Nightmare Town: Stories (5 page)

The blind man’s cabin was dark when they reached it, but the front door was ajar. Steve knocked his stick against the frame, got no answer, and struck a match. Rymer lay on the floor, sprawled on his back, his arms out-flung.

The cabin’s one room was topsy-turvy. Furniture lay in upended confusion, clothing was scattered here and there, and boards had been torn from the floor. The girl knelt beside the unconscious man while Steve hunted for a light. Presently he found an oil lamp that had escaped injury, and got it burning just as Rymer’s filmed eyes opened and he sat up. Steve righted an overthrown rocking-chair and, with the girl, assisted the blind man to it, where he sat panting. He had recognised the girl’s voice at once, and he smiled bravely in her direction.

“I’m all right, Nova,” he said; “not hurt a bit. Someone knocked at the door, and when I opened it I heard a swishing sound in my ear – and that was all I knew until I came to to find you here.”

He frowned with sudden anxiety, got to his feet, and moved across the room. Steve pulled a chair and an upset table from his path, and the blind man dropped on his knees in a corner, fumbling beneath the loosened floor boards. His hands came out empty, and he stood up with a tired droop to his shoulders. “Gone,” he said softly.

Steve remembered the watch then, took it from his pocket, and put it into one of the blind man’s hands.

“There was a burglar at our house,” the girl explained. “After he had gone we found that on the floor. This is Mr. Threefall.”

The blind man groped for Steve’s hand, pressed it, then his flexible fingers caressed the watch, his face lighting up happily.

“I’m glad,” he said, “to have this back – gladder than I can say. The money wasn’t so much – less than three hundred dollars. I’m not the Midas I’m said to be. But this watch was my father’s.”

He tucked it carefully into his vest, and then, as the girl started to straighten up the room, he remonstrated.

“You’d better run along home, Nova; it’s late, and I’m all right. I’ll go to bed now, and let the place go as it is until tomorrow.”

The girl demurred, but presently she and Steve were walking back to the MacPhails’ house, through the black streets; but they did not hurry now. They walked two blocks in silence, Steve looking ahead into dark space with glum thoughtfulness, the girl eyeing him covertly.

“What is the matter?” she asked abruptly.

Steve smiled pleasantly down at her.

“Nothing. Why?”

“There is,” she contradicted him. “You’re thinking of something unpleasant, something to do with me.”

He shook his head.

“That’s wrong, wrong on the face of it – they don’t go together.”

But she was not to be put off with compliments. “You’re – you’re -“ She stood still in the dim street, searching for the right word.

“You’re on your guard – you don’t trust me – that’s what it is!”

Steve smiled again, but with narrowed eyes. This reading of his mind might have been intuitive, or it might have been something else.

He tried a little of the truth:

“Not distrustful – just wondering. You know you
did
give me an empty gun to go after the burglar with, and you know you
wouldn’t
let me chase him.”

Her eyes flashed, and she drew herself up to the last inch of her slender live feet.

“So you think -“ she began indignantly. Then she drooped toward him, her hands fastening upon the lapels of his coat. “Please, please, Mr. Threefall, you’ve got to believe that I didn’t know the revolver was empty. It was Dr. MacPhail’s. I took it when I ran out of the house, never dreaming that it wasn’t loaded. And as for not letting you chase the burglar – I was afraid to be left alone again. I’m a little coward. I – I – Please believe in me, Mr. Threefall. Be friends with me. I need friends. I -“

Womanhood had dropped from her. She pleaded with the small white face of a child of twelve – a lonely, frightened child. And because his suspicions would not capitulate immediately to her appeal, Steve felt dumbly miserable, with an obscure shame in himself, as if he were lacking in some quality he should have had.

She went on talking, very softly, so that he had to bend his head to catch the words. She talked about herself, as a child would talk.

“It’s been terrible! I came here three months ago because there was a vacancy in the telegraph office. I was suddenly alone in the world, with very little money, and telegraphy was all I knew that could be capitalised. It’s been terrible here! The town – I can’t get accustomed to it. It’s so bleak. No children play in the streets. The people are different from those I’ve! Known – cruder, more brutal. Even the houses – street after street of them without curtains in the windows, without flowers. No grass in the yards, No trees.

“But I had to stay – there was nowhere else to go. I thought I could stay until I had saved a little money – enough to take me away. But saving money takes so long. Dr. MacPhail’s garden has been like a piece of paradise to me. If it hadn’t been for that I don’t think I could have – I’d have; gone crazy! The doctor and his wife have been nice to me; some people have been nice to me, but most of them are people I can’t understand. And not all have been nice. At first it was awful. Men would say things, and women would say things, and when I was afraid of them they thought I was stuck up. Larry – Mr. Ormsby – saved me from that. He made them let me alone, and he persuaded the MacPhails to let me live with them. Mr. Rymer has helped me, too, given me courage; but I lose it again as soon as I’m away from the sight of his face and the sound of his voice.

“I’m scared – scared of everything! Of Larry Ormsby especially! And he’s been wonderfully helpful to me. But I can’t help it. I’m afraid of him – of the way he looks at me sometimes, of things he says when he has been drinking. It’s as if there was something inside of him waiting for something. I shouldn’t say that – because I owe him gratitude for – But I’m so afraid! I’m afraid of every person, of every house, of every doorstep even. It’s a nightmare!”

Steve found that one of his hands was cupped over the white cheek that was not flat against his chest, and that his other arm was around her shoulders, holding her close.

“New towns are always like this, or worse,” he began to tell her. “You should have seen Hopewell, Virginia, when the Du Ponts first opened it. It takes time for the undesirables who come with the first rush to be weeded out. And, stuck out here in the desert, Izzard would naturally fare a little worse than the average new town. As for being friends with you – that’s why I stayed here instead of going back to Whitetufts. We’ll be great friends. We’ll -“

He never knew how long he talked, or what he said; though he imagined afterward that he must have made a very long-winded and very stupid speech. But he was not talking for the purpose of saying anything; he was tallking to soothe the girl, and to keep her small face between his hand and chest, and her small body close against his for as long a time as possible.

So, he talked on and on and on –

The MacPhails were at home when Nova Vallance and Steve came through the flowered yard again, and they welcomed the girl with evident relief. The doctor was a short man with a round bald head, and a round jovial face, shiny and rosy except where a sandy moustache drooped over his mouth. His wife was perhaps ten years younger than he, a slender blond woman with much of the feline in the set of her blue eyes and the easy grace of her movements.

“The car broke down with us about twenty miles out,” the doctor explained in a mellow rumbling voice with a hint of a burr lingering around the r’s. “I had to perform a major operation on it before we could get going again. When we got home we found you gone, and were just about to rouse thee town.”

The girl introduced Steve to the MacPhails, and then told them about the burglar, and of what they had found in the blind man’s cabin.

Dr. MacPhail shook his round naked head and clicked his tongue on teeth. “Seems to me Fernie doesn’t do all that could be done to tone Izzard down,” he said.

Then the girl remembered Steve’s wounded arm, and the doctor examined, washed, and bandaged it.

“You won’t have to wear the arm in a sling,” he said, “if you take a reasonable amount of care of it. It isn’t a deep cut, and fortunately it went between the supinator longus and the great palmar without injury to either. Get it from our burglar?”

“No. Got it in the street. A man named Kamp and I were walking toward the hotel tonight and were jumped. Kamp was killed. I got this.”

An asthmatic clock somewhere up the street was striking three as Steve passed through the MacPhails’ front gate and set out for the hotel again. He felt tired and sore in every muscle, and he walked close to the curb.

“If anything else happens tonight,” he told himself, “I’m going to run like hell from it. I’ve had enough for one evening.”

At the first cross-street he had to pause to let an automobile race by. As it passed him he recognised it – Larry Ormsby’s cream Vauxhall. In its wake sped five big trucks, with a speed that testified to readjusted gears. In a roar of engines, a cloud of dust, and a rattling of windows, the caravan vanished toward the desert.

Steve went on toward the hotel, thinking. The factory worked twenty-four hours a day, he knew; but surely no necessity of niter manufacturing would call for such excessive speed in its trucks – if they were factory trucks. He turned into Main Street and faced another surprise. The cream Vauxhall stood near the corner, its owner at the wheel. As Steve came abreast of it Larry Ormsby let its near door swing open, and held out an inviting hand.

Steve stopped and stood by the door.

“Jump in and I’ll give you a lift as far as the hotel.”

“Thanks.”

Steve looked quizzically from the man’s handsome, reckless face to the now dimly lighted hotel, less than two blocks away. Then he looked at the man again, and got into the automobile beside him.

“I hear you’re a more or less permanent fixture among us,” Ormsby said, proffering Steve cigarettes in a lacquered leather case, and shutting off his idling engine.

“For a while.”

Steve declined the cigarettes and brought out tobacco and papers from his pocket, adding, “There are things about the place I like.”

“I also hear you had a little excitement tonight.”

“Some,” Steve admitted, wondering whether the other meant the fight in which Kamp had been killed, the burglary at the MacPhails’, or both.

“If you keep up the pace you’ve set,” the factory owner’s son went on, “it won’t take you long to nose me out of my position as Izzard’s brightest light.”

Tautening nerves tickled the nape of Steve’s neck. Larry Ormsby’s words and tones seemed idle enough, but underneath them was a suggestion that they were not aimless – that they were leading to some definite place. It was not likely that he had circled around to intercept Steve merely to exchange meaningless chatter with him. Steve, lighting his cigarette, grinned and waited.

“The only thing I ever got from the old man, besides money,” Larry Ormsby was saying, “is a deep-rooted proprietary love for my own property. I’m a regular burgher for insisting that my property is mine and must stay mine. I don’t know exactly how to feel about a stranger coming in and making himself the outstanding black sheep of the town in two days. A reputation – even for recklessness – is property, you know; and I don’t feel that I should give it up –
or any other rights
– without a struggle.”

There it was. Steve’s mind cleared. He disliked subtleties. But now he knew what the talk was about. He was being warned to keep away from Nova Vallance.

“I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled, “who thought he owned all of the Pacific south of the Tropic of Capricorn – and had papers In prove it. He’d been that way ever since a Maori bashed in his head with a stone mele. Used to accuse us of stealing our drinking water from his ocean.”

Larry Ormsby flicked his cigarette into the street and started the engine.

“But the point is” – he was smiling pleasantly – “that a man is moved to protect what he thinks belongs to him. He may be wrong, of course, but that wouldn’t affect the – ah – vigour of his protecting efforts.”

Steve felt himself growing warm and angry.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly, with deliberate intent to bring this thing between them to a crisis, “but I’ve never had enough experience with property to know how I’d feel about being deprived of it. But suppose I had a – well, say – a white vest that I treasured. And suppose a man slapped my face and threatened to spoil the vest. I reckon I’d forget all about protecting the vest in my hurry to tangle with him.”

Larry laughed sharply.

Steve caught the wrist that flashed up, and pinned it to Ormsby’s side with a hand that much spinning of a heavy stick had muscled with steel.

“Easy,” he said into the slitted, dancing eyes; “easy now.”

Larry Ormsby’s white teeth flashed under his moustache.

“Righto,” he smiled. “If you’ll turn my wrist loose, I’d like to shake hands with you – a sort of antebellum gesture. I like you, Threefall; you’re going to add materially to the pleasures of Izzard.”

In his room on the third floor of the Izzard Hotel, Steve Threefall undressed slowly, hampered by a stiff left arm and much thinking. Matter for thought he had in abundance. Larry Ormsby slapping his father’s face and threatening him with an automatic; Larry Ormsby and the girl in confidential conversation; Kamp dying in a dark street, his last words lost in the noise of the marshal’s arrival; Nova Vallance giving him an empty revolver, and persuading him to let a burglar escape; the watch on the floor and the looting of the blind man’s savings; the caravan Larry Ormsby had led toward the desert; the talk in the Vauxhall, with its exchange of threats.