Bad Man's Gulch (19 page)

“Hers.”

Sue had found her way out from behind the counter, in some way.

Wainwright turned upon her. “He stole your hoss, ma'am?”

“I make no charges against him,” poor Sue said.

“Ah! You don't? You ain't steppin' on him now he's down?”

Tears of pity—for herself, for Billy Angel—crowded her eyes.

“Well,” said the rancher, “you're Sue Markham?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “He told my daughter something about you. That cuts down the crimes by one. It's only robbery and murder, now. Who did he rob? A gent named Carney, I think. Find Carney, and I got the money here to pay him and enough money to shut his mouth. And that, Sheriff, will leave one charge left.”

“Only the murder, I suppose,” said Tom Kitchin slowly. “Are you going to buy him off from that?”

“I am,” said Wainwright.

“With what, Mister Wainwright? Money?”

“With the blood of my own son!” exclaimed the big man in a voice of thunder. “For it was him that murdered Charles Ormond. It'll be known. It's got to be known. I'm here to talk it out where folks can hear me. It was my fool girl Betty that went out to see Charles Ormond . . . that handsome, useless young rat. It was my boy that went along with her. But she knowed that there might be trouble. She's been engaged . . . sort of under her hat . . . to Charlie
. She wanted to break it off. And he was aimin' to be nasty about it. She took her brother along. But she took another man, too. She took along the strongest fightin' man that she knowed, and that was Billy Angel, that she asked to trail the rest and be around handy in case there was bad work on foot. And he done it. Well, there
was
bad work. The end of it was that Charlie Ormond and my boy got to passin' language. And finally Charlie out with a gun. It misfired. My boy had a knife in his hand. He made a pass at Charlie . . . Charlie turned around to get away . . . the knife stabbed him through the back to the heart. There stood Betty and her brother in a mess, but here slips in Billy Angel, tells 'em to hop on their hosses and ride home . . . he knows a way out of this. Life is dull for him. He needs excitement.

“They're too rattled to stop and talk about it. They jump on their hosses and ride for it. When they get home, they find out that Billy Angel has been found on the scene of the crime, ain't stood when he was challenged, and has been hounded through the mountains by a sheriff's posse.” He paused, and then he roared: “You blockheads, can't you see that the girl is nigh dead? Get me water for her, somebody!”

He himself caught Sue and lowered her into a chair. Water was brought, but she waved it away. She wanted neither food nor drink, but only more words from the mouth of this homely angel and bringer of strange tidings.

“That was all for a while. Then down comes Billy Angel on a night that some of you can remember. He calls for my girl and talks to her in the house. He tells her that he knows that it's a hard thing to ask, but that, when he took the blame of that killing and got the chase after him, he figgered that he was foot-free, but, since that time, he'd met up with a girl in
the mountains and fallen in love with her . . . a girl that had been nursing him and sheltering him since the first day when he was wounded.” He pointed. “Sue Markham, was it you?”

What a shout from the men! In a dizzy whirl she made out the grim face of Jack Hopper from a corner, the amazed sheriff, and all the rest gaping at her.

“He wanted to be free from his bargain. He knew my boy had had trouble with his father because he ran through his allowance too quick. And Billy Angel had brought down coin for my son to run away on, if he didn't want to stay and face the music. But first he wanted my boy to talk up and take the blame for the killing of Charlie Ormond. Whatever blame there was . . . and my lawyer is gonna show that there was damned little! Well, sir, that's the story. I've told it brief. But if there was ever a romantic young fool, it's this here Billy Angel. I want to see him. You might have thought that he was in love with my daughter? The devil, no! He was in love with trouble, and that was all that there was to it. A trouble lover! Love of danger for the sake of danger. Well, all I can say is that he got it. But my boy ain't runnin'. He's standin' his ground. He's told all the story to me. Now, what I want is Billy Angel out of your hands, Sheriff!”

 

It could not be done at once. But it suddenly appeared that there were no charges to be pressed against Billy Angel. The state had nothing to say against him. Indeed, the state was very glad to shut its mouth tight, for Billy Angel had suddenly been borne aloft on an immense wave of notorious popularity.

The wild and improbable tale of what he had done was on the tongue of every man, a story that men could appreciate because of the danger in it, and that women could understand because of Sue.

And Sue?

She did not rush to the sheriff's house with all the others to congratulate Billy Angel on his deliverance. She remained behind in the lunch counter, sick-hearted, crushed. It only remained for Billy, as a free man, to come to her, and pour forth his scorn upon her! But now, as she looked back over all the days he had been in love with her, she could understand. It had been love. Indeed, that chained his tongue and kept him silent. It was more an agony of sorrow than of rage that had burned in his eyes when he had discovered her betrayal. But love, at last, had been killed by her own hand.

There were only two days before the meeting. Two dreary eternities they were to poor Sue Markham.

And then he stood in the doorway, and filled it up from side to side. There were half a dozen other men in the room. Instantly they picked up their hats. They grinned at one another and at Sue. And they walked out.

Oh, fools! Fools! Little they knew the terror and the sorrow with which she looked forward to this meeting with him! Now he was coming straight toward her. She shrank behind the counter. He followed her and loomed, enormous, above her. He took one of her hands and held her fast. She closed her eyes and said through her teeth:

“You bought the right to say what you want . . . you can scorn me and hate me and rage at me, Billy. I got to listen!”

He said: “What I got to say won't take long. I've come to say that I love you, Sue. And I've come to say that you love me, or else you'd never have sent the sheriff for me.”

She had no strength to deny it even for a single moment. She let him take both hands and all of her.

“Bad Man's Gulch” made its first and only appearance in
Western Story Magazine
in the issue dated July 17, 1926, under Faust's George Owen Baxter pseudonym. It was one of twelve short novels published that year, all in
Western Story
. “Bad Man's Gulch” is a powerful story about a reformed gunman, Pedro Emmanuel Melendez, who arrives in the lawless mining town of Slosson's Gulch armed with the philosophy that “the right thing is just to drift, and you'll land lucky or unlucky, just the way that everything was wrote down for you when you was born, or maybe before that.” But can he just drift when he meets up with Louise Berenger who, along with her father, has discovered gold and fallen prey to the desperate and predatory miners of the gulch?

If William Berenger had, in the first place, known anything about gold mining and gold miners, he would never have brought his daughter along with him when he joined the rush for Slosson's Gulch. What he knew about mining was connected almost entirely with the works on geology that he had read and mastered. As an amateur geologist he was a very well-informed man; certainly he made a greater picture of a successful man when he was out with a party of admiring friends, chipping fragments off bits of rock, here and there, and telling the story revealed there, than when he went downtown to his office where a sign on a clouded-glass door informed all who cared to look that William Berenger was a lawyer. But as time went on, very few cared to look at that sign. For when a case came the way of Mr. Berenger, he never allowed business to interfere with geology, and he never allowed fact to interfere with theory. Mr. Berenger held a confirmed theory that every man, in his heart of hearts, was perfectly honest, and nothing could wean him away from this belief. When he cross-examined a recalcitrant witness,
it was in the fashion of a saddened uncle pleading with a misguided child to be charitable to the truth and his better self. The result was that no lawyer ever succeeded in making men and women feel more at home on the witness stand—which is exactly what a lawyer does not want, of course.

Obviously the proper attitude is that all of one's own witnesses are scholarly gentlemen, and all of the opposition's witnesses are scoundrels, liars, and thieves, if they can get a chance. But Mr. Berenger could not help treating the entire world, not only as though it were his equal, but even a little bit more. He could not so much as tip a waiter without asking the pardon of that gentleman in disguise.

When a jovial and heartless friend of Mr. Berenger suggested that he close a law office that was simply a useless item in rent, and apply some of his geological knowledge by joining the gold rush, Mr. Berenger took the matter instantly to heart. He called in his daughter to help him make up his mind, and she poked her walking stick at the potted geraniums in his library window and listened thoughtfully. She put no faith in the ability of her father to be anything but the kindest of fathers and the worst of businessmen, but she was certain that nothing could be more disastrous than to keep on as they were doing. Knowing that the family fortune had diminished dangerously close to the vanishing point, she felt that, at least, this might be a cheap way of taking a summer's vacation in the Western mountains.

So William Berenger was encouraged to make up his pack as a prospector, and in that pack, of course, his geology books formed the greatest item. He would have thought it absurd to advance upon the practical problem of locating gold-bearing ore with-
out equipping himself with references, page, and paragraph, for every one of his steps. His legal training forced him into this attitude. But, in due time, they dismounted from the train, bought two pack mules and a pair of riding horses, built up two towering miracles of packs, and advanced on the mountains like two children on another crusade.

When they came to Slosson's Gulch, they halted on the overhanging shoulder of a hill and looked down upon the long, narrow town of shacks and tents and lean-tos that straggled along both banks of the creek. Even at that distance, through the thin air, they could hear faintly the noise of the mining camp. While they waited in the rosy dusk of the day, they heard from different portions of the gulch three shots. It sounded to Louise Berenger like three signal guns, warning the newcomers away.

Her father was not dismayed. For a week he mixed in the wild crowd of the camp in the evenings, and spent his days with Louise in tramping along the hill slopes, where thousands of others had already wandered before him. They learned now what they could have read in the papers before they started—no more strikes were being made in Slos-son's Gulch. The vein seemed to have been traced as far as it ran, and as for the throngs that still rushed to the mining camp, some were simply blind sheep like the Berengers, and others were the exploiters of the miners. That is always the case in such a town; there are 500 hangers-on for every 100 honest laborers. But there is always a wild, vague hope of fortune lingering about a new-found ledge of gold ore. Mr. Berenger still tramped the hills farther up and down the valley, from day to day, talked with the adventurers in the evening, and then burned his lantern beside his heavy tomes of geological lore.

One day Louise came to him, with her eyes glittering and her face on fire. “I don't think that this is a place for you, Father,” she said, “and certainly it is not a place for me!”

“What in the world has happened?” asked William Berenger, looking up over his glasses.

“Nothing,” said Louise, setting her teeth like a man about to strike or be struck.

She would say no more, but her father could gather that something disturbing had happened, and, since it was almost impossible for him to resist any suggestion, he agreed at once that they should give up the adventure. He only wanted a single day to try out a little theory that he had just found out.

That extra day was spent in roving far up the valley, leaving the noise of Slosson's Creek behind them. They turned the complete flank of the great mountain and marched up a narrow ravine that, in those days, bore no name whatever.

As the town dipped out of view behind them, the girl asked: “Do you think that there will ever be law and order in that town?”

“Law and order,” said William Berenger. “My dear, wherever there are more than two civilized white men together, there is sure to be law and order!”

His daughter stared at him. “There have been
five
known killings since we arrived,” she reminded him.

“The dregs of society! The dregs of society!” Mr. Berenger explained easily. “They have to be disposed of in one way or another. Drones must be thrown out of the hive, my dear child. Wine is not good until the lees have settled.”

Louise sighed, helpless and hopeless. She murmured finally: “Metaphors are not arguments, Father, except in poems.”

“And what could be more of a poem than this
spot?” Mr. Berenger said, waving his hand toward a blue giant of a mountain in the distance, for a turn of the ravine had just brought them into view of its sparkling head and white shoulders. “And what could be more of a poem . . . a living, breathing poem . . . than the strong men who have gathered in Slosson's Gulch to hunt for fortune in the ribs of old Mother Earth herself?”