Milo Talon (19 page)

Then suddenly there were some brief notations:
N-? Something odd there
. Months later there was:
S&N gone
. Then what must have been a confession:
Never learned to talk to a woman. Never could tell her how much I loved her, needed her
. Then there were several pages of notations of business deals, some more sales
but no mention of what had happened to the money, then:
Empty! Empty! Empty! S meant so much. N …? Only a child but cold … cold … and cruel
.

There were wide gaps in the dates then. Occasional deals, usually for big money. Then simply the word:
Divorced
. And somewhat later:
Married Newton Henry. My God! That scoundrel! I fear for Stacy. N will survive
.

Page after page of business deals, each noted with mere initials and figures.

Molly to see me. Has been putting flowers on my desk! Such a pretty child! If my own daughter could have been so gentle and kind! NH has no idea what a nettle he has grasped!

I put the notebook down. My eyes were heavy with sleep. NH … that would be Newton Henry. What nettle? Not Stacy, Nathan wrote of Stacy with affection despite her running off. Nancy? She was but a child. Yet he had said
Nancy will survive
.

Sleepy as I was, I turned the page.
From Topolobampo. All goes forward. Tai Ts’an met with us. Approves Topo as terminal. In confidence, later, told me somebody living on the place. A man, a woman, and a young girl. NH, S & N surely. But how—?

Turning over, I awakened. For a moment I lay still, trying to remember where I was. In my room at the hotel, reading the notebook. Quickly, I put out my hand. It was there. The chair was still under the knob but it was still completely dark. Sitting up I crossed the room, poured some water in the bowl, and splashed it in my eyes and on my face.

The memory of what I had been reading returned. Living on the place. What place?

A moment of listening, all was still. Standing at the window, I looked down into the empty street. All was dark and still. Nothing moved. Turning away, my eyes caught a flicker of movement from a roof across the way.

A man was there, or the shadow of a man, crouching near the stone chimney.

O
NE OF THE reasons I’ve lived as long as I have is that I never stand squarely in front of a window. When I want to look out I stand on one side or the other, and that was what I was doing now.

The man yonder had a rifle, but I couldn’t make out whether he was looking toward my window or some other farther along. From his position he would be unable to see the bed where I should be lying, so he must be gunning for somebody else. Molly?

But Molly was not in her room. She was down at Maggie’s restaurant where German Schafer could protect her.

Or I thought she was.

It was in my thoughts that I had fallen asleep with the lamp still burning, but sometime during the night I had obviously awakened and blown it out, too sleepy to actually recall the action. The room was completely dark and the man opposite could not see in, although he might detect movement.

From deep inside the room I could still see the roof opposite, and the man with the rifle was on one knee, half-behind the chimney. Watching, I pulled on my pants and shirt and strapped on my gun belt. Shucking my watch from the watch-pocket of my pants, I tried
to make out the time, but it was too dark and I daren’t strike a match. Judging by how quiet the town was, I had an idea it was long after midnight.

Whoever the man opposite was, I was positive it would not be the Arkansawyer. Baggott was too shrewd to take a chance on being trapped on a roof. This had to be somebody else.

Yet that was the building Baggott was living in, and unless I overrated the man, Baggott, if in his room, had heard that movement on the roof.

What would he do? Nothing, probably, but he’d be irritated. If there was any shooting it would attract attention and that was the one thing Baggott avoided.

Had Molly returned to her room? Was she in there now, sleeping?

Or was the man on the roof waiting for a shot into the restaurant? German was an early riser, always on the job before daylight, and unless my guess was wrong the man on the roof had a perfect shot for anybody in the window of Maggie’s or on the walk, and German always swept the walk early in the morning.

My window was open as I was a man used to lots of fresh air, sleeping out more than half the time. At the side of the window, on one knee, I waited.

Whatever he was planning he had better be at it. Already the light was better, and in a short time others besides me would be seeing him. Just as I thought that, he lifted the rifle.

Who he was going to shoot I did not know, but he was aiming right at Maggie’s. He was no more than sixty feet away, and as the rifle came to his shoulder I said, in a tone just loud enough, “I wouldn’t do that.”

My six-shooter was in my hand when I said it. I had no desire to kill him, so I continued talking. “You can walk off that roof or fall off.”

He lowered his rifle and straightened up, then he turned sharply and fired.

He wasn’t as good as he thought he was. His bullet hit the window frame a foot above my head, and my return shot, so quick the two sounded as one, seemed to hit the action of his rifle. He dropped it like it was red-hot and went off the roof in the back like a scared rabbit.

Quickly, I closed the window, slipped a cartridge into my pistol, and pocketed the empty shell. Then I sat down on the bed and started to pull on a boot.

Running feet came along the hall, excited questions, then pounding on my door. Boot in hand, I pulled the chair from under the knob and opened it.

“You looking for somebody?” I asked.

“There was a shot! It came from here!”

“Shot? Hell, mister, I just dropped my boot. It surely didn’t make that much noise!”

The clerk pushed into the room with several other men, staring around. There was nobody there but me and my window was closed, the glass unbroken.

Sitting down, I began to tug on the other boot. John Topp loomed in the doorway, his eyes on my bed. He started forward but I was too quick. I picked up Nathan Albro’s notebook and stuck it in my hip pocket.

“You must have heard that shot?” the clerk said.

“I heard something. It could have been a shot, but why be surprised at that? I’ve been in a hundred towns
like this and there’s always some drunken cowboy blowing off steam.”

That clerk was no fool. He stared at me, one eyebrow raised. “Come to think of it,” I said, “I believe I saw somebody on the roof yonder. Out of the corner of my eye, like. But what would a man want, shooting off a roof? Unless he was trying to kill somebody.”

I looked at Topp. “A man can’t be too careful these days.”

They trooped out of the room and I glanced around quickly, then took up my vest and donned it, then my coat.

When I reached the lobby John Topp was waiting. He spoke to me for the first time. “The boss would like to see that notebook.”

“He may, in time.”

“He’ll want it now.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re workin’ for him, mister.”

“Only to find a girl, that’s all. How I find her is my business.”

His expression did not change. It never did. Only his eyes moved and he had large, somewhat solemn eyes. “He’ll want that book, mister. He’ll want it now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All right,” Topp replied mildly, “I’ll tell him.” He half-turned away and then he threw a punch. He was big and he was fast and I was as much off-guard as I ever will be. He threw a right-hand punch and I just stepped off to the left. I’ll never know whether it was because of some subconscious warning or if it was pure accident, but when I stepped off to the left his
punch missed me completely and he fell, carried by the impetus of his blow, and he half-fell across a table and some chairs.

“Tsk, tsk,” I said, and walked on out the door.

Molly was gathering dishes from a table when I came in. “If you’re going to do that, stay away from the windows.”

“Milo, what are we going to do? What can we do?”

Now if I’d been like some I’ve heard of I’d have come up with a quick solution, a nice easy one, but I’d no idea what to do. What I needed was time to consider.

Molly was looking to me for help, and German Schafer was expecting me to come up with answers I did not have. Looking out at the sunlit street, I felt trapped, and furthermore, I was scared. I had a girl depending on me, a girl they wanted to kill, and now they wanted to kill me, too.

Topp knew I had the notebook, and he would be wanting to make up for his blunder in taking a swing at me. He hadn’t thought it out. There was the book, they wanted it, and a quick blow might knock it from my hands and he might be in possession. That I’d come off lucky I knew full well. I would not be so lucky again.

“German,” I spoke through the door to the kitchen, “better keep an eye on that back door.”

Looking out into that street a man would think it just a sleepy western town. Folks were going about their business, buying supplies in the stores, getting boots repaired, horses shoed, walking up the stairs to the doctor’s office, talking cattle, sheep, and politics, and ninety-nine percent of them totally unaware of
what was going on, that a few steps away a young woman was in danger.

We could run for it. We could take out for Denver and hope we could make it. We’d have to go horseback as they’d be watching the train. Molly knew too much and I had information they wanted … or they believed I had.

Molly brought me some coffee and sat down with me. “Milo? What are we going to do?”

“Run,” I said, “and I don’t like to. But this is all too open. One of these days when we step out on the street they’ll nail us.

“They’re watching, you can bet on it. They don’t want anything obvious and they don’t want either of us left alive to talk. I think if we could get into the mountains we could lead them a chase.

“I don’t know how John Topp is on a trail, but I know these mountains and I’ve friends in Denver. Far as that goes, we could go to the Empty.”

“Empty?”

“Ma’s ranch. MT is the brand, stands for Em Talon. We’d be safe there but that’s a long ride, and when there’s that amount of money at stake they won’t take any chances. Neither will she.”

“She?”

“Anne. She’s in it somehow.”

Molly looked at me. “You mean you don’t
know?
She’s the girl you’ve been looking for. Nancy is a name that began as a nickname for Anne.”

Well … I should have known.

Reluctantly, I’d been giving up on Anne. When she visited the Empty I built a lot of dreams around her.
The trouble was, I had been building my dreams around the girl I wanted her to be and hoped she was. We all do that. All too often the man a girl thinks she loves or the girl a man believes he loves is just in their imaginations. A body makes excuses for their mistakes because he or she wants to believe.

Anne … Nancy … even Nathan Albro had said she was cold and cruel. Whatever else he was, Nathan was perceptive.

“I think she always hated me,” Molly said suddenly. “I thought of her as my friend. I had no other. I know now that a lot of the slights I thought were unintended were intentional.”

“Nathan liked you.”

“He was a fine old man. Lonely … very lonely, and remote. Not many people understood him at all. He lived almost entirely with his business, but I know of dozens of things he did for people and they never knew he was responsible. I liked him.”

“We’ve got to get away, Molly. We’ve got to run. There’s no place to hide here. There’s no safety.” I looked at her. “Can you ride, Molly? Ride for days and nights? Sometimes without sleep?”

“Yes.”

“German?”

He came in from the kitchen. I put a gold coin on the table. “Grub for five days. Have it ready before dark.”

“How will you get horses? You go to the stable and that’s all they’ll want. That would be their chance.”

“Got to figure that one out. I want to get out of here tonight, without fail.”

“They’ll be watching.”

The street was a dusty avenue of waiting death. Who the man on the roof had been, I did not know, but that he had been scouting for Molly seemed obvious. It was her room into which he had planned to shoot, not knowing she was elsewhere. No doubt he’d had a view of the bed where she usually slept. He was inept, clumsy. Neither John Topp nor Baggott would have made such a mistake.

Suddenly a covered wagon came up the street. I sat up straight. Molly had already seen it. “Rolon Taylor’s wagon,” I said. “He’s waitin’ for us, I think. Or for you.”

We heard the far-off whistle of the train. Longingly, we listened. That train could carry us away to safety. Yet even as we looked, several rough-looking men strolled from the Golden Spur and started down the street. Others would come from the other saloon and they would go down to the station to wait.

There was another train, later. They would watch that, too. Maybe—

“German,” I said, “we’ve got to have horses.”

Walking to his counter I got a sheet of paper, then back to the table. Sometimes when thinking I liked to fiddle with something, drawing in the sand with a piece of stick or doodling on paper with a pencil.