Chapter IV

The following day had Sam Pepper running around in circles. Pop Smith, down at the General Store, said, “Sam reminds me of a dog chasin’ his own tail.” Hank Webber, the stage driver, said, “He’ll have a fit afore the day’s over.” Lying Bill Yarbo remarked, “He’s goin’ to blow up an’ bust; an’ me, I don’t want to be anywheres near when _that_ happens.” He put thumb and finger to his nose.

But under the circumstances there was no one--excepting Lying Bill Yarbo of course--who really censured the inquisitive little man for his state of excitement. Things had happened, the sort of things which were bound to interfere with Sam Pepper’s proper attention to his own victuals and drink and everyday affairs.

Sam Pepper fairly danced up and down.

“It all begun with Sally Dawn Cannon being at Bordereau’s gambling room! Her! What do you s’pose made her go to a place like that? All dressed up, they say, like a queen, in white silk with diamonds and ever’thing. Why wasn’t I there? And then look what happens. She kills Steve Bordereau! Kills him! Her! What about that? _Why?_ What made her? And then where’d she go? Talk about mysteries! Just vanished--poof! Like that. And that ain’t half of it!”

No, that wasn’t half of it. Sam Pepper was all over town, out of town, back to town, everywhere; he must have asked ten thousand questions that day. He said over and over:

“Sally Dawn’s mother died last night, while all the rest of hell was popping, and I want to know why. And most of all, tell me this: Can a dead woman walk? The old woman’s dead body’s vanished, too, ain’t it? How in hell? Where? _Why?_ A woman dies and her body vanishes, and all you lunkheads do is squat and let things happen and don’t even try to find out about ’em!”

So tremendously did all these occurrences obsess him that for the moment he lost all interest in Jim Torrance, and so failed of coming in contact with the one person who, if by any chance he had cared to do so, could have set Sam Pepper right all along the line. For Jim Torrance was at home all day, pottering around his ranch and letting his thoughts travel almost as far afield as curious Sam’s.

Last night he had prevailed, at first by physical strength and then by the suasion of cool logic, upon a girl in the grip of such frenzy as came close to making her into a mad thing. She screamed at him until he shut off her screams with a hard hand; she fought, scratching and pummeling and biting. Until she wore herself out, she evinced a strength surprising in such slender feminine shapeliness. But in the end she melted, exhausted, in his arms, and he talked with her, and after a while she listened.

“It’s tough, but you’ve got to take it. Don’t you suppose other folks have had to take it, no matter how tough? Your mother, in her time, your own kids in their time, if you ever have any.”

“I won’t! I never will! Life is so ugly, like a big fiendish brute, like a gorilla. I hate it!”

“Life’s all right,” said Jim Torrance, sounding vastly indifferent. “It’s sort of like taking a trip through the woods; you’ve got your ups and you’ve got your downs, all kinds of steep places and level places, too; and deserts after you pop out of the shade, and sun and rain and nice little sections of both heaven and hell.”

“It’s cruel and merciless, and it’s vile.”

“You knew your mother was a mighty sick woman; you knew she had to die before long--”

“I might have saved her! That was why I let Steve Bordereau make me do things I hated. He--”

“Never mind Steve Bordereau now. I’m talking about your mother. She is dead, and you can’t help that. You can go down to the house where she is if you want to; I won’t hold you back any more after you’ve had time to think. Only I’ll tell you what’ll happen if you go now. There’s a tough bunch hanging around, and they’re all Bordereau bums; and they’re half drunk, some of ’em, and the rest are more so. They’ll grab you; they’ll yank you off to Sundown or somewhere. God knows what they’ll do with you, but you could be sure of one thing. By the time you got back home, if you ever did, your ma’d be buried somewhere. Likely enough you’d never even know where.”

He had set her down at the base of a big pine. Slowly she slid down close to the ground; she lay there, flattened against the earth; he couldn’t hear a sob from her then and it was too dark for him to see how she writhed.

He waited a while, then spoke emotionlessly.

“I’ll go down to the house again pretty soon. They won’t pay much attention to me, as why should they? They won’t stick around all night. There will be only the Indian woman left. I’ll scare her off. Then you can come.”

* * * * *

Late that night it was Jim Torrance who dug the grave on the knoll back of the house near that other grave, already six years occupied by the former cattle king, Bill Cannon. He found mattock and shovel in the tool shed, and some planks. And it was Jim Torrance who, just before daylight, bore in his arms a thin, wasted figure, blanket-enwrapped. All had gone; none had any thought of the dead woman except the Indian woman, and she had been glad to flee the place when Torrance gave her her chance. The girl had had her vigil on her knees by her mother’s bedside while Torrance was digging. She did her weeping alone; when he came for her she stood up and helped him. She said, when they came to the knoll:

“I don’t want anyone to know even where she is. They were so cruel to her. I mean Bordereau and Murdo and those men you say were here tonight.”

So they replaced the dry sod over the unmounded grave; they scattered pine needles over it. Torrance even dug up a couple of small bushes and planted them on an already pretty nearly obliterated rectangle.

“And now?” said Jim Torrance. “What about you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Oh, I’ll go away.”

“Where? Friends?”

“Anywhere. Friends? No. I haven’t anyone. I don’t want anyone.”

“I see.” He rolled a cigarette; rolled and rolled it until it was as smooth and hard as a lead pencil.

“I haven’t thanked you--”

“Don’t.” He kept on rolling that cigarette of his. Then he cocked an eye at the eastern horizon. “It’ll be sun-up real soon.”

“Yes. I must hurry. While it’s still dark. I’ve got to slip away as though--as though I were a murderer!” She broke into a shrill, sobbing laughter.

“Slam the brakes on,” he said. He lighted his cigarette, then held it before his moody eyes, studying the red glow of its burning end.

“You have been mighty good to me,” she said. “You don’t know me; I don’t even know who you are. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why have you gone out of your way, gone to so much trouble to treat me like--like a friend?”

“I don’t like Steve Bordereau,” he said, clipping his words short. “I don’t like Murdo, his side-kick.”

“I see.” And she added, her own words clipped as short as his and shorter with their bitterness, “It was Clark Murdo first, Steve Bordereau next and working with him, who ruined us.”

“You haven’t answered me,” said Jim Torrance, and didn’t seem interested in her relations with Bordereau and Murdo and her sequential opinions of them. “Now what?”

“I’ve told you--”

“Only it won’t work.” He flipped his cigarette away, then strode to where it had fallen, to grind it out under the toe of his boot. “I listened to the men talking at the house before they drifted. Me, being a Johnny-come-lately, I don’t get it all. But I do get this: Maybe they won’t string you up the way they’d handle a man--but maybe, too, there are things a girl like you would hate just about as bad. They’re plugging all the roads. You try to skip and they’ll get you.”

“It’s Clark Murdo,” she said angrily. “That’s who it is. If Steve Bordereau were alive, it would be Bordereau. But with him dead”--she said it as steadily as though she were not remembering--“it’s Clark Murdo.”

He lifted his shoulders as much as to say, “What’s that got to do with me?” He reached for his Durham bag, then changed his mind and pulled his hat off to run his brown fingers through his thick black mane of hair.

“You’ll come along with me,” he said. “Back to my place. I’ll get you away, clear, from there. Let’s get going.”

“I can’t understand--”

“You don’t have to understand. Anyhow, there’s nothing that wants any understanding. You’re free, white and--you’re grown up.” She must be eighteen or nineteen or a barely possible twenty; at that ripe age a girl was a woman. “I’m asking you to come along. If you don’t want to, remember the road’s open both ends.”

She came along. She was half dead with stress, grief and weariness. At the house she had kicked off that hated white satin gown and donned riding breeches and boots. She forked her horse the way he did, and they rode.

They rode through the dark under the pines, as silent and dark within themselves as the black pines were. They came up to the top of a thinly timbered ridge and into the wan glow of a new day, two self-contained black silhouettes against a pale-blue wall glinting with fading stars. And when the first roseate flush crept into the lower sky they returned to Jim Torrance’s new ranch.

He made coffee, fried bacon, stirred up flapjacks and presented them as brown as October acorns. She wouldn’t eat, she couldn’t--but she did. He said:

“I’ve just moved in here. It’s still mostly like a pigpen. But I’ve got some clean blankets. You lie down; maybe after while you’ll get some sleep.”

He slammed the door after him and concerned himself with various ranch chores which kept him near the house. Most of the time, under his low-drawn hat brim, his eyes were watchful. He saw her when, about four hours later, she came to the door. Before she could get well into the open he bore down upon her.

“Get back inside. I’ll tell you a thing or two.”

First to tell her was something which she already knew but needed to ponder. Sam Pepper’s ranch was adjoining, and Sam had developed the habit of going atop a hill to spy on the newcomer.

“I had a skinny kid named Skeeter helping me,” he said. “He’s gone now, but most likely nobody noticed. You’ll find some of my old clothes in that back room; there’s a pack needle and thread. You can make ’em into the sort of misfits Skeeter wore. From a distance you’d look enough like him. There’s an old hat of mine in there too. All you got to do is just be a spindling, gawky boy; that ought to be easy.”

She didn’t say anything.

Later Jim Torrance saw several men riding along the road in front of his place. They passed on and out of sight. Presently they came riding back. He said to himself, “They found the buckboard.”

This time they turned in at his gate, and he met them on the wheel track that served as a rutted road.

“Howdy,” said Jim Torrance.

“Where’s the Cannon girl?” said one of them, a skinny man like a hungry coyote. “Seen anything of her?”

“Who?” asked Torrance.

“The Cannon girl. King Cannon’s kid. She killed Steve Bordereau last night, grabbed all the loose money she could get hold of and made a get-away.”

“You don’t say,” murmured Jim Torrance.

They looked at him shrewdly. One of them, a gimlet-eyed, lanky young hellion, said sharply:

“You was in town yourse’f. You know all about it. She headed out this way. We found her buckboard. Where’s she at now?”

Torrance’s shrug at its best, as now, was eloquent.

“Me, I’m a stranger in these parts. I’m up here alone, save for the kid over yonder,” and his gesture indicated a slim, slight figure on a hill nearly a mile away working at a fence. “If you think we’ve got the girl hid up our sleeves, look for her.” His gaze, as stern as an eagle’s, came back to their faces. “A flock of grown men trying to run down one lone girl? You make a man laugh.”

“Got any meanin’ back o’ that, Stranger?” demanded the sharp-eyed, lanky man.

For a moment Torrance appeared to consider the matter. Then he gave them a second shrug and strode away, going off to the corral, which he, like the slim, slight, distant figure at the fence, was making a pretence of mending. He knew that in the house they’d find no trace of her; he himself had seen to that.

He saw them when they came out. They stood a while talking among themselves; then they went out to the barn, passing quite near where he was. He gave no evidence of paying them the slightest attention, but none the less he noticed when they came to a halt and looked across the fields to the hilltop where the solitary, unhidden figure was. He knew, too, how her heart was pumping then under that old ragged shirt of his which he had made her put on for the masquerade. In that, in old hacked-off trousers of his and his worst hat, she looked as little like the Sally Dawn Cannon he had seen in a white satin dress at Bordereau’s as a scarecrow looks like a crescent moon. They might decide to take time off for a word with the “kid.” Well, she knew her part. If she saw them start her way, she was to climb into the saddle of the horse tied to a fence post, to ride leisurely over the brow of the hill--and then to dig her spurs in for all she was worth.

They went on into the empty barn. Torrance heard them talking in lowered voices before they came out. Again they looked over to the hilltop where the figure of what was supposed to be Skeeter, the kid Torrance had brought along to help with the horses, was busier than ever at the fence.

“Maybe the kid’s seen her?” said one of the men, looking at Torrance.

He got a third shrug.

“Maybe,” said Jim Torrance.

The men then went away. But they stopped before they got to the gate to call back:

“Sorry we bothered you, Stranger. Guess she didn’t come this way after all.”

Any man with half his wits about him could have seen through that studied remark as through a clean windowpane, and Jim Torrance wasn’t missing anything obvious today. He told himself thoughtfully: “They’ll be back about dark, or maybe one of them will stick around, hid in the pines. They know damn well she did come this way.”

He kept busy another hour at the corral, then went into the house for ten minutes, smoking and letting time pass. After that he saddled a horse, got a crowbar, shovel and hammer, and rode lazily across the fields to lend a hand at fence mending. The girl, watching him coming, turned frightened eyes upon him.

“They’ve gone?”

“Gone, sure. Not far, though. And they’ll be coming back.”

“You mean--”

“Yes. They found the buckboard where I ditched it, and back-trailed this far. They’re not fools--or if they are, they’re not plumb fools. I’ve a notion anyhow one of them is watching us now.”

She shivered. She said faintly:

“I’m afraid. What will they do to me? What am I going to do?”

“Keep right on mending fence for a spell. You know these folks better than I do. Does it mean much to you, one way or another, if they get their hands on you?”

Her shiver now was a shudder. He was glad of that, glad that she realized what she might expect. She said all in one breath, “I’d rather be dead!”

He helped her set a post straight and began tamping the earth about it.

“I’ll get you out of this--if you want to go with me.”

“Yes! Yes, I do! Oh, you are so-- But _why_? Why do you do all these things for me?”

The shrug she got from him was worth all the three he had bestowed on the men seeking her. He said:

“Pretty soon I’ll go back to the house. You’ll keep on here, working as hard as you can. But keep an eye open for me. When you see me mosey out to the barn, you take your time, pile on your horse and ride slow and lazy-like along the top of the hill, heading south. That will bring you in ten minutes down into a hollow where you’ll cut into a trail. Turn north there and keep straight on for about three-four miles, where the trail forks and there’s a spring. Wait there. You won’t have to wait long. I’ll be with you.”

Her eyes had been lowered while he spoke; now there was a flutter of her lids, and then her eyes, opened wide, looked up at him wonderingly.

“You haven’t even told me your name,” she said, as though that mattered.

“Torrance. Jim Torrance.”

“I’ll do just what you say.”

So in a little while, with few more words spoken, he left her. She, though her overtaxed body trembled, kept on at her intrinsically useless toil. He, pottering about house and barn and corral, kept an open eye. He saw Sam Pepper come out at his favorite vantage point, and was relieved rather than discomfited, for seeing what he knew must be there was easier on the nerves than just fancying it. Also, just once, he caught a glimpse of a figure skulking among the pines and knew it for that of the gimlet-eyed young hellion.

“Now we know,” muttered Jim Torrance. “And knowing is better than guessing, any day.”

He bode his time until the sun was red and flattening down by the western hilltops. Then he gave the signal which he knew King Cannon’s daughter had so long and anxiously awaited. He did not turn his head after that to see what response she made. He rode down the wheel track, out through the gate and toward Sundown. He rode slowly until he had passed the first timber-masked turn in the road; then he swerved off into the wood and began circling through it. In twenty minutes or so he would strike back into the trail the girl was to have taken. Down in the hollow it would be dusky then; no one should see him come up with her.