The Eye of the Hunter (19 page)

“Good morning, Father!” he called.

The priest looked up, smiled, and came to the sidewalk. In the cool sunlight they shook hands. Then Henry drew him aside, out of the hearing of the others. He was carrying an old briefcase of John Manion's, and Richard Parrish's bag of silver pesos.

“I have some news,” he said. “I've been out to Spanish Church. I've done the metes and bounds, I've doped the wind and reckoned the trajectory of the bullet that killed Richard Parrish. And it would be impossible for Frances to have shot him with a revolver. The woman just thought she saw it happen.”

“Yet she swears she did!”

“Impossible.” Henry pointed. “The shot was made from a cliff
five hundred yards away
! I have the spent shell, and I think I know where the body is buried. I'm going to talk to Sheriff Bannock this morning, but if this woman broadcasts her lies, it may mean Frances Parrish will be jailed and have to hire a lawyer to get out. I thought,” he said, “it might be possible for you to convince Catalina that she's wrong.”

Vargas sighed. “Unfortunately, she was married a few days ago, Meester Logan! Her husband wants to sell the story to the newspaper. I fear he's already made arrangements.”

Henry heard a lock rasp behind him, saw blinds being raised in the bank, and said, “This would be Ben Ambrose?”

“Yes. What in the world are you carrying, Meester Logan?” Henry chuckled. “Oh, just some money I'm about to deposit. Who's the lucky groom?”

“A man named Budge Gorman.”

Henry had to wait a few minutes to talk to Aaron Beckwith. The bank lobby was paneled in dark wood, with a floor of black-and-white linoleum you could play chess on. At each brass-grilled wicket was a small china cuspidor. Tellers with paper sleeve-protectors were filling canvas bags with coins for merchants, but Beckwith was out of sight behind green drapes.

Henry stared out a window. Gorman! My God! Bouncing off his dream of marrying Frances, into the arms of a whore, just to tell her, “I don't want you anymore!” And then to complete his triumph by
selling
her downfall to the newspaper.

A gaunt man with a weathered face came to a gate in a walnut fence, pointed a finger at Henry, and went back into his green cubicle. He was seated behind a desk when Henry entered. Beckwith waved at a chair. Henry guessed from his cold eye that he knew him.

“What can I do for you?” Beckwith asked. He was no overweight, red-faced man of affairs whose appetites were in his face. He looked horn-hard, his features stained by wind and sun, and his eyes lead-gray in a poker face. The sleeves of his black coat were too short. He would look more at ease in a dirty canvas jacket and work pants, with a smoking branding iron in his hands. Yet his eyes avoided Henry's.

“It's about Mrs. Parrish's account ...” Henry began.

But Beckwith said, “Mrs. Parrish doesn't have an account with us.”

“I think Spider Cattle company does, and she's the vice president. Am I right?”

“By Arizona law, it's her husband's account. Pretty close to defunct, anyway.”

Henry placed the bag of pesos on the desk and patted it. “You'll find two hundred and fifty pesos in all here, to bring the balance up a little. Mrs. Parrish came across the money the other day.”

“I'll have it counted and credited to Spider's account.”

“Aren't you interested in where she found the money?”

“Not particularly.”

“The sack was under he husband's bed!”

“Well—a temporary safe place, evidently.”

“But where did it come from?”

Beckwith raised and dropped his hands. “Mr. Logan—it looks like a busy day. Was there anything else?”

“One or two things. I'm trying to help Mrs. Parrish get her finances squared away, and one of the things I noticed was an offer on the ranch signed by you and General Stockard. It's dated about five months ago.”

Beckwith rolled a pencil between his palms. “That's right. And a fair one, when you consider that we'd be assuming all the ranch's debts.” Beckwith could be holding two deuces or four aces. His brown, stringy face revealed nothing.

“Why would you do that?” Henry asked, surprised.

“Because, goddamm it, they'll have to be paid before title to the ranch is clear!”

“But the ranch is a corporation—Spider Cattle Corporation. And all the bills I've seen were signed by Parrish himself—as an individual. The ranch doesn't owe anything, as far as I know.”

Beckwith's face flushed. Henry had rocked him. He wasn't sure of his own ground, but he had startled him. “Where did you hear that?” the banker asked scoffingly.

“Hum Parrish's attorney told me the old rooster was such a gambler, he set up the corporation to protect the ranch against his poker losses.”

“Well, I'd suggest you consult a Territorial attorney, Mr. Logan.” Beckwith placed his hands flat on the desk.

Henry got up. But then he dug into the leather bag and drew out a handful of silver coins. “Did he deposit many of those government assay office drafts?” he asked.

“He didn't deposit any of them! He cashed them. About all he ever deposited were the trust checks he received from Kansas City every month.”

“Cashed the government drafts for gold?”

“No, dammit!We seldom see gold here. He cashed them for silver coins—pesos. Mr. Logan—adios, as we say on the border.”

“Do you have the saying, on the border, ‘salting'?” Henry asked. “As in salting a mine, to make it look richer than it is?”

“I'm not sure what you're getting at, but I do know that old mine is played out. When Stockard and I made our offer on Spider, we were interested in land. Because that's all there is out there.”

“No, but if you look at those assay slips, I think you'll see the proportions of silver and copper in the bars he sold just about match that in sterling silver! In church artifacts, for instance.”

“Pretty close, I suppose.”

“Or Mexican coins. The numbers on these pesos tell how many parts of silver are in them—usually around seven-twenty in a thousand—sterling, that is. Same as what the assayer found in the ingots Rip Parrish was bringing him. Still, it's no secret that he gave a silver candlestick to Father Vargas, so maybe he was digging up treasure, not coins.”

“I'm not a treasure hunter, Logan.”

“Good thing you aren't. Because what Rip Parrish was doing was melting pesos, shaping them into ingots, and selling them to the government assayer. Then cashing the government drafts for more pesos to melt!”

Beckwith dug out a handful of pesos and looked at them. “I don't—that makes no sense at all. Why on earth—”

“To create a false impression!” Henry said. “Like salting a mine. Rip wanted people to think he had tons of silver out there. That he might not be much of a cattleman, but he sure knew where the silver was! In another few months he'd probably have been ready to put the ranch up for sale. What a shame some deadeye dick shot him before he could work his scheme.”

Henry walked south from the bank: to the
Globe
office and tried the door. He rattled it, then banged on it, peering through the mullioned glass panes. The place was dark. He turned to stare at the Frontera Hotel, rolling his shoulders. A man on the veranda was watching him. Henry gave a grunt of satisfaction and started for the hotel.

At a small round table of Mexican palm fiber and rawhide sat Ben Ambrose, a gray fedora on the side of his head. He was sipping coffee and nibbling a rolled tortilla and appeared to be reading a book. Yet his bearing was somehow not that of a successful editor taking his ease in the warm morning, but of a lonely and beleaguered man. He damned well should be lonely! Henry thought bitterly. Most people in the town feared him—did anyone love him? Was he married, and did his wife hector him, as others were afraid to? And it appeared that General Stockard had dropped him as a partner.

Which, however, might be the very thing that saved him from hanging.

Henry climbed the steps to the wide porch as Ambrose, in the shade of the wooden awning, watched him come. He placed his hand on the back of a chair and growled an invitation.

“Waiter'll be here in a minute,” he said.

He bit down on the rolled tortilla, his lips flaring back from long-stained teeth as yellow as those of an old dog. His gray box coat hung open, and Henry glimpsed the butt of a small pistol in a slash in the lining. Looked like a British Bulldog, butt like a small banana, probably a .28-caliber. The jauntily waxed tips of his mustache did not match the emaciation of his face, the dried skin dark as jerked venison.

“How's the state of your health?” Ambrose muttered.

“Despite all,” Henry said, “I'm feeling fine.” He tried to see what the editor was reading, and sat back smiling. “Isn't that Latin? With your nature you can't be studying for the priesthood, so it must be the law.”

The gaunt head came up. “It's neither.”

“What is it, then? Homer?”

“Homer was Greek. It's about war.”

“Don't you ever get enough? You should have tried Cuba, like Stephen Crane. He got a good book out of it.”

“Crane's best book was about the Civil War, which he never saw. You don't have to leave town to find stories, Logan. Every man's life has a book in it, but most lives are dismal failures—every day a bungled patrol, every year a disastrous retreat. Why? Lack of basic military comprehension! Men fail because they think life is a friend, not an enemy.”

“So my father learned. Why don't you write his biography? I hear tell he had a very exciting life, once he left the military.”

“You're forgetting, I did your father in my book—a chapter, at least. He was a perfect example of the average man—no offense, Logan—in his case, of a capable military man who didn't understand that life is to be fought, not tootled away on a tin whistle. He let the brass push him around, pass him over for promotions, give him a dangerous job like paymaster in Indian country. Life is nothing but a goddamned enemy.”

“How can I protect myself?” Henry grinned at Ambrose's rising excitement.

“Develop a battle plan! Set up a final firing line—the critical point beyond which you will not be pushed! Where you howl like a savage and take your dagger in your teeth. What if you lose? Is it any worse than breaking your neck yawning?”

“Right!” said Henry. “Although ... well, I'd have thought your golden globe was a final firing line.”

Ambrose bared his stained teeth again in a grin like a monkey's. “Not at all. It was just a skirmish. Of no strategic importance whatever.”

A waiter brought coffee and tortillas.

“Still,” Henry said, “it's quite a comedown, isn't it? From riding with Stockard with your dagger in your teeth, to running a small-town newspaper with a Mexican cigarette in them. I used to see your articles in
Harper's Weekly
, and I read your book, but here you are—look at yourself, man!—publishing recipes, biggest-turnip-in-Arizona stories, and vignettes of history! Was that your battle plan?”

The editor flipped his cigarette into the street and somehow made his shrug seem insulting. “I've done all right.”

“Well, I've got a suggestion,” Henry said. “Take your dagger in your teeth again and start setting type. I've got a story for you. You might call it ‘The Killing of Rip Parrish.'”

He pulled a spent shell from his pocket and stood it upright on its base. “What do you think? That shell case is unique.”

Ambrose turned it in his fingers, lips pursed. A bottlenose brass cartridge with a case as thick as his thumb, it looked like any other express shell, over three inches long, necked to take a paper patch or two. But he unwittingly touched what was strange about it when he rubbed the brass tube where the big shell throated down to the more common .45-caliber.

“Want my guess? A Sharps buffalo load.”

“It used to be. But look at it closely. It's been redesigned for smaller but more dangerous game. The bullet from this shell killed Richard Parrish.”

Ambrose tidied the comers of his mouth with thumb and forefinger, then wound the three hairs that comprised the tip of his right mustache. He recited, his voice mocking, ‘“I shot an arrow in the air, it came to earth I know not where.' How can a gunsmith possibly believe that the lead from this case came to earth in Rip Parrish's unworthy carcass? Did you find the body? Is he dead? I guarantee this would make a story, if you can back it up.”

“I know where he's buried. I don't know how the general dragged him up there by himself, but who knows, maybe he had a cohort—”

He broke off as a thunderous explosion rolled and echoed along the street.

He had dodged enough artillery to recognize that it was a round from a fieldpiece. He yelled,
“Take cover!”
his heart bouncing up in his chest, and found himself on his knees, trying to crawl under the table.
He was back in the crotch of a tree, safety-belted, and a Spanish gunner was laying ranging shots on him
. Echoes rolled like distant thunder, coffee sloshed, and behind them windows rattled. On a brown Mexican hillside a mile away, a shell burst threw up a cloud of dirt.

“That old loony!” Ambrose groaned. “It's all right, Logan, we aren't being shelled. Stockard is going mad as a hatter. I wonder if he decided to put his senile wife out of her misery. Today's headline:
THE HEADLESS HOUSEWIFE
!”

Henry sat down again, his pulse still bounding. “Was that a shot from his famous target rifle?”

Ambrose coolly blotted his saucer with a napkin. “Not quite. He has this Civil War cannon, you see—mint condition. It squats on his lawn like a bulldog, and on New Year's Eve and certain important occasions he fires a round.”