Chapter II

Lying Bill Yarbo, the next day, told one of the most intriguing lies of his Munchausenesque career, in that it was one which later seemed to be borne out in fact. All this was much to Lying Bill Yarbo’s surprise.

Sam Pepper, that queer combination of curiosity and cowardice, speaking about the matter in a way he had, since nothing that happened was out of the circle of his interest and commentary, made an observation which fitted the case as a cowboy’s new boots fit his Chinese feet. Sam Pepper said:

“Shucks, it’s ag’in natur’ that any man, lyin’ steady with every breath he draws for twenty year, won’t make a miscue and blunder into the outside edges of the truth once in a while. It’s like as if you took a gun and blazed away a thousand times, and even if you tried not to hit it you’d spot the bull’s-eye sooner-later. Accidents do happen.”

Lying Bill Yarbo rode into Sundown about noon and was seen--by Sam Pepper, of course--to rock somewhat unsteadily on his heels, then make a bee line to Doc Jones’ Drug Store. Sam Pepper sniffed the air like a hunting dog on a hot scent, and made his own bee line. It wasn’t like Lying Bill Yarbo to be drunk this time of day, and what did he want at the drug store anyhow?

Inside, Lying Bill was getting patched up, painted with iodine until he looked like an Apache on the war trail, hung together with strips of bandage and doused with Wizard Oil, so that face and hands were all criss-crossed, doused with forty-rod whisky that soothed what ailed him and lubricated the floodgates of his speech.

“I was riding up in the hills a piece,” said Lying Bill Yarbo. “I cut acrost Nigger Crick and went up over the saddle and down into Desolation Valley, and I seen three fellers down in there that I knowed. One of ’em was that very same Jim Torrance the feller in town was asking about yestiddy, and another was a half-breed I used to see around Tucumcari, and one was another feller; and so I rode down to pass the time o’ day, and I seen three more fellers that was sorta hiding in the brush. Quick as a flash I made out what they was up to, ’cause they was getting set to murder another feller. Then them fellers made out that I’d seen what was going on, and they piled onto me. The whole six of ’em, being it was six that I counted, and there mought of been more. And we fit.”

Sam Pepper giggled.

“Most likely they kilt pore old Bill Yarbo, bein’ so many ag’in him,” he offered humorously.

Lying Bill Yarbo glared him down.

“We fit, like I said,” he said ponderously. “Me, I grabbed one man and slung him ag’in the crowd, knockin’ ’em all galley-west. And they begun shootin’ and so did I, and I reckon I kilt some on ’em, and the rest got enough and run for it. I was that mad by then I’d of kilt ’em all, only I was sort of shaky and unsteady from fighting so many, all the same time, and so the living ones escaped.”

“Most likely,” Sam Pepper observed out of the corner of his mouth to the druggist’s boy, “he fell off’n his horse and rolled down a ten-foot drop of cliff somewheres, and most likely he wasn’t inside ten mile of Desolation Valley, and most likely--”

That was as far as Sam Pepper got with his surmisings, for Lying Bill Yarbo had ears like a lynx and heard every word and doubled his fists and sort of leaned forward. Sam Pepper skipped to the door and stuck there, too interested to permit of full flight, too much afraid of Lying Bill Yarbo to draw closer.

But the tale was told, and, though Lying Bill Yarbo elaborated it and put in some fancy stitches, nothing of any great import was added. It was, of course, a lie made out of whole cloth. The truth of the matter had been expressed unknowingly by Sam Pepper. Lying Bill Yarbo hadn’t been within miles of Desolation Valley that day, and he had gotten a bad spill when the young, half-broke horse he was riding shied at a rock rolling down into a bit of mountain trail. The rider, his wandering thoughts far afield, had come mighty close to going over a hundred-foot fall of granite rock instead of a mere ten, and was lucky to be alive, with no bones broken.

But the oddest part of the whole thing was to follow. Sam Pepper was right and knew it in his bones; just the same he couldn’t sit still until he visited Desolation Valley. It was only a dozen miles or so to the northwest of Sundown, and within an hour of hearing the story he rode out of town, heading eastward to fool ’em, then circling and turning toward Desolation. And he came dangerously close to being the second man to fall off his horse that day, when he found what he hadn’t the least expectation of finding.

Already, high in the blue air, the turkey buzzards were spiraling. Sam Pepper won the race from them. He found a man lying dead, arms outflung, wild black hair hanging straight against bloodless temples, a neat blue hole in his forehead.

“Why, cripes! I know this feller!” gasped Sam. “I seen him raising merry hell around Sundown only a coupla days ago. He was looking for Steve Bordereau, and Steve was out of town right then, and he shot his mouth off to say some day him or Steve was going to kill each other. And I’ll bet a man--”

Lying Bill Yarbo, when the news was brought to him, turned as red as a beet; even that bald and shiny pate of his, usually a pale pink, became a rich crimson. He swallowed a time or two; his Adam’s apple went pumping up and down and he seemed to find difficulty in breathing. But he was not Lying Bill Yarbo for nothing. He began to laugh.

“That’s only one of ’em I kilt,” he proclaimed. “I dug a hole and buried the rest of ’em. Must of overlooked that feller.”

With much laughter, with men slapping their own legs or the other fellows’ backs and vowing that Bill Yarbo was the very king of all good liars, Lying Bill Yarbo himself rode out of town hurriedly and was not seen for a week.

“Ashamed, that’s what he is,” proclaimed Sam Pepper gleefully. “He’s gone to hide his old bald head. Most likely he’s that shamed that he’ll never come back, which would be a good thing for one and all!”

And then--as though Sam Pepper didn’t already have enough on his mind to put a man into what was locally known as a state or a dither--all he had to do was climb the high pine hill pretty nearly centering his ranch, and from it look over to the old Hammond place, all of a sudden and without his knowledge taken over by a stranger who said that he wanted to see Jim Torrance--and who, if you asked him, said that he _was_ Jim Torrance!

“It’s beyant me,” muttered Sam Pepper when he had climbed the hill and had settled himself on a flat rock whence he could see far and wide. He saw the stranger going about the small house and barn and bunk house, pottering like a man at home; he saw the boy Skeeter and the dozen head of horses, likely looking stock, and the pack mules. “Must of bought the place,” he speculated. “Wonder how much he paid? Wonder what he’s up to? Wonder who the kid is? Wouldn’t be his boy; might be a kid brother. Wonder what makes his face look like it does, like he was athinking black and mysterious thoughts! I got a notion to go over--” His spare shoulders twitched and he made a wry face, squinching up his sharp-pointed nose. “If he is hiding some evil doings, and I found out--and he kotched me--he’d commit murder as quick as I’d spit terbaccy juice down a knot hole.”

Meantime the stranger, all unaware of the fact that he was being spied on whenever Sam Pepper had the leisure--and Sam always had plenty of leisure when there was something to be nosed out, and nearly always there was something afoot that invited his investigation--went about his work on the old Hammond ranch toward making it again what it had been a long time before, a tidy place to live on. First of all he and the boy mended fences; then they restored the old corral down by the barn, and after that they gave their attention to the barn itself. Those chores done, they did things to the old house. It was an ancient adobe with a plank shed addition like some noxious excretion that needed amputation. They tore the shed down and piled the lumber behind the house against some future use, as firewood perhaps. Then they carted out a lot of refuse and burned it; they cleaned out the well and installed a pair of new buckets on a new rope. Hour by hour the place brightened.

Jim Torrance’s premises were at last invaded by Sam Pepper, who could no longer resist making an exploratory expedition. He came over ostensibly to be neighborly but with eyes and ears taking in everything. It happened that at the moment a red hawk lighted on a pine top within what Sam Pepper would have described as rifle distance. Jim Torrance snapped a gun up from his dragging belt and set a bullet free--just like brushing a gnat away--no more premeditation, no more precision, you would have said; just an involuntary gesture. Yet it remained that the red hawk came straight down, a dead fluff of feathers.

“Don’t like ’em,” said Jim Torrance gently, and holstered his gun. He turned and looked Sam Pepper in the eye exactly as he had done that day in Sundown. “I’ve got doves around here that I do sort of like. The hawks bother ’em. Me, I’ve got no use for any sort of birds that go sticking their beaks into quiet folks’ affairs.”

And he kept on looking at Sam Pepper exactly as he had done in Sundown.

Sam Pepper went home.

As for Jim Torrance, he smiled, if you could call it a smile, and went into the house. He shed his work clothes and dug some town clothes out of a canvas roll. He shook them out, brushed them, used a hot stove lid as an iron and pressed them. He called Skeeter in and said: “Kid, at last I’ll let you go on your way. Here’s what’s coming to you, with enough on top of it to buy you board and lodging for a few days. Adios and luck.”

It was just one week from the day he had arrived in Sundown, just a week plus a few hours from the time he had overheard Steve Bordereau saying to Murdo, “I’ll have her upstairs at midnight a week from now.”

Jim Torrance rode into Sundown that night about ten o’clock. It was a Saturday night. That meant that the small town would be swollen like a tumor with that virulence which a horde of drinking, gambling, here-we-go, devil-may-care hell-rousers had the knack of injecting into an evening when they were at large. With them, cowboys and ranchers and dry-gulchers and mule skinners and desert rats, up from the Big Sandy, and the rest of the denizens of the ridges between lowlands and highlands; the thing to do of a Saturday night was come to town.

They came to town.

When at ten o’clock Jim Torrance looked in at the Stag Horn Saloon it was upon no such quiet picture as he had mentally photographed that still afternoon of his first arrival. Now the place was jammed; the air was blue with cigarette and cigar smoke; a big, new magical-looking wheel turned out noisy music if you dropped a quarter into it, and quarters dropped like rain while voices shouted other voices down; and along the bar, upon which three busy barkeeps slammed down the drinks and raked in the silver, there was no space for a new invader unless he scrimmaged for it.

Jim Torrance, shaven and with his hair freshly combed, wearing a brand-new bandana about his throat, walked through the long room, looking things over. He kept thinking: “He’ll have her here at midnight. That’s two hours yet. Upstairs.”

So he had his conventional drink and loafed through the place looking for its upstairs. He found a staircase, masked, until one looked sharply for it or knew where it was, by a pair of doors with veilings over them. As you came in from the street, all you had to do was turn right, instead of left where the barroom was, buck the doors, go upstairs and find the room where the wheel spun, where the faro layout invited, where chuck-a-luck and the rest of the popular games spun along wide open.

“I’ll poke along upstairs at twelve o’clock,” said Jim Torrance to himself.

A quirk of bitter humor molded his lips into a half smile that was the next thing to a sneer, for he thought: “I am like Sam Pepper, getting the disease known as elongated proboscis. What business is it of mine?” Just the same he was quietly determined to stick his long nose into the Bordereau-Sally Dawn affair.

Shortly before midnight he found his way upstairs. On the upper landing, standing before closed doors, was a thick-bodied, beefy looking man who challenged him with a long, probing look.

“Looking for somebody?” he asked.

“I want a run for my money,” said Torrance. “I can get it up here, can’t I?”

The doorkeeper didn’t ask any more questions. The stranger didn’t look like a tin-horn. Anyhow, ten minutes would show whether he was a cheap skate or the real goods. He said: “Go ahead, Stranger. Right through them doors. You’ll find your game.”

Torrance entered a big room, bigger than the barroom downstairs, that would have surprised him had it not been that the place was so widely known that he and thousands of others had heard of it from far off. It was the particular room to give Bordereau and the Stag Horn their dubious reputations. Elegance, nothing less, was the keynote here. On top of elegance you had abundance. Whiskies and brandies were of the best that the Southwest knew, and the Southwest knew its liquor. There was champagne that didn’t sicken you; and the whiskies and brandies and wines flowed as from a spigot that aped the purse of Fortunatus. What was more to the point, you didn’t have to pay for what your throat yearned for. There was a sort of politeness in the room; your host was M. Bordereau, and his one desire appeared to be to go to any extreme to make you feel at home, to make you feel cordially received, to get you cordially warmed--and put you in the mood to shoot your wad at one of his gaming tables.

Therefore the beefy man at the doors. It was his job to gauge all comers by the dollars-and-cents measure. You’d get anything liquid in the house that you wanted, free, not a cent for it; but you’d leave, at quitting time, nothing less than a hundred dollars. Maybe a thousand or ten times that. Steve Bordereau was wearing diamonds.

There were already some forty or fifty people in the room, men for the most part, though there were a few women, the dazzling, hit-you-in-the-eye, effulgent type, those adventuresses that the West drew at that time from all the world.

And there was Florinda.

Steve Bordereau himself, in his long-tailed coat and trousers with stripes down them and patent leather shoes, was very much in evidence. He knew everyone by his first name and was a genial host and friend. He was as smooth as an eel in oil, yet remained as hard as lava rock. Before them all he was a courtly gentleman with Florinda on his arm; not ten minutes before he had grabbed her by the hair and slapped her face and told her, as though she needed telling, what she was. But before his public he bragged about her.

This part of the establishment had been a gradual, natural growth. At first there had been just a poker room set aside for those who, when they wanted poker, wanted high stakes. There were several of them--old Tom Clark, the mine owner; Gaston Dubordieu, the gambler; three younger men, Juan Garcia, Walter Voorhees and Dick Hathaway, sons of three of the biggest cattle kings within a score of miles in any direction--and twenty miles was quite a step when you did it on horseback. These and their ilk at times brought others, and Steve Bordereau saw wisdom in accommodating them. So he had built on the second story, bricks laid on top of honest adobe, with not only a front but also a back stairway. He added a roulette wheel and a faro layout and dice and card games, and he made his regulations to shut out the nickel-shooters and admit only the dead-game sports.

Further, of late he had added two other luxuries--a deep Turkey-red carpet and a young lady in evening dress.

“She and the carpet add a nice homey touch,” he said sentimentally.

The young lady--Florinda--greeted the boys smilingly and chatted with them; she encouraged them in extravagant notions and sat briefly with them at their tables, dropping in and fluttering away like a butterfly. She lifted her long-lashed eyes and widened them in horror at pikers’ bets; she clapped her hands when some young fool took the bit in his teeth and began to plunge.

“And she’s a real lady,” Steve Bordereau boasted of her. “One of the fine old Spanish family of Valdez y Verdugo. The Señorita Florinda de Valdez y Verdugo, that’s who she is! The real goods, no gutter-snipe. Not from Mexico--from Spain. You see, she just happened to be visiting in Mexico City when all her folks got slaughtered in that Jerez revolution. The family fortune was swept away, nothing left but the Verdugo jewels that she’s wearing tonight.” Without stint, he had spent sixty dollars for the double handful of glass diamonds and rubies and emeralds.

To Florinda, not ten minutes ago, he had said in one of the private rooms: “You damn little fool, watch out for the booze tonight. Get tight just once more and I’ll kick you clean from here to the border dive where I picked you up, and where that _novio_ of yours will pop a knife into you like sticking a pig.”

As Jim Torrance wandered through the long room, looking at the games that were already running, glancing at faces to see whether any were familiar, and then stood up at the bar, he saw Florinda for the first time. She was not six feet away and chanced to turn at that moment and their eyes met.

“You!” she exclaimed.

He stared coldly at her. And Steve Bordereau noted her exclamation and Torrance’s impassive, masklike face.

Bordereau came forward and explained to Torrance that up here a man did not have to pay for his drinks. It was all on the house.

“Drink hearty,” he said. “Have a good time, Stranger.”

Jim Torrance set a ten dollar gold coin spinning.

“I pay for my drinks, unless I’m drinking with a friend, or go thirsty,” he replied.

Bordereau shrugged. To the man behind the bar he said: “This gentleman is new here, Charlie. Let him have things his way.”

“Sure,” said Charlie, and to Torrance, “What’s your relish, Stranger?”

Torrance had his drink, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Bordereau signal the girl aside. He couldn’t overhear their words but thought that he could come pretty close to guessing their burden. Bordereau would be saying: “Say, you know that man! Who is he?” She would have to confess that she didn’t quite know.

But Florinda was saying more than that. A shiver twitched at her bare shoulders as though she were cold. She said rapidly:

“I don’t know who he is, but I am afraid of him! There is something terrible about him. Did you see how he looked at me?”

“You do know him,” snapped Bordereau.

“I saw him once, only once; that’s all. Down in Nacional where I was dancing at the place of One Eye Perez where you found me. The way he looked at me just now, he looked at a man like that that night--and before the sun came up that man was dead. That is all I know. I swear it!”

“I wonder!” He looked at her suspiciously.

Jim Torrance amused himself for a while at one of the tables; faro was his game when it wasn’t poker, but tonight his eye was less for the card the dealer slid from its rack than for the several doors opening into the long room. It was full midnight now, and the sullen little beauty with the smoky eyes, Sally Dawn, was nowhere in evidence. He was glad, because he wanted to have Steve Bordereau fail to make good his boast, yet it remained that he was disappointed, too.

Then he saw Bordereau look at his heavy gold watch and hurry out through a door at the far end of the room; that way was the head of the back staircase, and also, as Torrance later discovered, a series of small private rooms--a dressing room, an office, small rooms for poker. He thought--because Bordereau had looked at his watch: “He’s going to get her now. He looks smug and somehow like he’d raked in a jack pot.”

He was right. Almost immediately Steve Bordereau returned, and Sally Dawn came with him. The gambler threw the door wide with a gesture; he extended a dramatic arm in another wide gesture, ushering her in. Then a hush fell upon the room as she stood framed in the doorway.