The Removers (3 page)

It was in the valley beyond, a rambling collection of peeled-log buildings with enough large windows to qualify as rustic modern. It looked like quite a spread, as we say out West.

“Do you live there all year?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We move into town winters to be near the children’s schools. And Larry has a little place in Mexico, too, where we go sometimes... Follow me. We’ve got to head over this way to intercept the boy. Pete and I came straight down the mountain, but they’ll be following the trail.”

She took it fast. Her cross-country riding had improved since I’d seen her last. Undoubtedly this was why she’d decided to bring me to the ranch on horseback, to show off her new skill. Besides, she’d probably guessed I hadn’t been on a horse for a year, and a man who’s limping and saddle-sore is kind of at a disadvantage in delicate personal negotiations demanding an air of ease and dignity. I don’t mean she was a malicious person or a calculating one. After all, we’d known each other for a long time. She was entitled to her little joke.

She led me around the side of the mountain, and pulled up at last in a wooded hollow, through the center of which ran a well-used trail. I checked my horse beside her; and she turned to face me, flushed and breathless from the ride. I thought she looked very attractive, but then, I’d been prejudiced enough on the subject to marry her, once.

“They’ll be coming along soon,” she said, “if they haven’t already passed. I told them to head straight for home. There’s a man with them, of course, but they ride very well now, both of them.” She laughed. “We’ve even had Betsy on a pony. She’s crazy to come riding with us, but she’s a little small yet. She’s barely three, you know.”

“Yes,” I said dryly, “I know. I happened to be present when she was born, if you’ll remember. At least I was in the expectant papas’ waiting room.”

She flushed slightly. “Yes,” she said. “Of course... Well, we might as well get down and wait.” She hesitated. “Besides... besides, there’s something I have to tell you.”

I said, “Yes, I got your note.” When she did not speak at once, I went on idly, “I don’t know as I have much faith in these rustlers of yours, Beth.”

She said quickly, “Then you don’t know much about modern ranching—”

“Oh, rustlers that slip in at night and make off with a beef now and then, sure. But not rustlers that cause your husband to give orders not to let you go riding in broad daylight without an armed escort. What’s the trouble?”

She hesitated again. Her mount fidgeted, and she pulled it up sharply. “Let’s get down, shall we?” she said. “I’m still not enough of a horsewoman to trust these animals completely.”

“Sure.”

I dismounted, and stepped forward to take her horse as she swung from the saddle. It was a funny damn experience, watching her. I mean, it had been a year, and I hadn’t exactly spent it as a hermit. Whatever she’d meant to me once, I’d thought I was over it. But now, watching her drop lightly to the ground, I knew I should have stayed away.

She glanced at her watch, and looked up the trail. “I didn’t realize we’d taken so much time. They’re probably halfway to the ranch by now. Well, we can wait a few minutes longer and make sure.”

Her voice was unnaturally level, but at least she had one. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d sound if I tried to talk. I hadn’t stayed away. I was here on a mountainside in Nevada, holding a couple of horses and watching her come forward—tallish, willowy, with big brown eyes and light brown hair under the big Stetson hat. She stopped in front of me.

I said, “Mrs. Logan.”

My voice sounded about the way I’d expected it would. She glanced at me sharply. “Matt—”

I said, “It’s a funny thing, Mrs. Logan, but you look just like a girl I used to know... a girl I used to know pretty well, as a matter of fact.”

“Matt,” she said. “Please! I should never—”

“No,” I said. “You most certainly shouldn’t. But you did.”

I dropped the reins. If they were any kind of western horses, they ought to stand ground-hitched, and if they didn’t, to hell with them. I reached out and took her by the shoulders, and she started to speak. She started to tell me not to touch her, but it would have sounded very corny, and she didn’t say it. She started to tell me that she was happily married to a lovely guy named Logan, to whom she was deeply devoted, but she didn’t say that, either.

It was all in her eyes, however, and I suppose I should have had the decency to leave her alone, but it had been a long year without her, and I didn’t owe Logan a thing.

All he’d ever done for me was marry my wife.

“Matt!” she whispered. “Please, no—”

I didn’t really draw her towards me. At least, if I did, there wasn’t any great resistance to overcome. Then she was in my arms, her face upturned, and her big hat fell off to hang down her back by its braided cord.

She was no longer trying to hold me off, quite the contrary. There was a disturbing kind of desperation in the way she clung to me. It wasn’t really flattering. I couldn’t kid myself she was thinking of me as a lover she’d missed; it was more that I was something solid and familiar and reassuring in a troubled world, and I suppose I should have been a gentleman and offered her an absorbent shoulder and an attentive ear instead of kissing her hard.

This changed the whole nature of the operation, as I had hoped it would. I’ll be a rock of refuge if I have to, but only if I have to. Suddenly I wasn’t any longer, and we’d known each other much too long and much too well for it to end with a kiss—and that was the moment our two boys picked to come charging down the hill, accompanied by a middle-aged cowboy who should have known better than to run a horse like that. Beth and I had barely time to jump apart and put respectable looks on our faces before they all raced into sight.

Later, Beth and I rode sedately down the trail while the boys and their escort ranged ahead. I noted that the man’s horse, like the one I was riding, carried a lever-action .30-30 on the saddle.

My reunion with my sons had been undramatic. Matthew, age eight, had said ‘Hi, Daddy,’ and Warren, age six, had said ‘Hi, Daddy,’ and they’d both sat there uncomfortably on their ponies wondering if I’d brought them any presents from wherever I’d been, but too polite to ask. Then they’d ridden off, whooping. An extra daddy or two means very little, at that age, when you have a horse to ride.

Presently I heard a small sound from Beth. I glanced at her suspiciously. She kept her face averted as we rode along; then she looked at me quickly, and I saw that she was trying very hard to keep from laughing.

“Yeah, funny,” I said, and grinned.

I mean, we’d been through it all before. It wasn’t the first passionate moment in our lives that had been interrupted in this manner—in fact, I sometimes used to wonder how any parents ever managed to achieve more than one child. Somehow, after the first one, at the critical moment there’s always a small voice outside the bedroom door telling you to come quick, the cat has just had kittens, the dog has just had pups, or there’s a large brown bug in the bathtub.

My truck was standing in the yard when we rode up. Beth glanced at it with a kind of nostalgia.

“I see the wheels haven’t fallen off it yet,” she said.

“Best damn car I ever had,” I said. “I don’t see your station wagon around.”

“It needed a grease job, so Larry took it to town this morning,” she said. “He’ll be back soon. I want you to meet him.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I really do,” she said. “I think you’ll like each other.”

My friend, the young rifleman, came around a corner to take the horses. The boys, who’d reached the ranch well ahead of us, were all over him, telling him he had to come meet their real daddy. He was good with them, I saw, in that tolerant, mildly dictatorial way that, coming from someone they respect, someone three times their own age but still not too old to be approachable, goes down well with youngsters. He put them to work, giving them each a horse to lead away and unsaddle, and reminding them not to neglect their own mounts.

Beth said, “Peter, could you ask Clara to get the baby up and dress her? She’s had a long enough nap, and I’m sure her father would like to see her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” young Logan said, and went off.

Beth watched him go. “He’s a nice boy,” she said. “I suppose it’s hardly to be expected that he should be enthusiastic about me. A bomb killed his mother in London during the war. After a lot of knocking around here and there, Larry brought the boy to this country. There were only the two of them for years. Of course, Peter was away at school a good deal of the time, but still, there’s a kind of special relationship between a widowed man and an only son... And then I came along, with three children! Naturally he can’t help considering us as rivals. It speaks a lot for his character and training that he can be as nice to us as he is.” She shook her head, dismissing the subject. “Well, I’m going to take a shower. Come on and I’ll show you to your room, first.” She hesitated. “Matt.”

“Yes.”

“It was a mistake. Let’s not repeat it.”

“If you say so,” I said politely.

She said, “It would be all wrong and. and kind of complicated and unpleasant, wouldn’t it? I don’t know what I was thinking of. I...” She drew a long breath. “Anyway, here comes Larry.”

A car that I recognized was coming up the road to the ranch. She walked quickly towards the front of the house to meet it. I saw her pause briefly as she realized that the driver was not alone.

I saw a funny, hard look that I didn’t recognize come to her face. Then she was going forward again, but not as rapidly as before. I held back, since it seemed advisable to give her time to prepare her new husband for my presence. When I approached, she was talking to him at the side of the station wagon; but it wasn’t Lawrence Logan who caught and held my attention first. It was the young girl who’d got out of the car on the other side, and the dog this girl had with her.

Of the two, the dog was slightly more spectacular. I’d seen red-haired girls before, but this was the first gray Afghan hound I’d met. It’s not a breed with which I’m really familiar—not many people are—and the few specimens I’d encountered previously had all been brown or tan. This one was a silvery, bluish gray. Like all Afghans, it was short-haired along the back and longhaired down the legs so that, lean and bony, it looked rather like a greyhound with shaggy cowboy chaps on. It had a long, narrow, inbred head and big pleading brown eyes; and when I first saw it, it was protesting against something by standing erect on its hind legs, waving its woolly fore-paws skyward, as tall as the girl on the other end of the leash.

She wasn’t exactly inconspicuous herself, since her hair was that wonderful reddish-golden color that I doubt any woman ever grew naturally, but who cares? It was done up kind of casually about her head, with a loose swirl in back secured by a few pins that didn’t look very trustworthy. She was quite young, not tall, but well developed or, as the saying goes, stacked. In other words, except for a trim little waist and neat small wrists and ankles, she wasn’t skinny anywhere.

She was wearing sandals that would have looked swell on a Florida beach but seemed slightly impractical on a Nevada ranch; and emerald-green, skin-tight pants, the narrow kind that terminate about six inches above the ankles. You could hardly call them slacks since they didn’t have any. Above them, she wore a kind of thin, loose jacket adorned with a wild, Japanese-looking print, predominantly the same bright shade of green as the pants. It was quite a costume. It seemed a pity for her to waste it on us mountain folks. In Bermuda, it would have gone over big.

What with Beth and Logan to think about, and the exotic dog putting on its standing-bear act, and the boys coming racing from the corral to admire it, and the other attributes of the girl to consider, I hope I may be excused for not paying immediate attention to her face—besides, it was partly turned away from me, as she tried to calm her panicky, rearing pet. She got it back to earth, but it wasn’t happy, and it stood there trembling with its long, snaky tail tucked between its legs—something I never like to see in a dog, nor am I very fond of these narrowheaded animals, in any case. Selective breeding is all very well, but you ought to leave room for a few brains.

“Matt,” Beth was saying now, coming towards me, “I want you to meet my... my husband. Larry, this is Matt Helm.”

The moment was upon us, and it was no time to be staring at stray young females or their unlikely-looking dogs. Logan was standing in front of me. He was pretty much as Mac had described him, a spare, sinewy man in khakis, very English, with a bushy, sandy mustache and sharp blue eyes under sandy brows and lashes. He was older than I’d expected him to be, however: somewhere in his forties. I should have been ready for that after learning that he had a son over twenty. The British don’t go in for child marriages much.

He held out his hand. It wasn’t a sign of friendship, or even a gesture of peace; it was just a gentleman greeting a guest in the proper manner, regardless of possible personal differences.

“I have,” he said, “heard quite a bit about you, Mr. Helm.”

“Yes,” I said. “Probably you’d have preferred to hear less.”

After a moment, he smiled. “Quite,” he said.

We’d made contact, at least. It seemed as if we might get around to understanding each other, with a little effort on both sides. We studied each other briefly, standing there, and I knew what Mac had meant when he said this man looked as if he might be able to take care of himself. It wasn’t a look, as much as a smell or an aura. I tried to tell myself I was imagining things, or that if I wasn’t, it was just that, at some time Logan had been in somebody’s army and had fought somebody’s war, like most men of his generation and mine. But there are lots of men who’ve worn uniforms and fought battles and got nothing much out of it but a few unpleasant memories and an allergy towards military discipline. He wasn’t one of those.

He started to speak, but Beth grabbed his arm. “Is that animal safe?” she asked, pointing to the dog, now flat on the ground like a bearskin rug, its head between its paws, obviously suffering agonies of shyness, while the two boys scratched and petted and stroked it, and asked questions of its owner.