Saddle & Ride (Musaicum Vintage Western). Ernest Haycox

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СКАЧАТЬ anything."

      He said, politely unrevealing: "What?"

      "Clay," she said, "your memory is too long. Someday it will kill you."

      He bowed his head a little, as if in agreement. He had lighted a cigar, holding it between his fingers while he listened. His eyelids crept nearer and his lips rolled together in stubborn fixture. Lamplight, sliding across the surface of his cheeks, darkened and sharpened the reverse angles. She saw in him then those things his friends loved—the tenacity and the faithfulness that never wavered, and she saw, too, the things that made his enemies hate him with such fullhearted bitterness. For as he was a man to stay by his friends for good or bad to the very end of time, so he was a man who returned dislike with an equal passion and an equal ruthlessness. Qualities people loved, and qualities they could hate—this was what she thought and kept her face smooth so that he might not see how she felt. She had never dared to let him see.

      He got up, smiling at her. "Don't worry over my affairs."

      "Not yours. You will always do as you want to do. Nobody will ever be able to change your mind."

      He said in some surprise, "Am I that unreasonable?"

      "Not unreasonable, Clay," she reminded him. "Something different than that. You just don't change. But there is one thing—about Janet. What happens to her if you die?"

      "I don't know."

      She rose and came around the table. She was near enough that she had to lift her eyes. Her cheeks were colored by the room's heat. "Clay," she said in a swift urgency, "there are only two people you could be thinking of, if that happened. Think of me, then. I want her."

      He said, "Thanks for the supper, Ann," and walked on through the store to the front porch. She followed him; she was beside him when he paused on the street. Janet ran forward from the store's back alley, out of breath and laughing. At this moment Morgan's interest was wholly on the street. Ann McGarrah saw how closely he studied the roundabout shadows. It was a carefulness that he had always had, as though the need of it had been burned in him since the beginning. Darkness rolled tidally down the hills, filling War Pass. Lights glinted through window and doorway and made yellow fanwise pools on the walks and the night breeze bore in sage scent and pine scent from the upper country. The Burnt Ranch stage stood before the hotel, ready to go. Morgan's attention clung to the dark area around Gentry's corral a long while. Afterwards he said to Janet: "You're staying here for a few days. Let's take a walk before I start home."

      Ann McGarrah knew where they were going. Paused by the store's doorway, she watched these two, the tall shape of the man and the slender figure of the girl side by side, go down into Old Town, Janet's small hand gripping her father's. One light illumined them a moment, then they were lost beyond Old Town as they walked toward the cemetery. Ann McGarrah stood still; she put her hands together, turned bitter by what she knew.

      Beyond Old Town a creek came out of the hills and crossed under the road with a liquid lapping. Past the creek the round- topped wooden headboards of the cemetery glowed vaguely white under the moonlight. Following the irregular row, Morgan stopped before his wife's grave. Janet's hand gripped his fingers more tightly and she stood quite close to him. There was a child's dread of the unknown in her. He didn't want it to trouble her, so he said casually: "Next time I come to town, we must cut the grass here and paint the board again."

      She said: "Do I look like her, Daddy?"

      "When you are eighteen, Janet, you will look exactly as she looked. That was the year we were married."

      He heard her soft, long sigh. "It would be so nice to have a mother."

      This was the thing that hit him so hard, his daughter's loneliness for a mother. He stood at the foot of the grave, with his hat removed, thinking back to that long-gone night when Lila Durrie, so full of life and laughter and recklessness, had smiled to him across the dance hall's width, putting everything into her round black eyes. At eighteen a man was like the blowing wind; he had gone over, knowing there would be a fight. Ben Herendeen had brought her to the dance and Ben Herendeen stood by, quietly raging. When the music started Lila Durrie looked up at the sullen Herendeen, laughed at him and took Clay Morgan's arm, dancing away. At the doorway they had stepped out; down by the row of buggies, in the bland black night, they had stood a moment, no longer cool and no longer laughing. Even now Morgan remembered the sharpness, the wild intensity of his feelings as he kissed her and heard her whisper in his ears. "Clay—Clay, do you love me?" They had gone immediately to his rig. At daylight in War Pass, forty miles away, they were married.

      Janet's fingers tugged at him. "Didn't you ever have a picture, Daddy?"

      "No," he said. "She never had one taken."

      There hadn't been time for a picture or for much of anything else. At that time he owned a small ranch in the Lost Hills and ran a few cows on it. This was where they set up housekeeping, a long way from town, a long way from dances or from her friends. She had been used to better things and couldn't help remembering it. She was a stormy girl, so rash in anger, so quick to seek laughter, by turns so terribly forlorn and so tempestuously happy. Four months after their marriage Herendeen rode up to the place and stepped from the saddle. From the far corner of the meadow, Clay had seen this. When he reached the house Herendeen was laughing and she was laughing but that laughter stopped soon enough, for Herendeen said: "Why stick so close to the house, Clay? Don't you trust your wife?"

      Morgan drew the cigar from his mouth, feeling some of the fury of that fight. He had rushed against Herendeen, hearing his wife's scream of protest. Herendeen started laughing again, but when they were finished, both exhausted and drained dry and badly beaten, there was no amusement in Herendeen. That hurt still came back to plague Morgan, even now; he remembered how he walked to the corral and hung his elbows against it to keep from falling, and how blindly Herendeen staggered toward his horse. He had whipped Herendeen in that fight and yet he had lost; for, five months later, shortly after Janet's birth, Lila had looked up from her bed, white and strengthless, all her love gone, and whispered: "I should tell you something, Clay. I made a mistake. It was Ben I wanted to marry. You and I are not at all alike." And so she had died.

      He brought himself out of all this with effort and replaced his hat. "I think," he told Janet, "we'd better go."

      Janet reached down and patted the dust of her mother's grave, murmuring, "Everybody says you were very beautiful."

      He had turned away. But he turned back, holding the warm small hand of his daughter within his own big fingers, knowing that in his daughter's head was a wistful and wonderful image of her mother—an image made out of a child's longing. Like a fairy tale, he thought, that had to be bright and always fair. So he said: "Yes, she was, Janet. There never was a mother like her. She had black hair. It was very long and sunlight made it shine. Her eyes were the same color as yours. She was never angry and never afraid and she loved us both. When you were just three days old she sang a song to make you sleep. The song was 'Ben Bolt.' She had a lovely voice. You will be like her and you will always see her when you look in the mirror."

      She remained silent, drinking in his description, storing those words in her retentive memory. She drew a long, pleased sigh; the pressure of her hand grew greater on his fingers, and afterwards they turned through Old Town, walking in silence. He had made her happy.

      He was thinking of this, pleased by her pleasure, when he saw a low-bent and shadowy shape run from the alley adjoining the Mountain House hotel and whip across the street toward Mike Boylan's blacksmith shop. This was in the corner building of Old Town, and Mike Boylan, late-working, had hung a lantern above the shop's wide double-door. A saddle horse stood loose before Boylan's rack, toward which the running man СКАЧАТЬ