Novel 1969 - Conagher (v5.0) Read online

  “We took it from the Mimbres,” Benactiny replied proudly.

  “And then you went away and the white man has come. There are many white men, and they still come. They are as many as blades of grass upon the Plains of St. Augustine, and for every one who dies, five will rise in his place.

  “I hope not many die,” Conagher added, “for I like the country as it is, with not too many people.”

  Benactiny changed the subject. “You are the man here? There was only a woman and two young ones.”

  “They are my friends. I watch over them. Their friends are my friends, their enemies are my enemies. It is good that you come in peace, for I would like to believe Benactiny is their friend as well as mine.”

  Benactiny studied him, the faintest shadow of a smile in his eyes, for before this the two men had barely spoken in passing, although each knew much about the other.

  “I think you speak of peace,” Benactiny said. “Is it that you are afraid?”

  “You speak in jest.” Conagher used the word he had heard an Army officer use to an Apache. “I have no need to fear. I have no enemies.”

  “No enemies?”

  “I had enemies, but I have buried my enemies upon many hills. A man needs enemies to keep him wary and strong, but I would not have Benactiny for an enemy. I have spoken to all the white men of what a great warrior he is, but what a fine chieftain also. It is one thing to be fierce in battle, but it is important, also, to be wise in council.”

  Benactiny swung his pony. “We will ride on.”

  “Wait!” Conagher lifted a hand. “My friend Benactiny rides far. I would not have him ride without tobacco.”

  With his left hand Conagher delved into his saddlebag and came up with several sacks of Bull Durham. One he gave to Benactiny, and half a dozen others to the other warriors. “Divide them,” he said, “and when you smoke, remember Conagher, your friend.”

  Deliberately then, he turned his back and stepped up to the door. It opened before him and he stepped in, reaching up with his left hand to take the saddlebags from his left shoulder. Then he went to a loop hole to peer out. The Apaches were riding away.

  “They would have attacked us,” Evie said.

  “I think so.”

  “What did you say to them?”

  He shrugged. “They’re reasonable enough. I’ve fought Indians. I’ve fought the Sioux, the Cheyennes, the Apaches, the Comanches, and the Kiowas, but I’ve shared meat with them, swapped horses with them, and found them reasonable men. They respect courage. You can’t yield to an Indian. He will kill you out of contempt as much as for any other reason, but he respects courage, and he respects a good argument.”

  “He knew you.”

  “Let’s say he recognized me. I ain’t much, Mrs. Teale, but I’m too dumb to know when I’m whipped. He knew I’d fight just as I knew he would. We recognized that much in each other.”

  “Will you stay for supper? We were just gathering some greens.”

  “Well, I’ll stay if you’ll let me contribute. I’ve just come from the Plaza, a few days back, and I’ve got some bacon, a package of raisins, and a couple of pounds of prunes you might use. And I’ve got coffee.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Conagher. I will accept them. As a matter of fact, we are just out of coffee.”

  “Fry up some of that bacon,” he suggested. “I’ll go see to my horse.”

  She had said they were out of coffee, but Conagher had a hunch they were out of a lot of other things as well. All of them looked gaunt…they might not have missed meals, but the meals they’d had must have been pretty skimpy. How Evie Teale kept going without a man he could not guess.

  He rubbed his horse down, forked some hay into the corner of the corral, then carried his saddle under the shed. He took his rifle, rope, and blanket roll to the cabin.

  There was a lot of work around here that needed a man to do. The boy wasn’t up to it yet. Conagher stopped up a leak in the water trough, and fixed a place on the roof where the wind had worried a corner loose, and when it was close to sundown he got his rifle.

  “I’ll be an hour,” he said. “If I haven’t got a deer by then it’ll be no use waiting longer. They’ve not been hunted, and they should be feeding down toward water about now.”

  He remembered the country from before. A western man habitually noted water holes and animal sign as he traveled through the country, and Conagher had crossed that ridge before. He got up on it, about thirty yards from the water hole with the wind in his face, and he lay down in the brush and waited.

  Sure enough, scarcely half an hour had passed before he saw a deer, then two more. He chose a big buck, settled down with his aim on a neck shot. At that range he could not miss. He killed the buck, skinned it, and then loaded the meat in the hide and carried it back to the cabin.

  He could smell the coffee, and the bacon was frying.

  When he brought the meat into the cabin the first thing he noticed was Laban’s slicked-down hair. Ruthie had tidied herself up, and so had Evie Teale. The table had a red and white checkered cloth on it, and it was all set and proper. Suddenly he was self-conscious.

  He was unshaven for days, and he had been sleeping out wherever he could find a place. He had not paid much attention to anything more than combing his hair and washing up a mite.

  “I’ll wash up,” he said. “Excuse me.”

  He stripped off his coat and shirt, rolled up his sleeves and washed, combed his hair by guess work in the piece of flawed mirror alongside the kitchen door, then shook out his shirt, put it on, and came back in.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, “it’s too dark to shave.”

  “That’s quite all right, Mr. Conagher. Please sit down.”

  After his own cooking, any food tasted good, but this was excellent. There were two slices of bread on the table and he was eating the second before he suddenly realized there was none for anyone else. He ate the piece in silence, cursing himself for being a fool.

  “You’ve got a nice place here,” he commented. “I see you have some calves.”

  She explained about the cattle. “Better let me brand them for you, Mrs. Teale. There will be other herds coming through, and unbranded cattle surely have a way of coming up missing.”

  “I’d be pleased, Mr. Conagher.”

  When he got up to walk outside after supper, Evie glanced around at him. He was certainly a fine figure of a man when you really looked at him. He was tall, with wide shoulders, and he had an easy way of moving that was more like a woodsman than a rider. And he seemed sure of himself without in any way appearing bold.

  There had always been the shadow of worry under Jacob’s seeming assurance, and she was sure that Jacob, deep inside, had never really believed in himself. He was prepared for failure despite the fact that he was so stern, so hard-working, and so demanding of dignity.

  She knew next to nothing about Conn Conagher, only that he was reported to be a top hand who asked no favors of anyone, a grim, hard man…a man to leave alone, as McCloud had said.

  She knew he had ridden into the back country and brought back cattle that belonged to the ranch he worked for, cattle that he must have taken back from some pretty dangerous men. Yet he seemed strangely shy, and gentle. Though that had been true of several men she had met who were reputed to be dangerous.

  She made her bed upstairs with the children, and Conagher slept on the floor.

  When she awoke in the morning and saw that he was gone, she was suddenly frightened. It had been so reassuring to have him here, and she realized that for the first time in months she had slept soundly.

  She was dressing when she heard the sound of a gun, and then another. She managed to get down the ladder and get water on for coffee before he came.

  “Shot a couple of turkeys,” he said. “They’re in good shape.”

  All that day Conagher worked around the place, and he kept thinking of the girl who wrote the notes tied to the tumbleweeds. If he was going to find
her he knew it was time he started on, but he stayed to brand the calves, he helped Laban with some heavy logs well back on the ridge, and he killed another deer.

  “You can jerk the meat,” he said, and showed her how to cut it into thin strips for drying.

  Twice he rode out, studying the country around. Jacob Teale had picked a poor place to settle, and would have failed here as he had elsewhere. There wasn’t enough grass in the nearby meadows to cut for hay, and the grazing was not as good as on the old Ladder Five range.

  One evening Evie was coming in from milking and he was sitting on the stoop watching the sun set on the hills. “It is very beautiful, Mr. Conagher,” she said. “I like to watch the wind on the grass.”

  He started to answer that, and then stopped. Kris Mahler was riding into the yard.

  Chapter 16

  *

  MAHLER PULLED UP when he saw Conagher, and the expression on his face was not one of pleasure.

  “I figured you’d pulled your freight,” he said. “I heard you quit the Old Man.” His horse side-stepped a little, and when he straightened him out again he went on, “A lot of good it did you, riskin’ your neck for him. There’s a couple of good men gone because of it.”

  “Not because of what I did,” Conagher replied; “because of what they tried to do. As for what good it did me, I was just doing my job, the way I’ll always do it.”

  “You think I didn’t do mine?”

  “You can answer that question best yourself. You ran out on the Old Man when he needed you. You joined up with his enemies.”

  “That’s a damn lie!”

  “There was a time when I’d have reached for a gun if a man said that to me,” Conagher said, “but you know whether I’m lyin’ or not, and I know it, so what you say doesn’t make a bit of difference.”

  Mahler stared at him, his expression cold and mean. “I never liked you, Conagher,” he said. “You’re not my kind of man.”

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  Mahler turned his horse sharply and rode away. Conagher watched him go, then turned to Evie Teale. “I am sorry for that, Mrs. Teale. I believe he came to see you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  After a moment she said, “I was surprised, Mr. Conagher. They told me you were a quarrelsome man, yet you avoided trouble.”

  “I don’t want to fight him. He’s a top hand when he works, a good man who is on the verge of being something else. But you were present,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to fight with a lady present.”

  “Thank you.”

  They walked to the cabin together, and he held the door for her. After she went in he sat down on the stoop again.

  The last of the sun was gone, and the first of the stars had come. The night wind was bending the grass, and his eyes studied the hills. There was something restful in this, sitting here in the evening, the day’s work done, the sounds of supper being prepared inside, the low murmur of voices. It was something he’d missed…how long since he had lived in a house with a woman in it?

  “Not since I left home,” he said to himself, “not since I left my aunt and uncle when I was fourteen.”

  Grading camps, cow camps, mining camps…the women you found there weren’t his kind. He was a lonely man who did not make up to people easily. It came hard. When he was with women he never thought of anything to say. It seemed as if all he knew was stock, range conditions, and the stories of some fights, and these didn’t add much to his conversation.

  He felt that he should be saddling up and riding on—it was no good staying here. Yet he did not move. He watched the stars come out, and thought of Mahler.

  The man had a burr under his saddle about something. About a lot of things, maybe. Why hadn’t he gone with Smoke? Why had he stayed behind?

  An idea came to Conagher, but he shied away from it. Kris Mahler had nothing against him…or shouldn’t have. Still, he was riding it rough tonight. Had he been trying to pick a fight? Or was he sore because he found Conagher here?

  Was he sweet on Evie Teale? When you came right down to it, she was a fine-looking woman. A nice shape to her, and pretty, too.

  Well, she was pretty. Maybe not to everybody’s taste, but she was to his. She was a handsome woman, he thought. And it took sand to stay on a place like this with two kids, and no money coming in. It took real old-fashioned grit.

  By rights he should saddle up in the morning and pull out. If he was ever going to track down the girl who wrote those notes he was going to have to do it before his money gave out, or before somebody else got there first.

  He told himself he would get going in the morning, but he did not feel very positive about it.

  The trouble was, he suddenly realized, that he was comfortable, and he could not remember how long ago it had been since he was comfortable.

  The door opened suddenly. “Mr. Conagher, supper is ready,” Evie said.

  All through supper he sat there wanting to say something and he couldn’t find the words. Finally he said, “I reckon I’d better drift. I can’t sponge off you forever.”

  “You’ve helped,” Laban said. “I can’t shoot straight enough to kill much game. We never had turkey before.”

  “Sometimes you can kill them with a club. I’ve seen it done.”

  Evie Teale stared at him, but when he looked up she glanced away quickly, blushing for some reason he could not imagine. “I know you must have much to do,” she said. “I…you have helped us.”

  She looked at him suddenly. “We were having a bad time, you know.”

  He took out some money—not that he had so much left after laying in the supplies he had bought. “Look, I’ll be coming back this way. Maybe you’d better take this so you’ll have something for me to eat when I come back.

  “I mean, I don’t want to pay you, but I want to feel free to come back.”

  “You don’t have to leave money,” Evie said. “You can come any time. We hope you will.” Then, not to seem too forward, she added, “We don’t have much company now that the stages do not stop here. It is very lonely.”

  “Yeah…sure, it must be.”

  He rode out in the morning. At the last he did not want to go and he waited, wanting her to ask him to stay, not knowing whether he dared say anything about it to her. Why had he been such a damn fool as to say he was leaving? He had no reason to leave, when it came right down to it. He was just going hunting tumbleweeds…what kind of a silly idea was that, anyway?

  Was he a kid to go dreaming about some fancy princess or something? Some beautiful girl who was held prisoner somewhere? What was he thinking of?

  All right, suppose those notes did say something to him? That was no reason to be a fool. He wasn’t a kid any more.

  If he had any brains he would turn right around and go back, but he kept riding on. He was riding east, and he wasn’t even looking at the tumbleweeds. Twice he passed places where they were piled along the brush-lined road, but he did not stop.

  What did a man say to a woman like that? Suppose now, just suppose he wanted to settle down…what would he say?

  When night came he had not answered the question, and it was time to make camp. He reined his horse off the road, crossed over a low ridge and into an arroyo. His horse shied suddenly and when he looked ahead he saw the skeleton of a man. It was too dark to make out clearly, and the coyotes had been at it, but there it lay, and nearby were the bones of a horse, much of the hide still clinging to it. And there was the saddle.

  He rode on a little farther, found a corner among the junipers and rocks, and settled down for the night.

  The gent back there…that was how he’d die, most likely, and who would give a damn? When you rode alone you died alone, and there was nobody to do right by your bones.

  “Well, mister,” he said aloud, “I’ll do right by you. Come daylight, I’ll go back there and dig you out a grave. That’s what I’ll do.”

  Sleep came only after a long time of watching
the stars. He saw the Big Dipper wheel around the sky, swore at his wakefulness, and finally fell to sleep. It was broad daylight when he awoke and the dun horse was nudging his toes.

  He got up, dressed, and built a small fire. He boiled some coffee and fried a piece of venison, and when he had finished eating he got up, wiped his knife off on the seat of his pants, and shoved it back in the scabbard. It wasn’t like Mrs. Teale’s grub, but it was all right—it would do.

  When he had saddled up he took his Winchester and walked back to the dead man.

  By daylight the story was plain enough. The horse’s leg was broken, snapped right off, and the position of the saddle and the crushed bones over the chest showed him all too clearly what had happened.

  Somebody, an Indian most likely, had taken his rifle and pistol, if he’d owned them.

  When Conagher had the grave dug he took hold of the skeleton and as he moved it he stirred some of the sand and revealed part of a coat still intact beneath the body. And partly under the edge of the coat and buried in the drift sand that had blown over it, were the dead man’s saddlebags.

  They were stiff and dry, the edges curled and turned kind of white, like the saddle itself. He pulled them apart when he couldn’t get the stiff leather strap to come loose, and a shower of gold coins fell on the ground.

  Startled, he stood for a moment looking down at them, then glanced around quickly.

  But there was nobody—he was all alone.

  He squatted on his heels and picked up the coins. He counted up to three hundred and twenty dollars, then shook out the saddlebags again. Five more gold eagles fell on the ground, and he picked them up.

  Four hundred and twenty dollars—more than a year’s wages, right there in his hands. And it was his—finders are keepers.

  He looked through the remains of the saddlebags, but if there had been any letters or papers they had fallen apart and been blown away. He completed the burial, made a marker of a couple of big stones, and then mounted up.

  Four hundred and twenty dollars! He was going into town and he was going to have himself a time. He was going to have one good blowout in his life, anyway—one at least.