the sheriff and both fathers told him to shut his mouth. And that was the end of it until the next afternoon, for after one more sullen round, the riders picked up their weapons and left town.

Charger was in his office poring over the county chart when the kid ran in with the bad news. The sheriff had been at it for an hour and a half—he didn’t really know why. Maybe it was because of the trail-riders last night. Nobody but a damn fool stays with the trails year after year—which is why every drive had its share of damn fools—but like railroading or going to sea or some other things you never did quite get all the grit pumped out of your blood. Charger liked where he was and what he was doing, but all the same some small part of him went jingling out with them to the smell of cow and the brainless bawling, and the good ache of a long hard day, and trail food sauced by a real working man’s appetite.

His finger traced the old trail up from the lush land to the southwest which had bred the herd. He knew those hills, and that alkali patch—twice he’d had stampede crossing that, when the steers smelt the waterhole. Yonder was the place he picked off a cougar with one shot, and saved a calf. Over there the ford that was flooded when they got to it, and still they beat across and lost only seven head.

And here the black new marks on the chart, the rail line. Crews had pioneered the roadbed last summer and would have the rails in this year, and that would be about the end of the old trail. They’d
brought in powder gangs and blasted through a hogback—now that would’ve been a blessing back in his day. Look how the trail had to wind, better than forty miles around. Now you could drive your steers straight through and save a day, or would until the rails were in.

Save a day. Days were money. Shadd had lost a day, somewhere.

Somewhere? Right there! He put his finger on the place. Old Man Shadd had unaccountably crossed the railroad right-of-way and kept with the long looping old trail, instead of cutting through. You’d think he’d jump at the chance to use the new road, after what the new road was doing to the old ways he was so hitched to.

Charger was wagging his head in puzzlement over this when the kid burst in. “Mister Kelly says Hank Shadd is in the saloon, he’s been drinkin’ and workin’ up a mad.”

The whole thing came to Charger in a single blaze. Once he had been inside the skin of a lad like that, and he knew—he knew as if he had been through last night and this morning, every second of it, along with Hank Shadd. Aggrieved, insulted, called names and told to shut up … yes, and in love to boot; and with “be a man” as his weaning-pap, every day of his life until now. Only nobody really ever told him how. So the kidding, the new name—what would they call him? Randy? Billy goat? Probably he had to fight a couple of them last night and this morning. And the Old Man wouldn’t be much help. “Ride drag,” is all he’d say. Yes, and back he’d go, and he’d be mad, and he’d think of a flower-face and let the beef clatter past him, stay behind, ride to town, try to be a man by drinking up his mad.

Charger snatched up his gun-belt and ran, strapping it around him. He knew where to go—the mercantile. He stopped near it to knot the thong around his thigh, and by the time he straightened up there was Hank Shadd, mounted and sitting too straight. Charger called him but he wouldn’t hear. Hank ranged up before the mercantile and called out in a choked voice, “Willow!”

Billy Willow’s head appeared at the door and popped back again.

“Send her out, Willow. I got something to say to her.”

An upstairs window swung open and there was the magnolia
face, crinkled, the jacaranda eyes horrified. And Billy Willow stamped out on the duckboards, a graying bantam—Billy with a gun-belt on!

“She has nothing to say to you. Now git.”