Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) Read online

  “This is all very well,” he said, waving a hand at the surroundings, “but one needs to travel. You need perspective, some basis for comparison.”

  Seemed to me he was talking as much for Teresa as for me, and there’s nothing like a smooth-talking man to have a way with womenfolks. This here little one-horse town seemed mighty empty when he began talking of San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and suchlike. Seemed to me he’d been everywhere and seen everything and remembered most of it. Teresa was looking at him all starry-eyed, and that didn’t set well with me. I began to feel sore. I wished I had a story to match him, but when all you’ve done is play nursemaid to a few cows, it doesn’t leave you much to spend on conversation.

  “Me an’ pa traveled some,” I said defensively. “We covered most of the West, time to time. I been to Dodge, and down there in El Paso…that’s right acrosst the river from Mexico!”

  “So it is.” Yant was amused and showed it. Then he slipped it in so casually I almost spoke up. He said, “Your father ever talk of taking you home? To his home, I mean?”

  That was one thing pa never mentioned, but I felt no need to say so. “Time to time,” I lied. But I wondered why he had never mentioned it. Why had he not talked of home? Told me of his family, the place where he was born? The memories of his childhood?

  And then suddenly something did come back. I’d been very young then, a mere child, and there’d been a woman in the room. I remember she was slender and dark-haired with large, lovely black eyes…or almost black. I do not know where she came from, how she came to be there, or where “there” was, except that she was wearing a cloak and she had come in out of the night.

  Did I remember anything? Or was it all my imagination? “I’ve only a few minutes. I’m afraid…deathly afraid! He’s coming back, Charles, and you know how he is! I’m afraid! If he ever finds out that I’ve even talked to you, he’d kill me. I mean it. Literally.”

  “You mustn’t be here. Leave…get away while you can. I only wish I—”

  “There’s nothing you can do, Charles. There’s nothing anybody can do! And if you come back, that would be the end of everything. They believe you did it, Charles. They all believe it…except grandfather. I don’t believe he does.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it. We had trouble, I’ll admit that, but it was nothing, and I’m not a vengeful person.”

  Did I remember all that? Why had I remembered it at all, when I had forgotten so much? Maybe it was her beauty, her sudden arrival out of the night, and the intensity with which she spoke.

  How long had it been? Thirteen years? Closer to fourteen, I thought.

  It was the only time I remembered a woman coming to our rooms, wherever we lived…that is, the only time when pa was home.

  There was that other time, the time I never liked to remember, the time I never told pa about, when the witch-woman came.

  I’d been alone in the room, but that was years later, and I was eight years old. I remember that because it was my birthday and pa had promised me something special, a real treat for my birthday.

  I never got my treat, and that I remembered most of all because pa always did what he promised, except that time. That was the time he got sick, he almost died…and for months after that he was sick.

  Was it because of the witch-woman?

  Chapter 5

  *

  SETTIN’ THERE OVER breakfast he riled me. Talkin’ smooth was one thing, but he looked so elegant, always lookin’ like he’d stepped out of a bandbox, as they used to say. Made me look shabby.

  Well, I had me a little money, so I made up my mind right then I’d get fixed up. Finally, he got up and left, but he’d been talkin’ smooth and easy-like and it got to me, him making himself big in front of Teresa. So I said, “I’m tired this morning. Some damn fool was ridin’ his horse up an’ down last night, away after midnight. You’d think folks would have the sense to stay inside when it’s that cold.”

  It stopped him, and he turned his head to look at me just like a rattler does when he fixes to strike. There was no laughter in his eyes, nor no smoothness in his tongue. “Sometimes, they tell me, when you hear a rider in the night, it’s a sign of death.”

  “I never heard that,” Teresa said. “That’s a new one.”

  “I heard it,” I lied, “it’s somebody ridin’ a dark horse to his death.”

  He looked at me with those flat, cold eyes, and I looked right back, and then I grinned. I don’t know how I done it, but suddenly everything seemed funny. I’m like that. Solemn occasions seem to arouse the humor in me. It wasn’t that way with him, for when I grinned, he got up. I could see the temper in his eyes and knew right then his weakness was his impatience. He was a man who hated to wait, hated to be thwarted or put off, hated anybody that didn’t sidestep for him.

  “We’ll meet another time,” he said, and turned sharp around on his heel and went out, leaving the money to pay for his breakfast.

  “He doesn’t like me,” I said dryly.

  “He doesn’t like anybody,” Teresa commented.

  “He likes you,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Not really. And I’m afraid of him, really afraid.”

  After I finished my coffee, I went out. Being cold winter like it was, not many folks were moving about. We hadn’t had much snow, but it was surely cold. I went down to the general store and looked over what he had. It wasn’t much.

  I bought myself a couple of pairs of black Frisco jeans for rough work and a sheepskin coat. Then I bought some shirts, a pair of gray striped pants, and a black suit. They were hand-me-downs, of course, and would have the sharp creases that come from the shelf, but would no doubt lose them in time. I bought some socks, some underwear, and a few odds and ends, and then went to my room to bathe and change.

  When I opened my pack, I seen right away somebody had been through my gear. After living out of a pack for years, a man gets so he packs for easy handling, and somebody had been through my things, then had neatly repacked them, but not as I’d had them.

  Now who would do—It was him! It had to be him…but why? What was there about me that would interest him that much? What was there to bring him to this country at all?

  Suppose…just suppose he tied into all this mystery about pa and his past? Suppose we were related? Why would what we did matter to him?

  A man like him, he would be apt to do something only for money or hate. This might be one or the other, and it might be both.

  But what would he be looking for? Fortunately, what money I had was on me, but I didn’t think it would be money. I’d never had anything else worth taking, and no personal papers of no kind, and as for pa, he never carried his papers—

  I just sort of backed up and set down. Pa’s papers—those two big brown envelopes he had for so long…where were they? And what were they?

  Pa an’ me, we’d knocked about the country a good bit, hunting work here and there, and pa had always carried those two brown envelopes in a sort of buckskin case he had with a belt run through it. Yet it had not been on him when he was killed, and in fact, I hadn’t seen it for some time.

  Kidlike, I was mostly concerned with my own affairs, and somewhere along the line pa had left those envelopes with somebody or hid them somewhere, and I’d no idea where they were.

  There was a lot I had never known and had never thought to ask about that was suddenly important to me. If there were any answers, they would be in our past. Somewhere down the drifting path we had taken over the years, pa had left a clue.

  Those papers now, in those brown envelopes in the leather case…pa hadn’t lost them. He’d just plain left them somewhere, and if he left them he left them a-purpose, someplace where they would be safe until needed. He had carried those guns, but he was never a quarrelsome man, although I’d seen him shoot and knew he feared no man. Yet death finally caught up with him.

  Murder…and if I was not careful, I would be next.

  Somehow I never doubted
that. It was just the way things shaped. I could see it coming, and had I been out on the trail in the snow, I would now be dead. Or if I hadn’t locked my door. What I should do was run…yet I knew I’d never get away. This man would be a bloodhound on a trail. Hadn’t he found pa and me after all those years?

  First, I’d better not let him think I was smart…if I was. He had to believe it wasn’t going to be all that hard to win or he would suddenly try much harder, and to kill a man in our day wasn’t all that hard. He could start a quarrel, then shoot me down…if he was fast enough.

  That, of course, was the question. I’d never had a gunfight, nor wanted one. No man in his right mind does. I heard tell of a kid or two running around trying to get a reputation, but it was a rare thing, and only some half-baked youngster whose cards were badly mixed would be that crazy. I knew I was fast, and pa had taught me to shoot.

  Running went against the grain, even if I could get away. On the other hand, I might be better out in the hills than he was, and it might make all the difference. Yet with him around and knowing what it was about, I’d be better off to try to blunder into some hint of why he was here, and why it was important that pa be dead.

  He either hated pa something fierce or there was money involved. Or maybe some family feud.

  Just thinking about it would help me none at all, and if I was going to survive, I was going to have to do some thinking.

  When I got all dressed, I looked at myself in the mirror and looked just what I was, a country boy all dressed up to go to town. I didn’t look right to myself, and wouldn’t to those folks out there, including Teresa. I had nothing of that casual elegance Felix Yant had. He was the kind of a man who would have looked well-dressed in his long johns. He had manner and style. Well, pa had it, too. Why not me?

  I taken off that new suit and hung it up. I just put on a pair of Frisco jeans, a gray flannel shirt, a black handkerchief at my neck, and my new sheepskin coat. But I did not forget my guns. Nor my knife…which I’d carried all my life. Never can tell when you might come on somebody needs skinning.

  Next I taken that coat off again and set down at the bureau, which would do for a table. On the edge of an old newspaper I started to write down the towns we’d been in. I never realized there was so many.

  When I got to counting towns, I found that in the past four years we’d stopped or worked in twenty-two different places. Part of it was that pa had an itchy foot or some other reason for moving on, and the rest of it was that work was scarce and few jobs lasted long.

  For two months pa worked for the stage line. He was an agent and bookkeeper in Eureka, Nevada. I’d had a job herding cows right near town, a herd that had been driven in to supply beef to the miners. We went over to Pioche from there, and it was a rough town, a boom mining town with a man named Morgan Courtney walking the streets, a hard, irritable man always on edge for trouble. Pa took the place of a teller in a bank there, for the regular man had to go to a funeral in Salt Lake or somewheres. I taken a job washing dishes in a restaurant.

  One way and another we moved across the country, from Placerville in California to Kansas City in Missouri, with stops at Fort Worth, Fort Griffin, Santa Fe, and Silver City, and then back to Dodge and up to Yankton.

  Where had I last seen those brown envelopes? He’d had them in Eureka, because he kept them in the company safe whilst there. I recall stopping for them before we rode out. And he’d had them when he was teller, that time. I had seen him roll the buckskin wallet up in his bedroll when we left Dodge, and I thought I recalled pa having them in Kit Carson.

  Georgetown! Try as I might, I could not remember them after we stopped at the Hotel de Paris in Georgetown. Pa was friendly with the owner, a Frenchman, and they often talked French together. I recall pa telling me Louis Dupuy was a man he could trust. “He’s a hard, opinionated man, but nobody can push him, buy him, or sway him. I’d trust him with my life.”

  So there it was…maybe.

  Which didn’t help me one bit, for that was clear across the country from where I was. There were a lot of passes choked with snow between here and yonder, and I had a bloodhound on my tail.

  About then I began to get an idea. It was a crazy sort of thought that came into my mind and stayed there. Part of it was because I thought I might be better off in the wild country than he would be. Nobody tried to cross those mountains in the winter. Up high there, the passes were often packed with twenty to thirty feet of snow, and it was cold, really cold.

  But west and south of here was some desert like you’ve never seen, and it come to me that maybe I should head off west right into the midst of that desert. I’d pick a stretch where I knew the water holes and I’d lose him out there. It sounded simple, but I wasn’t at all sure. Felix Yant was not a simple man.

  Getting into my coat, I went off down to the restaurant again. Seemed like the only place I was going these days, but where could a body go, it being so cold and all?

  Teresa looked at me and smiled. “You look very nice, Kearney,” she said. I felt like I was blushing, and maybe I was.

  “We’ve got some hot soup,” she suggested. “Lots of beef and vegetables.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, and I meant it, but at the same time an idea hit me. What I should do was take out of here at mid-day or later. A traveling man starts early to get the light for traveling, but if I were to take out suddenly, I might just get a lead on Yant before he knew I was gone.

  Chances were I wouldn’t, but it was a thought. I’d been stopping by the livery barn to see if my horse was all right, and I’d continue to do that, stopping by in the afternoon so there’d be a pattern.

  The soup was good. Only trouble was, in the midst of it I looked up and I seen Tobin Wacker and Dick riding into town. There was no sign of Judge Blazer or the others.

  I started to get up, then sat back down. That was mighty good soup, and it might be awhile before I had more. My eyes followed Wacker and Dick as they rode up to the saloon and got stiffly down. They looked to be wore out. Even Wacker, big and burly as he was, staggered a mite when he stood. Might be because they’d been in the saddle for some time.

  They went into the saloon, and I finished my soup. It was time I did some thinking. Had they come down here hunting me or were they just getting out of the mountains? It looked to me like they’d had a rough, rough time.

  Teresa came in and sat down across the table from me. “You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you?”

  “You could say that,” I agreed, “but it’s none of my seeking.”

  “Is it him? Mr. Yant, I mean?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what he wants or where he comes from, but he worries me.”

  Suddenly it all began to come out. Maybe I was lonely, maybe I just needed to get it all straight in my mind. Anyway, I told her about me an’ pa, our drifting and the like, and I told her about pa’s big winning and what followed after. I didn’t know what was to happen, and maybe I just wanted something to be on record, with somebody, and she was a good listener. Anyway, what man doesn’t like having all the attention of a pretty girl?

  The more I talked, the more it began to shape up like this Felix Yant was kin to me. At least, I had something he wanted, or didn’t want, to find.

  “You scared of him?” She looked at me with those blue eyes, and I looked into myself for the answer. Was I scared of him?

  “No,” I said, after a bit. “I ain’t…I’m not scared of him, but he worries me, because I don’t know what he’s after. You know and I know that nobody but a crazy man would be out here inspecting mining properties with all this snow on the ground. You can’t see the formations, how the land lays, or anything. I don’t know why he’s here, but it ain’t that.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I got to do some detective work,” I said, and I’ll not deny using that word made me kind of swell up a little. “I’ve got to go back along the country a
ways and maybe find out where pa came from and where Yant comes from.”

  “You be careful,” Teresa warned.

  “You can do something for me,” I said, “if you’re of a mind to.”

  “What is it?”

  “Those two men I spoke of? The ones who just came into town? If they should come in here, try to hear what they say if you can do it without seeming to. I’d like to have an idea what they have on their minds.”

  “I’ll do it.” She got up. “I’ll get you some hot coffee.”

  From where I sat, I could see up and down the street while sitting back from the window. Those two had gone into the saloon and they were having a few. Tobin Wacker was a right quarrelsome man when drinking. I knew nothing about Dick except the company he kept and the fact he’d been one of those who attacked me on the mountain.

  What had become of Judge Blazer? There was just no way he was going to get back to where he came from after that snow, and he wasn’t the kind of a man to stay in any cold mountain cabin when he could get off the mountain. It began to look to me like Judge Blazer was dead.

  They came out on the street and they looked right over at the restaurant. They looked up and down the street and then they started over. Dick, who was about average size for our time, was maybe five foot eight. I guess he’d weigh maybe one fifty. Tobin Wacker was something else. He was maybe six inches taller than my five foot nine, and he was a good seventy pounds heavier than my one sixty. If I was going to tangle with them, it wouldn’t be for fun. I’d have to take Dick out with one punch so’s I could devote my time to Wacker.

  Just then Teresa came in with my coffee. She seen my expression and she stopped. “What is it? What’s the matter, Kearney?”

  “It’s them. They’re comin’ across the street. If there’s to be a fight, I’ll try to get them outside so’s we won’t tear things up.”

  “You’ll do what you have to, Kearney,” she said coolly. “My pa was a fighting man, and I’ve heard him say it a thousand times, ‘Land the first punch. The first punch wins nine out of ten fights.’ You land the first punch, Kearney, and leave the cleaning up to me. I’ve mopped up blood before this.”