Trail Smoke (Musaicum Vintage Western). Ernest Haycox

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СКАЧАТЬ She dropped her voice. "Bill Head's called for a meeting of the big ranchers tonight, up at his house. Sam will want to know that."

      "I'll tell him. As for the other thing—"

      "I said I trusted you," she interrupted. "Let it go like that."

      He nodded and pointed his horse back down the trail. But her voice came abruptly after him, turning him back. She came on until she was beside him once more. Interest was strong in her and she studied this man with a strange emotion. His high, square torso made an alert shape against the shadows of the trees; there was a tough and resilient vigor all about him, a hard physical power to his body. Discipline lay along the pressed lines of his broad nouth, but a rash and reckless will was in his eyes, struggling against the discipline. She saw it. His head, she decided, would never betray him, for it was cool and introspective. But a latent storminess, a subdued capacity for terrific gusts of feeling, made him dangerous to others and to himself. It was his heart that someday would betray him. These were the things she thought in that little interval; and she wished he might smile as Sam Torveen smiled.

      She said: "I think your own eyes have warned you. But there are many things about this country you don't know. And you have made Bill Head your enemy. Bill is not a forgiving man. You ought to remember that."

      "I'll remember it, Miss Cameron."

      "My name," she told him quietly, "is Judith."

      "Yes," he said, "I know. There was a woman in the Bible by that name. I've often thought of her."

      Her glance dropped and color came strongly to her cheeks. She swung the pony with a long, graceful dip of her body and cantered down the trail. He watched her until she vanished round a lower bend, and then turned homeward.

      He rode idly, the picture of her departure so vivid in his mind that some of his customary riding vigilance deserted him. When he reached the woodcutter's camp he pulled himself reluctantly from his thinking and chose another route by which to descend the slope. An increased heat lay trapped underneath these trees, and the midday's sultry stillness was a thick substance all around him. "The rights of other men," he said softly, "are not my rights. When I have paid my bill to Torveen I ride away from here." And he was wrapped in the somberness of that thought when the reaching crash of a shot threw his pony back on its haunches and whipped him forward in the saddle.

      He had not been struck, but there was deep in his head the long-planned reaction to just such a contingency as this. It came to him now like a boxer's instinctive defense. Rolling on forward across the saddle horn, he capsized and fell to the soft humus soil and turned over and over until he crouched at the base of a pine. His horse stood fast. The echoes of the shot went rolling and ricocheting down the slope; it died out in little fragments and eddies.

      He lay with his head turned upslope, keening the hot twilight of the trees. The sound had struck at him from his right side, and therefore his eyes went to the higher ground, across the brown roll of hummock and stump and deadfall. A mule deer came scudding along the trail, its tail lifted, and plunged on to remote shelter. Surratt's eyes focused on the fan-shaped barricade made by the root system of a capsized pine; it was two hundred yards away, on the high side of the trail. He edged away from his protection and got to his knees and made a run for another tree. Whipped behind it, he studied the slope again. When he next moved—circling and bending as before—he kept his eyes to upheaved roots. He side-stepped and reached a breast- high deadfall. He crouched and ran with it, to the margin of the trail. Paused for one long moment, he finally made one long dive across the trail and dropped behind a stump. From this spot he had a glimpse of the rear of the fallen tree's roots and saw nothing. But there was a bowl where the roots once had been, and in this bowl a man might crouch. Surratt drew his gun then and broke for the adjacent pine. When he reached it he didn't stop, but walked deliberately toward the bowl. It was a strange thing. Perrigo sat on his heels in the bottom of this depression with a rifle across his knees. He saw Surratt coming, but he didn't make a further gesture.

      Surratt walked down into it, coming against Perrigo. He was breathing a little from his run and sweat had reached his face; yet the stillness of Perrigo's attention, the bright and malicious burning of the man's black eyes steadied the fresh, strong pulse of his anger and made him alert.

      "You've got some bad habits, Nick," he grunted. "And this is one of them. I don't love a man that tries to get his turkey cold."

      Perrigo said: "Don't make that mistake, mister. If I'd wanted to hit you I'd aimed at you."

      "So maybe you're just trying to run a little scare into me?"

      Perrigo got to his feet. He put the rifle butt on his toe and cupped a hand over the muzzle. His shortness made him tip his head to reach Surratt's measuring inspection; it seemed to heat the little man's wrath. He stepped backward. "I don't like strangers. I'm tellin' you."

      "I understood that last night," Surratt told him dryly.

      "I don't get why you rode up there and met the Cameron girl," growled Perrigo. "It didn't look like an accident to me."

      "It bothers you?"

      Perrigo said, with a wicked calm: "A lot of things bother me. I don't like you around. You know too much about that shot the other night." His eyes pointed on Surratt, as bitter and dangerous as the muzzles of a double-barreled shotgun. He whipped out his thin question. "What do you know about it?"

      "You got an interest in the matter?" inquired Surratt.

      Perrigo pressed his mouth together. His dry features betrayed a faint fear. Surratt saw that and marked it in his mind and spoke again, somewhat more agreeable. "I'd suggest we get along, for I'm staying on with Torveen awhile. But if we're not going to get along I want to know that, Nick. When a man declares open season on me I've got my own remedies. Two can play this tune."

      "You smell like a Head rider to me," stated Perrigo.

      "You're dead wrong. I braced him the other day, didn't I?"

      "Men don't brace Bill Head like that," countered Perrigo. "They don't get away with it—not unless it's a faked scene."

      "Do we get along or don't we?"

      Perrigo blazed up. "The hell with you! You battered Chunk Osbrook's face out of joint and you laid your tongue on the kid. I'm warning you never to try that on me! I'm running that ranch for Torveen. I tolerate no man on the place that rides in front of me. I want that understood. If you stay, you take my orders. You get that?"

      "No," said Surratt.

      A quick reflex of temper sent Perrigo's arm forward with the muzzle of the gun. But he checked the impulse. Whiteness showed on his cheeks and made the blackness of his eyes more unreasoning. Violence shook him. "Then watch out for yourself!"

      "I wanted it clear," Surratt murmured.

      "You got it clear," cried Perrigo.

      He climbed from the bowl, and Surratt watched him go up to a thick swirl of pine seedlings and pull out a horse standing there. The little man trotted to the trail and galloped away. Surratt went thoughtfully back to his own horse, following the slope down. He came upon the meadow and crossed it to the ranch house. The crew had gone, but Torveen sat in his office room, sprawled out in a chair, somehow deeply engaged with his thoughts and ruffled by them.

      He said, with perceptible relief: "So you're back."

      "Was there some doubt in your mind, Sam?"

      Torveen СКАЧАТЬ