Crime Stories Page 23

  Nowhere did the ground hold the impression of feet larger than a small woman’s or a ten—or twelve—year−old boy’s.

  The fugitive crossed the yard to the dwelling, moving with wide−spread legs to offset the unsteadiness of his gait. With the unhurried, unresting spacing of clock−ticks, fat drops of blood fell from the fingers of his limp left hand to be hammered by the rain into the soggy earth.

  Through the dirty pane of a window he saw the woman and boy, sitting together on a cot, facing the door.

  The boy’s face was white when the man threw the door open and came into the unpartitioned interior, and his mouth trembled; but the woman’s thin, sallow face showed nothing—except, by its lack of surprise, that she had seen him approaching. She sat stiffly on the cot, her hands empty and motionless in her lap, neither fear nor interest in her faded eyes.

  The man stood for a time where he had halted—just within the door to one side—a grotesque statue modelled of mud. Short, sturdy−bodied, with massive sagging shoulders. Nothing of clothing or hair showed through his husk of clay, and little of face and hands. The marshal’s revolver in his hand, clean and dry, took on by virtue of that discordant immaculateness an exaggerated deadliness.

  His eyes swept the room: two cots against the undressed board side walls, a plain deal table in the center, rickety kitchen chairs here and there, a battered and scratched bureau, a trunk, a row of hooks holding an indiscriminate assembly of masculine and feminine clothing, a pile of shoes in a corner, an open door giving access to a lean−to kitchen.

  He crossed to the kitchen door, the woman’s face turning to follow.

  The lean−to was empty. He confronted the woman.

  “Where’s your man?”

  “Gone.”

  “When’ll he be back?”

  “Ain’t coming back.”

  The flat, expressionless voice of the woman seemed to puzzle the fugitive, as had her lack of emotion at his entrance. He scowled, and turned his eyes—now redder than ever with flecks of blood—from her face to the boy’s and back to hers.

  “Meaning what?” he demanded.

  “Meaning he got tired of homesteading.”

  He pursed his lips thoughtfully. Then he went to the corner where the shoes were piled. Two pairs of men’s worn shoes were there—dry and without fresh mud.

  He straightened, slipped the revolver back into its holster, and awkwardly took off the slicker. “Get me some grub.”

  The woman left the cot without a word and went into the kitchen. The fugitive pushed the boy after her, and stood in the doorway while she cooked coffee, flapjacks, and bacon. Then they returned to the living−room. She put the food on the table and with the boy beside her resumed her seat on the cot.

  The man wolfed the meal without looking at it—his eyes busy upon door, window, woman, and boy, his revolver beside his plate. Blood still dripped from his left hand, staining table and floor. Bits of earth were dislodged from his hair and face and hands and fell into his plate, but he did not notice them.

  His hunger appeased, he rolled and lit a cigarette, his left hand fumbling stiffly through its part.

  For the first time the woman seemed to notice the blood. She came around to his side. “You’re bleeding.

  Let me fix it.”

  His eyes—heavy now with the weights of fatigue and satisfied hunger—studied her face suspiciously.

  Then he leaned back in his chair and loosened his clothes, exposing the week−old bullet−hole.

  She brought water and cloths, and bathed and bandaged the wound. Neither of them spoke again until she had returned to the cot.

  Then: “Had any visitors lately?”

  “Ain’t seen nobody for six or seven weeks.”

  “How far’s the nearest phone?”

  “Nobel’s—eight miles up the coulee.”

  “Got any horses besides the one in the shed?”

  “No.”

  He got up wearily and went to the bureau, pulling the drawers out and plunging his hands into them. In the top one he found a revolver, and pocketed it. In the trunk he found nothing. Behind the clothes on the wall he found a rifle. The cots concealed no weapons.

  He took two blankets from one of the cots, the rifle, and his slicker. He staggered as he walked to the door.

  “I’m going to sleep a while,” he said thickly, “out in the shed where the horse is at. I’ll be turning out every now and then for a look around, and I don’t want to find nobody missing. Understand?”

  She nodded, and made a suggestion.

  “If any strangers show up, I guess you want to be woke up before they see you?”

  His sleep−dull eyes became alive again, and he came unsteadily back to thrust his face close to hers, trying to peer behind the faded surfaces of her eyes.

  “I killed a fellow in Jingo last week,” he said after a while, talking slowly, deliberately, in a monotone that was both cautioning and menacing. “It was fair shooting. He got me in the shoulder before I downed him. But he belonged in Jingo and I don’t. The best I could expect is the worst of it. I got a chance to get away before they took me to Great Falls, and I took it. And I ain’t figuring on being took back there and hung. I ain’t going to be here long, but while I am—”

  The woman nodded again.

  He scowled at her and left the shack.

  He tied the horse in one corner of the hut with shortened rope and spread his blankets between it and the door. Then, with the marshal’s revolver in his hand, he lay down and slept.

  The afternoon was far gone when he woke, and the rain was still falling. He studied the bare yard carefully, and reconnoitered the house before re−entering it.

  The woman had swept and tidied the room; had put on a fresh dress, which much washing had toned down to a soft pink; had brushed and fluffed her hair. She looked up at his entrance from the sewing that occupied her, and her face, still young in spite of the harshness that work had laid upon it, was less sallow than before.

  “Where’s the kid?” the man snapped.

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

  “Up on the hill. I sent him up to watch the coulee.”

  His eyes narrowed and he left the building. Studying the hill through the rain, he discerned the outline of the boy, lying face−down under a stunted red cedar, looking toward the east. The man returned indoors.

  “How’s the shoulder?” she asked.

  He raised an experimental arm.

  “Better. Pack me some grub. I’m moving on.”

  “You’re a fool,” she said without spirit as she went into the kitchen. “You’d do better to stay here until your shoulder’s fit to travel.”

  “Too close to Jingo.”

  “Ain’t nobody going to fight all that mud to come after you. A horse couldn’t get through, let alone a car.

  And you don’t think they’d foot it after you even if they knew where to find you, do you? And this rain ain’t going to do your shoulder no good.”

  She bent to pick up a sack from the floor. Under the thin pink dress the line of back and hips and legs stood out sharply against the wall.

  As she straightened she met his gaze, her lids dropped, her face flushed, her lips parted a little.

  The man leaned against the jamb of the door and caressed the muddy stubble of his chin with a thick thumb.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  She put away the food she had been bundling, took a galvanized pail from the corner, and made three trips to the spring, filling an iron tub that she had set on the stove. He stood in the doorway watching.

  She stirred the fire, went into the living−room, and took a suit of underwear, a blue shirt, and a pair of socks from the bureau, a pair of gray trousers from one of the hooks, and a pair of carpet slippers from the pile of footwear. She put the clothing on a chair in the kitchen.

  Then she returned to the living−room, closing the connecting door.

  As the man undressed and
bathed, he heard her humming softly. Twice he tiptoed to the connecting door and put an eye to the crack between it and the jamb. Each time he saw her sitting on the cot, bending over her sewing, her face still flushed.

  He had one leg in the trousers she had given him when the humming stopped suddenly.

  His right hand swept up the revolver from a convenient chair, and he moved to the door, the trousers trailing across the floor behind the ankle he had thrust through them. Flattening himself against the wall, he put an eye to the crack.

  In the front door of the shack stood a tall youth in a slicker that was glistening with water. In the youth’s hands was a double−barrelled shotgun, the twin muzzles of which, like dull, malignant eyes, were focused on the center of the connecting door.

  The man in the kitchen swung his revolver up, his thumb drawing back the hammer with the mechanical precision of the man who is accustomed to single−action pistols.

  The lean−to’s rear door slammed open. “Drop it!”

  The fugitive, wheeling with the sound of the door’s opening, was facing this new enemy before the order was out.

  Two guns roared together.

  But the fugitive’s feet, as he wheeled, had become entangled in the trailing trousers. The trousers had tripped him. He had gone to his knees at the very instant of the two guns’ roaring.

  His bullet had gone out into space over the shoulder of the man in the doorway. That one’s bullet had driven through the wall a scant inch over the falling fugitive’s head.

  Floundering on his knees, the fugitive fired again.

  The man in the door swayed and spun half around.

  As he righted himself, the fugitive’s forefinger tightened again around the trigger—

  From the connecting doorway a shotgun thundered.

  The fugitive came straight up on his feet, his face filled with surprise, stood bolt upright for a moment, and wilted to the floor.

  The youth with the shotgun crossed to the man who leaned against the door with a hand clapped to his side. “Did he get you, Dick?”

  “Just through the flesh, I reckon—don’t amount to nothing. Reckon you killed him, Bob?”

  “I reckon I did. I hit him fair!”

  The woman was in the lean−to. “Where’s Buddy?”

  “The kid’s all right, Mrs. Odams,” Bob assured her. “But he was all in from running through the mud, so Ma put him to bed.”

  The man who lay still on the floor made a sound then, and they saw that his eyes were open.

  Mrs. Odams and Bob knelt beside him, but he stopped them when they tried to move him to examine the wreckage the shotgun had made of his back.

  “No use,” he protested, blood trickling thinly from the corners of his mouth as he spoke. “Let me alone.”

  Then his eyes—their red savageness glazed—sought the woman’s.

  “You—Dan—Odams’s—woman?” he managed.

  There was something of defiance—a hint that she felt the need of justification—in her answer. “Yes.”

  His face—thick−featured and deep—lined without the mud—told nothing of what was going on in his mind.

  “Dummy,” he murmured to himself presently, his eyes flickering toward the hill on whose top he had seen what he had believed to be a reclining boy.

  She nodded.

  The man who had killed Dan Odams turned his head away and spat his mouth empty of blood. Then his eyes returned to hers.

  “Good girl,” he said clearly—and died.

  ESTHER ENTERTAINS

  He shouldn’t (he thought) have come. These four hours, if so applied, would have disposed all the incidentals to his departure tomorrow, sending him away with no loose ends to be taken care of later. But her voice had come over the wire so alluringly; and no doubt she really had missed him, not seeing him for two weeks. And to have excused himself tonight would have been to prolong that fortnight to nearly two months, since his trip would cover six weeks at the least. Perhaps he could leave an hour early, get away at eleven-thirty or forty-five without seeming anxious to go.

  “You know I did, dear. If you had waited another ten minutes, or fifteen at the outside, I’d have been calling you up.”

  He had almost called her “honey”: an endearment for which she professed aversion, finding it reminiscent, possibly, of some former lover who had been disappointing. Southerners, he believed, were addicted to the word; and she came from somewhere in the Carolinas.

  “Not a thing except work.”

  She didn’t look so well tonight. Her gown was less than becoming; and her hair, dressed in this new manner, was also at fault, accentuating the slenderness of her throat: a slenderness that was on the point of aging into scrawniness. She must be getting along in years. Even in this light, diluted and tinted to friendliness, she failed to appear quite young. Her figure, too, was less youthfully slim now than merely thin. Her eyes were good, though, and they saved her: she would never be unattractive while they held their beauty. If only she wouldn’t maneuver them with so little subtlety, with so obvious a consciousness: pulling them around like fat blue puppets beneath the heavy dark fringe of her lashes: lashes edging lids that slid down and up on occasion with all the smooth precision of well-handled drop-curtains.

  “Sit still, baby, I’ll get them.”

  If he didn’t light his cigarette, she would, and pass it to him limp and hot from the excessive draught she had applied, its end sodden with saliva, and he would have to smoke it with a pretense of extra enjoyment. Of course, that would happen once or twice before the evening was over; but by exercising a reasonable amount of alertness, and keeping the cigarettes near him, he could prevent its too frequent occurrence.

  “I did. You know, or you should, without my telling you.”

  It was peculiar, how he was invariably disappointed in her. It wasn’t, either, that he had any illusions. He would leave tonight—as he had left the last time and the several times before that—to hardly think of her again until he had an evening whose emptiness promised to be irksome, or until he heard from her. Such vagrant thoughts as came to him meanwhile would not draw him toward her. Yet, between the time when his engagements were made and the time for their keeping, he was somehow filled with inflated notions of her charm and appeal—an anticipation of vague ecstacies. Not consciously; but that he always experienced this disappointment testified to the existence of some such process of delusion.

  “Yes, much nicer.”

  It was nicer. The light at their feet, a mellow glow, tilted upward the shadows on her face, softened the texture of her skin, lent her an appearance of girlishness—almost. She was, for that matter, girlish, in a way. Arrested development you could call it if you liked, but it went well with her smallness; and, now that the only illumination came slanting up from the gas log, you could believe in her youngness, or very nearly.

  “Utterly.”

  He would be utterly comfortable if only she wouldn’t fidget so much, tickling his face with her hair; and if she wouldn’t call him “dearest” or that ridiculous “most beloved boy.” Superlatives were weak, almost cheap. Furthermore, superlatives carried with them the postulant that there were others in the speaker’s mind. To call him dearest was to think of one who was dear and another who was dearer; though it was unlikely that it worked out that way—that she had anyone else in her mind at the time. But the inference, the suggestion, was there. Not that he cared, really, how many others there might be; but it was nevertheless faulty technic. The pleasurableness of these evenings depended upon the maintenance of certain illusions whose very high artificiality made them delicate and all the more vulnerable to the least discordance.

  “I wasn’t thinking at all. I don’t when I am with you. There’s nothing to think about. It’s all here. This afternoon there may have been a world—Tm not quite sure. Tomorrow there may be another, or even a continuation of the same one; with business and things in it, and scheming and conniving to be done. But now there’s not
hing anywhere but you and me, and the aim of existence is to sit still, like this, close to you, doing nothing, neither remembering nor imagining—just sitting still with you.”

  More than a bit silly, but it would at least keep her from jumping up and turning on that damned talking machine for a while. She needn’t, however, have received it with so much rapture. The Lord knew he had made the same speech, or one of its variants, often enough before. She would know by now that it didn’t have any particular meaning, that it was just one of the things you say. She did know it, of course, but she should also know that he was aware of her knowledge. Her antics threw a spotlight on the speech, gave it a prominence that was never meant for it and that made it seem sillier than ever. And why did women always want to know what you were thinking about? And if, as was probable, they didn’t, why did they ask? The sort of answers they got would become monotonous after a while.

  . . . It was easier to kiss than to talk, and more satisfying. She did kiss well. Even the solemnity, with its insistence upon an equal seriousness on his part, which she brought to the business failed to mar it; though it would have been more thoroughly enjoyable without this alien reverence. She surely didn’t expect him to believe that she held these kisses, embraces, caresses, so sacred as she pretended. That was the worst side of her: she not only invested her amours with all the trappings of the theater, but she went to the amateur theater for her properties.

  . . . There it was again. It was as if there were hidden and not very sophisticated spectators to be satisfied. A kiss wasn’t, properly, a sacrament; nor was she any more deeply stirred than he, for instance, himself. It could all have been done just as neatly and a whole lot more enjoyably without the burning glances, the shivers and sighs, the devout emotion with which she embellished it—sometimes caricatured it. He must be careful not to smile, though, not even when she reached her highest histrionic altitude; or she would sulk, and that was a nuisance. True enough, her sulkiness seldom endured for longer than it took him to light a cigarette, but even that was sufficient to irritate him and make him feel rather sullen himself. Now and then, when a smile wouldn’t be repressed, he could hit upon the right thing to say—something without flippancy but at the same time whimsical—and pass it off; but she didn’t as a rule like trivialities of any sort when her emotions were rampant.