Bad Man's Gulch (11 page)

She was wondering at herself as she ran down the stairs. In the lunchroom she found the last man in the world she wanted to confront at that moment—Jack Hopper himself. She wanted to appear perfectly calm, perfectly cheerful, but, instead, she
knew that she had turned white and that she was staring at him.

“I thought,” he said stiffly, “that maybe you might need something done . . . for your friend.”

“Friend?” she answered. “Why, Jack, I never saw the poor fellow before tonight.”

The raising of his eyebrows stopped her. He quivered with a passion of disbelief and of scorn. “He looked pretty bad hurt,” said Jack Hopper. “If there was anything that I could do . . .”

“He's gone, Jack. I only kept him here until the sheriff was gone. . . .”

“Billy Angel is gone?” exclaimed the engineer.

“Yes. Right after the sheriff went away . . . and the rest of the boys.”

“Did he sneak out the back way?”

“No,” she said, lying desperately. “He walked right out the front door. . . .”

He turned a dark red, and she knew, at once, that he must have been keeping a close watch upon that door and that he was certain no Billy Angel had passed that way.

“Well,” said Hopper coldly, “I s'pose that there ain't much I can do then?”

“I guess not,” she answered, full of wretchedness, and hating Billy Angel with all her heart for the miserable tangle in which he had involved her.

Twice Jack Hopper turned his hat in his hands; twice words came to the verge of his compressed lips. Then—“Good night!” he snapped out at her, and turned on his heel. The closing of the door behind him seemed to the girl the definite act that separated her from the rest of the law-abiding world.

She closed the counter for the night now, then she went up to bed. There was a second room in the story above. It was hardly a room. It was rather a mere corner with a cot in it and a bit of cracked glass for a mirror on the wall, with a tiny dormer window peering out over the roof.

There she lay down, but she had hardly closed her eyes when she heard talking in the building. She wakened and sat up, her heart thundering. It was Billy Angel, then, that they had come for. Jack Hopper, after all, had not been able to keep the terrible secret. She hastened to the door of her room in time to hear the speaking again, and this time she made it out as coming from her own chamber. It was a strange voice, raised high one moment, sinking the next, almost like two men in rapid conversation, yet she could tell that there was only one speaker. It was not Sheriff Tom Kitchin. Certainly it was not Jack Hopper, or any other man she knew. Who could it be, then?

She crouched outside the door, listening. She heard the voice rumble on:

“Take the second road and ride along half a mile . . . talk straight to him. Talk like you didn't fear him none. Talk like you expect to get a square deal, and most likely you'll get one. Steady! Steady! Look here, I've come talkin' business, Charlie. Will you hear me? Go to the second house. Throw a stone up through the window. It'll be open. I'll do that.”

The voice died with a groan. It was Billy Angel in helpless delirium. In the silence that followed, she strove to unravel the babbling and bring sense out of it, but she strove vainly.

Suddenly the voice resumed: “Now, Charlie, here we are together, and there ain't nobody likely to step in between us.”

At this, a chill of deadly apprehension ran through the blood of the girl. For was this not a rehearsal of the murder scene in which he had struck down Charles Ormond? She had a wild desire to turn and flee, a terror lest she should hear him condemn himself with his own mouth.

“A knife, old son, will do the trick as well. A knife is a handy thing. Look what a wolf can do with his teeth. Suppose that he had a tooth as long as this . . . made of steel . . . and with the strength of a man's arm behind it . . . why, Charlie, he'd crawl into the caves of mountain lions and rip their bellies open when they jumped at him. And the best thing is . . . a knife don't make a sound . . . only a whisper when it sinks into you and asks the soul out of you. If you . . .”

There was no need of anything more convincing than this. To have denied his guilt after this would have been utterest blindness, she felt. But, in the meantime, that voice was rising every moment. Murderer though he was, he was helpless, and, moreover, she had gone too far to draw back now.
She must bring back his strength to him if she could, keeping him secretly in her house.

She opened the door and went hastily in. The lamp was turned so low that only a tiny yellow new moon of flame showed and turned the room into a sea of dark, on which bulky shadows rode and stirred with the flickering of the flame. Only the mirror looked back at her with a dim, ghostly face.

On the bed Billy Angel was a black giant. He was humped against the headboard, his chin on his breast, his enormous arms thrown wide. He spoke not a word, but, while she watched him, filled with terror, she saw one great hand rise and fall, and it seemed to the girl that she was watching the knife driven home into the back of dead Charles Ormond.

She wanted to flee then. The company of a dog, even, would have been a treasure, but she must remain there and do the work that lay before her. If his voice were raised again to its last pitch, it would be strange if someone did not hear it as they passed in the street. And if a man's voice were heard in her house at this hour, every man in Derby would come to the rescue with weapon in hand.

She sat on the edge of the bed. The strength of his hurried, uneven panting made a slight tremor run continually through the room. There was no intelligence in the roving of his eyes. It was the blank, wild glare of delirium that had given him for the moment a false strength. That glare became fixed upon her now, and the head of Billy Angel thrust out toward her a little.

“Is it you, Charlie?” he asked loudly. “And are you ready?”

“It's Sue Markham,” said the girl, trembling. “Billy Angel, talk soft. They'll hear you in the street!”

“You're not Charlie?”

“No, no.”

“You lie!” snarled out Billy Angel. “I've been waitin' a tiresome time, Charlie. But I got you here now, Charlie, and I'm gonna leave you to rot here, in this cave where no man'll ever find you. . . .”

A hand fixed on her arm with a grip like iron; she was drawn slowly inside the reach of his other hand. Billy Angel had begun to laugh like a devil incarnate.

“Now, Charlie,” he said, “what you got to say? I have you here. I can break you to pieces like an orange. Where's your strength, Charlie? Have you turned yaller? Has the nerve gone out of you? You're tremblin' like a woman. . . .”

“Billy Angel!” cried the girl. “Don't you hear me?”

“I'll hear you beg like a coward and a sneak and a cur. Will you beg like a dog for your life, Charlie? Will you beg?” His right hand fumbled at her throat. It was a hand of ice, and it brought the chill dread of death into her soul.

“Billy, Billy,” she gasped out, “don't kill me!”

His hand fell away. He sank back on the bed. “I knew all the time,” he said, “that you was yaller inside.” His voice fell to a mumble: “But if you say you're beat . . . you're safe from me this time. Until one day I'll corner you, and make you . . .” The strength crumbled out of him. He fell sidewise on the bed and lay motionlessly.

After that, half reeling with weakness and with relief, she turned up the flame of the lamp. And then she went toward him as one might go toward a sleeping tiger. He was quite unconscious. His hands, she knew, were icy cold, but his head was fiery hot to the touch. A new fear came to her. If she called a physician, she might make sure of helping
him from the fever, but would she not certainly be fitting a rope around his neck?

She sat down by the bed to watch, telling herself that only if the delirium returned would she send for the doctor. And there she watched the hours out. It was a broken sleep. Often he stirred and stared and muttered to himself. Once he sat bolt erect and stared at her with terrible eyes, but he sank back again and slept once more.

It was after midnight, well after, before he settled into a quiet slumber, the muscles of his forehead quite relaxed, and his breathing regular. Then she tried his pulse, and found it firmer and more regular. She laid her hand lightly on his face, and it was no longer of such burning heat. So she stole back to her attic room and slept out the remainder of the night.

But there was little sleep in Derby that night. Men had something to think about in the recent murder, and the northwester had settled to a howling demon that wailed and screamed with double force between midnight and morning. With the dawn it sank in force, but it was still whistling fitfully when Sue Markham awakened and looked out her window upon a dull gray sky stretched across with blacker, low-hanging clouds that threatened more snow. With what had already fallen, the hollows were already filled, although the gale had scoured all away from the highlands and the exposed places. All was stark mud, black rocks, or the crusted snow in the hollows. A miserable world to waken into, surely.

She went down to the lunchroom. It was a grisly sight to her. For some reason the squalor of the place had never struck home in her before. Cigarette butts
were everywhere, some mere streaks of ashes and black charred places in the wood where the butts had been dropped by careless hands. Others had been fairly ground into the very texture of the floor by wet, heavy heels. There were new smudges on the counter where the thickly oiled jacket sleeves of the trainmen had rested. There were half-washed dishes, too.

Then there was a trip before her to the woodshed, wading through the gripping cold of the morning and through the snow, drifted knee deep behind the fence. As she came back, her arms aching with the weight of wood, she turned her head to the east and looked down to the great valley below her. There was a break in the leaden color of the sky there to the east. There was a streak of shining sun and gentle blue along that eastern horizon, and in the big valley itself was not the sun shining brightly?

No doubt to those dwellers in a better land, looking out from their cozy homes, old Derby Mountain was a pure and a grand picture on this morning, his white cape lower around his shoulders, and with a wreath of smoky clouds around his brow. How little did they know of the miseries of mountain life.

She built the fire in the stove. It sent up first a fume of smoke, until the draft cleared and began to pull on the flames. In the meantime, she jerked all the windows wide, and with the pure wind scouring through the place, she set to work sweeping and scrubbing with might and main, loathing herself for the work that she was compelled to do, hating the world for the fate that it had unjustly bestowed upon her.

Even while she worked, she wondered at herself. This humor had never come upon her before. She had gone cheerfully to the dull beginning of every
day. But now, all was sad effort. She told herself, mournfully, that blue days must follow such a night as the last one had been. But that explanation was not satisfactory. Something had been added or subtracted from her existence since yesterday dawned, and she could not yet tell what it was. But was it not, perhaps, the consciousness of the rift that had come in her old friendship with Jack Hopper?

So, half dreamily, half wearily she went to the kitchen and started to cook breakfast.

But when the water was boiling and the coffee steaming and pouring its thin, piercing fragrance through the room, a joy came back to her. By the time that she had finished setting out the breakfast on the tray, she told herself that this was a game worth playing more than anything she had ever done before in her life.

She bore up the tray to Billy Angel and found him lying, pale and weak, on the bed, hardly able to lift his head while he watched her out of dull eyes.

“Where am I?” he asked. “This ain't the jail.”

“This is my room,” she told him. “And I'm gonna keep care of you till you can handle yourself.”

She expected a tide of protestation to come from him. But he merely turned a dark red and said not a word. He did not even thank her for bringing the breakfast to him, but worked himself slowly up on the pillows and ate the food that was before him. She was half angered, half amused by his pride, and, with the amusement, there was mingled a sting of fear. As she watched his set and gloomy face she told herself, more than ever, that here was a man capable of anything.

She went back to the lunch counter. Already, about the stove, half a dozen laborers in the yards were gathered, blinking sleepily at her. She served their orders in silence, knowing well that men do not wish to talk in the morning when the steel edge of the curse of Adam is eating into their souls.

In the mid-morning, the wind swung sharply around to the southwest again, and in an hour the mountainside was covered with rivulets of water running down from the melting snow. By noon the report had come in that the fugitive had probably escaped. If he had been able to live through the bitterness of the night, he was now far away. For the horses were unable to make any progress through the slippery slush. The sheriff, to be sure, and three helpers were working rather blindly through the mountains, trying to pick up some sign of Billy Angel. But there was little hope of that. All that remained was that some outlying town might catch a glimpse of Angel as he fled toward safety.

Old Pete Allison, tending the fire in the big stove and vainly trying to make himself useful, offered a target for conversation when the breakfast time was done.

“How long'll it take them to catch this Billy Angel?” she said.

“Not for a long time,” said Pete Allison. “Folks can't hope to run down a gent like that right offhand.”