The Fugitive (19 page)

“I'd rather have lost a year of life than to've seen this,” he said simply. “I'd've swore that Harry Vance was on the square now. But this here letter is straight. Mighty straight. It'd convince any judge and court in the mountains that Pearson was yaller . . . and telling the truth.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked at Willie again with new eyes. “Willie,” he said, “this kind of changes things. But I'm afraid that it don't help you none. It shows that you're going to have company in jail. But it don't save the fact that you swiped old Chris's cows. Does it?”

“I ain't aiming to save myself,” said Willie. “I figure that, after some of the honest men that I've met up with, spending a few years with the crooks in the open will be sort of restful.”

“Going to plead guilty?”

“I sure am. Let 'em finish up the case quick. That's all that I ask.”

“Willie, what got into you? Mind you, this is after arrest, but what you say
won't
be used against you in court. But open up and tell me what got into you? If I'd been asked to pick out the plumb soberest young gent in the county, doggone me if I wouldn't've landed on you right off for a hardworking, money-saving kid. And here you go bust in one grand slam.”

“I was needing excitement,” said Willie with a smile. “I'd played sober so long that I had to go on one big bat.”

“Well,” said the sheriff, “I was just curious, but, if you don't want to talk, I reckon that I can't make you.”

“Listen to me, Sheriff . . . if you'd never been a friend of mine before, I'd reckon you one now, since you've put the irons on me just when I was getting set to run wild. It's better to go ten years in the pen than to go ten months in the open and wind up like a coyote, with a slug of lead to digest.”

“You was aiming to play the game wide open?”

“I was a fool,” said Willie, “but my heart was busted, Sheriff.”

The sheriff, without another word, rose from his chair and led the way out of his office into the cell room. There, with a rusty key, he turned the wards in the old lock. They screeched as they moved, and he waved Willie into the compartment. There he removed the irons, but still he lingered a little.

“You've lived honest, worked honest, and now you talk honest, Willie. When they send you up to the prison, doggone me if it ain't a mark ag'in' old Chris, not ag'in' you. You can lay to this, too, kid, when you get out of the coop . . . come back to me. I'll have a way to give you a hand.”

 

If Chris Martin heard the news of the imprisonment of Willie that next morning, he could not relish the word. In his brutal heart of hearts, he had really only one wish about the young fellow, and that was that he would turn outlaw and go the way of that kind. There was other news than that of the capture of young Merchant. Big Harry Vance had been served with a warrant for arson, and he had promptly knocked down the bearer of the warrant, rushed out to a horse, and ridden far away. But Pearson, his accomplice involuntarily, was now in a cell.

The public opinion was put in the greeting of an old acquaintance of Chris who rode in from Cedar Creek that day.

“I hear you've gone out and bagged a couple more, Chris. Having a kind of a nice little game all by yourself, ain't you?” It was spoken with a faint, ironical smile.

Old Chris answered with a grunt. He had received nothing but black looks from the entire village ever since old Hank Ballon vanished.

“Time takes care of hard feelings,” he was heard to murmur.

As for his villagers, they would not dare to revolt against him. They were deeply in his power, and they were not freehanded, like Hank. They had wives and children, and they dared not defy him. So secure was he in his hold upon them that he began to relish this new situation. It proved so conclusively who was their master. Every hour of the day he had a new testimony concerning his position. He was, in fact, the undisputed tyrant of the town, and the realization was sweet to Chris Martin. He went home that night whistling half the way, and actually forgot to light a cigar.

The foreman came out and watched him unsaddling his horse, for Martin was at least enough of a democrat not to make any of his cowpunchers do menial work.

“I hear they got Willie,” said the foreman.

“When any young fool,” said the rancher, “runs into a stone wall, he's going to get knocked down.”

That, for him, ended the narrative of Willie Merchant.

“He'll go up, all right,” said the foreman. “Sure he will. He's done.” “How many years?”

“I dunno,” said Chris. “It's pretty serious. Cutting wire and then swiping water . . . that's as good as burglary right there, ain't it? And then rustling cows on top of all that . . . the law is pretty hard on cattle rustlers, partner.”

“The law'd rather see cows starved to death, I reckon,” mused the other.

“Eh?” said Chris.

“Law'd rather see 'em starved,” repeated the foreman steadily.

“You aim to be one of them that waste time pitying a blockhead?”

“I do.”

“I got no time for soft heads, son.”

“I got no time for you, neither,” said the foreman. “You can find somebody to take my job. I'm through.” And he turned upon his heel and walked away.

Chris was dumbfounded. Here was a new expression of public opinion. Here was a man whose hair was grizzled, whose step was no longer light, who had, for many and many a year, labored like a slave in the service of a hard master. But now he was willing to sacrifice the pension that, in a few years, was sure to come to him, in order to enjoy the exquisite satisfaction of telling the master that he disapproved of his conduct. It was almost bewildering to Chris, but he put it into a maxim and threw the fact behind him.

Some fools blossom early and some blossom late,
said Chris to himself, and went to the house.

There was Jennie waiting. She was dressed in riding togs, her best outfit. There were yellow gloves on her hands, and a black, snaky quirt was dangling from her fingers. Her head she held very high. And in her eyes there was something that made him a stranger. It troubled Chris.

She's sulking,
said Chris to himself.
When a woman is sulking, the thing to do is to act damn' serious. Like you had a toothache or something. They sure hate a smile when they're on a grouch.

With this in mind, he shied his hat into a corner and slumped into a chair as though the weight of the world had crushed him. But the eye of Jennie remained as frosty cold as ever. It seemed to the old rancher, as he watched her, that she had never been so beautiful. For to him she was beautiful. A man who called her nose too short would have been damned by him as blind to begin with, and a fool to finish. Even her freckles were, to him, each a separate grace. He wondered, as he watched her, how God could have given him the joy to be bound by a blood tie to this marvelous creature.

“Uncle Chris,” she said, “I've waited for you to come home before I left.”

He refused to admit the meaning of the words. “Left for where, Jen?”

“For Cedar Creek first, I suppose.”

“Going to visit the Lorings?”

“No. I'll stay in the hotel for a while.”

“Bad place, Jen.”

“Perhaps.”

“How long d'you aim to be gone?”

Forever.”

He peered at her with a squint, as though he were looking across the blazing sand of the desert at the far, cool image of mountains.

“Forever, Jen?” he murmured.

She rose. “Forever,” she answered.

“You ain't joking, honey?”

“Joking?” she said savagely. “No, I haven't your sense of humor. It doesn't make me smile. I . . . I . . . “She shook away tears that were coming, and then stamped a foot to drive away the coming weakness.

“Jen,” he told her, “you sort of stagger me. What have I done except love you like you was my own?”

“You've ruined my life,” she told him. “You've ruined it. You lied to me about poor Will and sent me there to scorn him and break our engagement . . . and that drove him to all the rest. You called him a coward . . . a coward and . . . ” She choked with the immense injustice of it. “And I've learned the whole truth. A coward? He was brave enough to defy the whole law . . . and you . . . and all the rest. A coward.”

Public opinion,
said a still voice in the heart of Chris.
She's only a part of it. Public opinion.
“Jen,” he said aloud, “suppose that you and me was to talk all of this over, slow and easy.”

“There's nothing left to talk about. Will's gone from me. The prison will have him. The prison. And you . . . it's all you . . .”

After that, what happened was too stunningly swift for Chris to follow. But it was all stormed out at him. She was going, and never to return. She would stay at Cedar Creek until she had fought the case for Will with her money. For now those old investments that he had made for her had flourished and grown into a small fortune. And she, being of age, would claim them. She would do this, and then, when Will was gone, she would take herself she cared not where, so long as she never had to see her uncle's face again.

Then she was gone, and he watched her throw herself on the back of her horse and gallop away with her head down into the wind. At that he weakened enough to run outdoors after her and cry out, but his throat was cramped and small—not a whisper's volume issued from it. And she did not pause to look back at him, not even when her horse had galloped over the top of the hill to the west. She drove straight on, and presently the horse and rider vanished.

He went back slowly into the house. The screen door stuck, and he plucked at it with numb fingers, rather wondering why he did not curse it. When he went in, the shuffling feet of Wing, the old Chinaman, whispered past him. He saw that the eyes of Wing were wet. At this he wondered, rather dimly. That the very cook should weep because she was gone, and yet from him there came not a vestige of a tear.

Her glove lay in the middle of the floor, where it had fallen, and he plucked it up. He had a foolish pang as he saw it, a desire to go out and call her back. As though she would return for the sake of a riding glove.

So, instead of going out, he sat down, with the glove in his hands, and fell to smoothing it with his stubby fingers. He began to look at it with a new wonder, for it was so small that it seemed to him that Jen must be still a child if her hand could fit into it. She was not a child, however. It was a woman who had raged at him. It was a woman who was about to fight her best for Willie Merchant and save him from the prison if she could.

When he looked up again, the Chinaman was moving softly about the room, laying the table; the thick dusk was everywhere.

“I ain't eating,” he told Wing, and went outside again.

He felt at first that it was better outdoors. He could breathe more easily in the freshening wind, and he said to himself: “Time'll take care of all this. I ain't broke. Not yet.”

Then, turning the corner of the house, he came on the swing under the mulberry tree. It still hung there in the blackened ropes, although it was ten years since it had been used. It seemed to Chris suddenly that it was ten years since he had been deserted. He turned hastily back, lighting a cigar. But it had no taste. He began to crumble it, bit by bit, in his fingers. He began to think of that old trip to Havana; his interviews with the cigar manufacturers. . . . That was in the newness of prosperity; that was when Jen had first come to him. Time could never heal him, he knew at last.

“I'm too old,” said Chris, and he tossed away the fragments of the Havana.

 

“I want acquaintances,” Chris used to say. “I'll get along without friends. I want folks around me that need me . . . not them that I need.”

He had lived on that basis so successfully that now he found there was not a friend in the world to whom he could turn, and yet he knew that he needed a friend most desperately. There was no advice that could help him, but although he was aware of that, he felt that he must talk. The mere utterance of words would lift some of that mysterious weight that pressed down upon his heart.

Nothing would do. There was not a living soul to whom he could turn. He spent two days revolving his misery in his mind. Each day he continued his usual routine. He went into the town in the morning and returned in the evening. But now he spent his day not in the office, but wandering around through the village. What he was hunting for, he himself did not know. But finally he made sure that he was looking for one kindly eye, and he found none. There was nothing but the bitterest resentment and suspicion in every face he encountered.

On the third day, his strength melted away, and he surrendered. He would go to Cedar Creek and tell Jen that he must have her back; that he himself would throw all of his giant strength into the battle to save Willie Merchant, but that she must come back to him and stay with him.

So he drove to Cedar Creek that day and actually up to the hotel, before his heart changed. It was not that he minded humbling himself to Jen. It was that some other person might hear how he debased himself and cringed. The walls of that hotel were paper-thin. Even a whisper might be heard in an adjoining room. So he drove on past the hotel, through the town, with his hands cold and his face hot. He drove five miles out on the farther side of the town. By the end of that distance he had made up his mind. He turned the team around and drove them, smoking, back into Cedar Creek.

Martin went to the jail and asked for Sheriff Champion. That veteran upholder of the law was not there. He went to the home of Champion, and the old man came out on the porch to meet him. It seemed a little strange to Chris that he was not asked inside to talk. It seemed a little strange, also, that there was no smile on the face of the sheriff. Yet they were men of the same period. Together they had fought in the cohorts that won the West. Together they had seen the great men of the border rise and fall.