Trail Smoke (Musaicum Vintage Western). Ernest Haycox

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to the gun. Surratt dismounted.

      The man's head instantly lifted again. He said, uncharitably: "Anybody invite you to light here?"

      "Torveen's place?"

      "Yeah."

      Surratt shrugged his shoulders. He walked to an empty box and overturned it and sat down; he got out his pipe and loaded it. But his nerves were alert, keened by the suspecting unfriendliness of that other man's attention. He was beyond forty, Surratt judged, and gray at the temples; there was a thinness of body and temper about him, a wicked excitability. Something struck Surratt on his left side then, something that had weight but no physical substance. He got a match out of his pocket and lighted it, his glance sliding quickly along the porch. A sort of an ell ran back from the left corner of the house, with four doors opening into what he judged to be kitchen and bunkroom. His eyes went along the ell and reached a window and stopped. Behind the window was the attentive face of a young man, pallid and prematurely etched by lines of violence.

      Surratt ground the burnt match into his palm, creating a sooty disk there. He pulled smoke into his lungs, his lips lengthened and tightened. The feel of this place was bad. It rubbed his fur the wrong way, it kept plucking at his senses, it cocked his muscles. A horse scudded out of the trees. Looking up, he saw Sam Torveen wheel around the house and step to the ground. The little man on the porch rose immediately. He stared at Torveen.

      "You know this fella?"

      "Sure," said Torveen.

      The man's wire-edged features snapped to anger. He said something under his voice and picked up his gun and went scowling through a doorway, into the ell.

      Torveen's grin streaked angularly across his sandy cheeks. "You may like Nick Perrigo," he said carelessly. "Or you may not. He's my foreman. Come inside." The restlessness of this redheaded man sent him across the porch at a high stride. Soberly following, Buck Surratt came into a long bare room cluttered with the gear of a cattleman. There was a bunk at one end, and a fireplace, and a desk with a tally book and a pad of writing paper on it, and two chairs. The windows had wooden shutters that closed from the inside; a stand containing four rifles stood near the bunk. Torveen dropped into a chair. He hooked a leg over the chair's arm and began swinging it. The greenness of his eyes was brighter and there was the stronger impression of a controlled rashness playing behind that color.

      "Want a drink?"

      "No."

      "You've heard my name mentioned. I don't know yours."

      "Buck Surratt."

      Sam Torveen bent forward. "What was the idea of that play against Bill Head?"

      Surratt said, gently: "Just to freeze things up long enough for me to get out of town."

      "Supposin' the play hadn't worked?"

      "It worked."

      "Supposin' it hadn't?" insisted Torveen.

      "I never figure more than one step ahead at a time," murmured Surratt.

      "The hell you don't," countered Torveen. "You're half a mile ahead of yourself, every foot of the way. I been laughin' to myself ever since—the way you framed that." His grin was hard and cheerful. "You're trapped in town but you walk up to Bill Head, give him hell, and ride off before he can get unsnarled from his surprise. If he was a man quick on the recoil you couldn't of made that play stick, friend Buck. But you pegged him as bein' slow. I take off my hat to you."

      Surratt's mind reviewed the scene in Morgantown methodically. There was a need in him for information, as there always was. "Who's Bill Head?"

      "He runs the Crow Track for his old man, who's a cripple. It's a big jag of land, north of here, up in the hills."

      "There was a dark, heavy fellow standing beside him."

      "Dutch Kersom, another old-timer with plenty of cattle. I already named you Ab Cameron. The fourth fellow, the one with the bony face, was Hank Peyrolles. They'll account for eighty per cent of the beef in this section."

      "The sheriff's not a proud man," reflected Surratt, "and the marshal just does what he's told."

      Torveen chuckled broadly. "You're figgerin' again." But his eyes were curious. "Why did you ride into Morgantown, instead of goin' back to the desert? You must of known that shot would get you in trouble."

      Surratt looked at Torveen steadily. Torveen shook his head and made a dry observation. "Pm not sayin' you did the shootin', Surratt. I meant that you're a stranger and you're pulled into it."

      "Where would I run?"

      Torveen remarked, very quietly: "So you're here, for reasons of your own. The pay is thirty a month."

      "If I stay."

      Torveen had a poker expression on his roan cheeks. "You came for a reason. It still holds good, doesn't it?"

      "Yes," said Surratt. But his thoughts were on Nick Perrigo and the pallid face in the window, and his mind balanced evenly, with no decision. He could not resolve the puzzle. The reflection of it crept faintly into the studying soberness of his cheeks.

      Slack in his chair, Torveen watched this out of his jade eyes. "Your head," he murmured, "never stops working. You got this ranch sized up and there's somethin' about it you don't cotton to."

      "That's right."

      Torveen shifted his body. The smile left him, the corners of his mouth stiffened. Inscrutably patient, Surratt searched the sandy cheeks of this Torveen, seeking some solid bottom behind the surface recklessness, beyond the skeptical glint of deviltry. He could not help it. All the hard training of his years had disciplined him to silence, to patience, to a perpetual vigilance against the trickeries of men. Faintly, he saw something now. Torveen's cheeks relaxed and a strain showed itself and his tone became ragged. He said: "If you stay, you'll find out for yourself. I need help, friend Buck, but I'll tell you no more—and I'm not askin' you to stay."

      A steel triangle on the porch began to beat harsh sound across the day. It was noon, it was dinnertime. Boots scraped the porch boards and there was a rider coming in from the meadow. Torveen said, "Let's eat," and rose and led the way to the porch. He ducked through a door of the ell, into a dining room. Coming in, Surratt found three men already at the table and an enormous Chinaman standing against the wall. Then a fourth man entered and took his place, staring at Surratt with one brief, curious glance. Surratt sat down, silently reversing his capsized plate. Torveen said to the crew in his casual touch-and-go voice: "The name of the new member is Buck Surratt. Wang, if you don't quit puttin' so damn many eggshells in the coffee I'm going to throw a plate at you."

      The Chinaman didn't stir and didn't show a change of expression. Torveen reared his head, obviously irritated. "I meant that," he grunted. But he covered the irritation instantly, nodding his head at the individuals in the crew as he named them for Surratt. "You know Perrigo, the gentle soul. The kid there is Ferd Bowie. Good-lookin' gander near you uses a title called Chunk Osbrook. It may be his real name, I don't know. Last man there answers to Ed."

      They looked briefly at him without acknowledgment. For his part, Surratt went imperturbably on with his eating. But his mind registered them with a camera clarity and their faces told him things they hadn't intended to tell. This Ed was an easy-going misfit in a crowd that had a jarring, explosive note. Perrigo СКАЧАТЬ