The Fugitive (15 page)

That was most usual. Wherever Hank appeared, the children were sure to show their faces before long. While pressing jobs awaited his hand, he would sit down on the old barley bin in the corner of his shop and hold forth to all who cared to listen, but particularly to the children. Rocked far back into the shadow, with his long and bony fingers hooked in front of one knee, his head deeply sunk, his eyes either closed or else looking out with startling glimpses of light, he would tell his stories. They were better than fairy stories. They started not with “Once upon a time,” or “In a distant land across the seas,” but out of the very stuff of which their lives were made, he built his romances. His heavens were no bluer than the skies above their heads, and he, by the mere naming, made the old swimming pools, the twisting white roads across the hills, and the smoky colors of spring upon the desert enchanting.

He was about to turn on his heel again and go to the office, but he decided that he would steal up and listen to the old loafer's voice for a minute or two. So up he crept, all unheeded by the enrapt children. When he arrived, he found that he had apparently come into one of the pauses in the narrative. There was no voice speaking. It was a pause of terror and fear and grief in which the cunning talker allowed their own emotions to work in the minds of his audience. All of those emotions were in the faces of the children who stood so silently around the door of the shop. Old Chris looked around the corner of the shop to take a peek at this eminent faker. But to his amazement, he found that the shop was empty of a single human form. But upon the flooring, near the forge, there had been written with the point of a red-hot iron:

 

Dear Chris:

Here are all my tools, and I guess that they pretty near pay for the money I got from you. I find it's hard to go, but I'll never come back.

Hank Ballon

This, then, was the meaning of the movement upon the fascinated lips of the children. They were repeating that terrible sentence over and over again: Hank was gone, and he would never come back again.

Then, suddenly, some one of them caught sight of old Chris. There was a white flashing of faces as they turned upon him. Not a word was spoken. Old Chris turned and fled. There was no other word for it. He ran away. As he went, he wondered what under heaven had happened. If the shouting of children was a mere noise and annoyance, why should their silence be worse than a thunderbolt fallen upon him?

When he was at last in the shelter of his office, he did not even light a cigar, but walked up and down for a long time, trying to put his thoughts in order, and failing lamentably in the effort. Hank had left town. Hank had actually taken him at his word and gone. If a dog, that had barked at him a hundred times and then run when he snapped his fingers, had actually run out and put teeth in him, he could not have been more appalled.

He finally decided that he must go down to hear what people were saying of him. He had not far to go. He found half a dozen black brows bent upon him. The very clerk behind his grocery counter would barely bid him good morrow. These were signs, these were portents, indeed.

Then he went out into the street and saw Sam Patrick, and gave him a “good morning.”

“Adarn' poor morning to poor old Hank,” blurted out Sam Patrick, and went on past him without another word.

In short, it meant revolution. But Chris Martin thrust out his lower jaw and decided to meet the brunt of the opposition right there on the spot. He called back Sam Patrick with a voice of thunder. Then he told him why he had driven Hank away. “The blacksmith was a lazy old drunken ruffian,” stated Chris Martin. For years he had not been worth his keep. For years he had been running deeper and deeper into debt. Now the time had come for him to leave. He was incurable.

“He'll he a big loss to the kids,” was all that Patrick would say, and so he left Chris.

In the meantime, as they talked, windows had gone softly up, and heads had looked out and even many ears, unseen, had listened carefully to every word from the street. When the tale was ended, each window was closed again all as softly. Not a word was said; not a voice was raised. But old Chris knew well enough all that would follow, and how they would gather together to converse about the thing that had been done. They would have harsh things and hard things to say about him, beyond a doubt. But he resolutely damned them and went on his way. Yet something was stinging him to the heart. What would become of old Hank? Where had the old rascal gone?

Then he forgot his pity. It seemed to him that Hank had simply left the town and left that sad and stern message behind him because he wished to raise the hearts of the villagers against Chris. Five minutes before he had been condemning himself for his cruelty to Hank. But from this moment he began to hate the old fellow and wish that even the memory of him might perish from the face of the earth. His anger grew with brooding.

In the meantime, his niece had left her room not five minutes after her uncle left the house. She went to the corral, caught and saddled her own horse, and then flogged at full gallop across the hills and through the delicious fresh coolness of the morning air. Oh, how thin and still and how vast it was. Still it seemed to Jennie that the curve of the great earth's surface was pressing her dizzily up into the sky.

There was no joy in her heart. She went savagely on to the house of Willie Merchant, and she met Willie at the door, just coming out, with his saddle resting against his hip and his head sunk.

She was too blind with anger and rage and disgust to do more than know that it was he. Had she looked any closer, she could not but have been touched by the despair in his eyes. But she saw nothing. There were too many tears in her eyes after she had spoken the first words.

Jennie told him, quick and plain, that she was done with him. She offered him back his ring, and, when he would not lift his powerless arms to take it, she dropped it in the dirt at his feet. She took out a dense packet of letters and tossed them down after the ring. Then she turned and rode away. When she crossed the next wave of ground and looked back, what did she see but poor Willie Merchant standing just as she had left him, with the white batch of letters at his feet, and the saddle resting against his hip, and the quirt dangling in his hand.

“A coward. A coward. A coward,” gasped out Jennie as the gallop of her horse rocked her along. And then she cried in the same voice: “I wish I were dead! I wish I were dead! I wish I were dead!”

She rode on blindly until her horse began to stagger. Then she looked about her and found that, instead of heading straight back for the ranch, this wrongheaded beast had turned aside and was veering toward his old home, which was the Jacobson Ranch. So she had to make a detour through rough ground before she could get back through the broken country and come within line of her uncle's ranch again. Thus it was that she encountered old Hank Ballon.

She came over the first rise from which that old ranch house was visible and saw the deserted shack that old Bud Hervis had built there twenty-five years before, in the days of the cattle wars. But it was no longer deserted. Smoke, as gladdening to the heart as the flag of a man's country, waved out of the patched and reërected chimney, and snapped away to nothingness in the morning breeze. The door was open, and a broad white piece of new pine showed where it had been recently repaired and held together with nails. Indeed, the old place had come into a sudden and not unpleasant life.

Then, looking down into the hollow, she was amazed by the sight of the bony bay gelding, Timothy, and the goat, Jud, which, as all the world knew, were the property of the good old man, Hank Ballon. She knew all about Hank's faults. But she knew all about his virtues. Like everyone else, except her uncle, she loved him with all her heart.

In her astonishment, she forgot her own grief and rode up to the door and knocked against it with the loaded butt of her quirt.

“Hello,” said the familiar voice inside, and then the door opened and the old blacksmith was before her. He came out with a laugh and a wave and took both her hands in his big, bony fingers. “Jen, my darlin',” he said, “how long and how long it is since you've been to see me an' talk to me. Where have you put yourself? Into Willie's pocket, doggone him.”

Hank knew, then, and that meant that everybody knew. It was going to be much harder than she had at first anticipated.

“There's nothing in that, Uncle Hank.”

“I guess not,” he said with too much emphasis, and winked brightly at her.

“But what on earth are you doing out here, Uncle Hank?”

“Me? I'll tell you how it is, honey. Doggone me if I ain't been pondering and pondering, and I figured it out that there ain't no chance for rest and quiet in a great big place like the town. So I decided that I'd come right out here and take a swing at . . . what you might call suburban livin', eh?”

“But seriously, Hank, you rascal, what's in your mind?”

“Nothing but a wish to get away from the noise, Jen. There ain't nothing more than that. All I want is this little shack and you to talk to half an hour a day, and doggone me if I ain't plumb contented.”

“But the village, Uncle Hank. Good heavens, what will it do without you? How can it get on?”

“I'm an old man, honey. Folks get along right tolerable well without old folks.”

“Uncle Hank!”

“Heavens, girl, I ain't aiming to make you cry.”

“Who've you had trouble with?”

“Ain't you going to believe nothing that I tol' you?”

“Not a word.”

“This here comes from givin' women votes,” pronounced Hank. “Doggone me if it don't.”

She tried again to make him talk. “I'm just out here restin' and waitin',” was all that he would say.

But when she went on to the ranch, she heard more details. One of the cowpunchers had come on Uncle Hank in the old shack and had helped make him comfortable there.

The message that he sent by the cowpuncher to the world was that he was waiting, indeed—and waiting inside the sight of the ranch house of Chris Martin. Because, he said, when a man had done as much wrong to the world as old Chris had done, it was time that he began to pay for it.

“Someday,” he had concluded, “Chris will go smash, and everything that means the most to him'll be lost. I'm just staked out here, waiting to see when it happens.”

 

When Jennie heard this, she refused resolutely to believe that Uncle Hank could ever have said such a thing.

“Why,” she said. “I love Uncle Hank, and he loves me, Pete.”

“Sure he does.” said Pete the cowpuncher. “Sure he does. But nobody can love half as hard as he can hate. And here's where your Uncle Chris comes in for some doggone' hard hating.”

He went away and left Jennie by herself to digest this remark and all that it might imply. She decided at once that, when her uncle came home that night, she would have a long and most serious talk with him.

But a great deal was to happen that day before the night came on and the veteran drove his buckboard home with the dust sluicing off the wheels and the tires bumping over the humps that were hidden beneath the velvet of the dust. For before that time came, a white-faced Willie Merchant came on a foaming horse into the town and entered the office of the terrible Chris Martin.

He stood at the doorway and regarded the landowner as though the latter were a ghost. Chris had vowed not to lose his temper for another month, but he was angered by this interview, and, besides, he despised Willie for the whiteness of his face.

“What in the devil d'you want?” he asked of

Willie.

“You lied to me,” said Willie in a dead man's voice.

“I lied? You rat-faced brat.”

“You lied,” Willie repeated.

And Chris saw, with the most utter amazement, that, in spite of all appearances which indicated it, Willie was not afraid. Not in the least. In fact, he was in a fighting fury, and would as soon pull out a gun as a handkerchief. To Chris it was hardly credible—for he prided himself on his ability to judge men. He could not believe that he had gone so far wrong with Willie. Not that he doubted his entire ability to handle Willie in a personal conflict of any kind. As for gunplay, although he seldom had a chance to indulge himself in the actual sport itself, he practiced his draw and his shot every day. When he drove home behind the rat-tailed sorrels every night as he bumped along the roads with no one within hearing of him and no one within sight, he used to empty his revolver at least once at stumps and stones. So that old Chris was in perfect practice. Being in perfect practice, he considered himself as dangerous a fighter as any one in the world, with the exception, perhaps, of a few desperadoes.

He regarded Willie rather with a cold and scientific interest than with a passion of anger. He did not want to kill this boy simply because the boy could not put up a fight good enough to make the war interesting. Old Chris had arrived at that stage of mind.

“You're talking big and brave,” he told Willie gently.

“I say that you lied when you swore that Jennie shouldn't know about what you and I had talked over. Then you went and told her everything.”

“You ain't remembering right, Willie. I said that you must not do any talking to her about this here talk we had. I didn't say whether I'd do no talking or not.”

“You can't speak behind that sort of a cover, Mister Martin.”

“I never speak anyplace, Willie. I'm always right out here in the open . . . and everybody in the world knows right where they can find me.”

“That's why I've come down here to tell you that you've double-crossed me. She's turned me down, this morning. She come, and give me back my letters and give me back my ring. She said that she was through with me because I was a coward, and because I thought a lot more of my cattle than I thought of her.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess she heard that from you, Chris Martin?”