Sheep Limit/Chapter 24
The seriousness of Rawlins' wound made a daily trip to the doctor necessary. Mrs. Peck had gone back to the ranch the same evening she came with the wagon and the startling news of Edith's desertion, leaving the two men to hold what they had won. Peck's great interest in the welfare of his sheep took him abroad early and kept him away all day, except for a dash in at noon for dinner.
This threw Rawlins on his own one-armed resources very largely, and he found little that he could do. He had not been able to devise any scheme by which a one-armed man could wash dishes, for one thing. Owing to that, things had a distressing way of accumulating about the place, Peck being content to scrape the plates of the last meal for the next. Peck had not even thought to volunteer any help in saddling Graball for the daily trip to Lost Cabin. By using his teeth Rawlins had managed the cinch in a hazardous fashion that held until he got to town, where the doctor tightened the girth to carry him home.
Several days passed that way, with no further interference by the forces which had dominated that illegally occupied territory so long. While Mrs. Peck had visited them daily, news of Edith was still lacking. The sheepwoman appeared to have recovered from her first flurry, but Rawlins was beginning to feel the strain of anxiety. He believed there was something between Mrs. Peck and Edith which the sheepwoman had concealed, responsible for the girl's sudden desertion of the ranch.
A feeling of resentment toward Edith for her precipitate action, her cold expression therein of complete aloofness from his affairs and all interest in them, had hardened Rawlins to her welfare for a while. Now this feeling was clearing out of his mind, giving place to fear that Edith had not gone entirely of her own free will. The girl was not so shallow and heartless as to pull out like that after the unworded understanding that had grown up between them. She would have come to him with her troubles, he believed, unless she had been goaded beyond forbearance or driven away outright.
Rawlins had returned from Lost Cabin shortly before noon on the fifth day since the fight, a cloud of anxiety concerning Edith darkening the outlook, even obscuring everything beyond that hour. He seemed to be living in little jerks of time, hope, expectation, clearing a space an arm's length ahead, like a man traveling in a heavy fog.
He unsaddled Graball and turned him out to graze, the horse having become so entirely domesticated and affectionate that he would come running at a call or a whistled summons, and turned his one-handed efforts to preparing the mid-day meal. He had brought potatoes and unions, unusual luxuries, from town that trip, with anticipation of an old-time Kansas dish of the two vegetables sliced and boiled together for supper that evening. If he could get Peck to prepare the vegetables when he came in for dinner, the rest could be managed with one hand.
Rawlins was not quite certain that his own gloomy state of mind was responsible, or whether Peck had been sulky the past two days. He had appeared to be somewhat less communicative and voluble than usual, his manner sarcastic on the least provocation. Fancied or real, Peck's attitude had not given much concern. Now, when Peck came in for dinner, there was no mistaking his ill-humor. Rawlins wondered if he had stepped on the new flockmaster's toes.
"Taters, huh?" said Peck, taking a peep into the sack. "It's about time you was chippin' in something on the grub, Rawlins. You've been eatin' off of me ever since the old lady brought up that grub."
"All right, Peck," Rawlins returned good-naturedly, although he felt a desire for a hot retort to the inhospitable charge. "There's some onions in the sack, too. I thought maybe I could get you to clean some of both of them for supper. I could manage to cook them all right."
"It don't look like you've managed to cook very much dinner," Peck said contemptuously. "I tell you right now, Rawlins, I'm gittin' dan tired of doin' all the work around this joint. And you've got the gall to ask me to clean onions on the side. I wouldn't clean the dan things for a dollar apiece, and I wouldn't eat 'em for five. You can't put all the dirty work off on me around here, I tell you, Rawlins."
"I'm sorry, old feller, but you'll have to take it as it comes," Rawlins said in a friendly dispassionate way.
"I've been doin' it ever since I landed here," fvPeck sneered, his glassy goggle eyes seeming to advance and recede in their shallow sockets as he leered at Rawlins. "Look at them dishes, look at this dan crummy joint! It looks to me like you'd clean things up, Rawlins. You can afford to, me furnishin' the grub."
"The door's open, Peck, if you don't like the kind of hospitality I'm able to offer," Rawlins said.
"Is yat so?" Peck chattered, with insolent boyish mockery. "You wait till I go, then, will you? You ain't got nothing on me because you killed a man. Them coroner fellers said the one I killed was twice as big as yours. You kind of want to watch your step when you talk about firin' me out of any door, Rawlins."
"Peck, you're talkin' like a fool," Rawlins said calmly.
He was not afraid of Peck, although his pistol was hanging on the wall behind the door, where he had relieved himself of it on his return from town, nor was it surprising to see this villainous streak of egotism and overbearing selfishness in the man. Rawlins had seen it growing from the day when Peck's lucky shot knocked a man over in the fight, but it had developed faster than expected.
"I've got as much right here as you have," Peck declared, scowling and glowering as he slammed a slab of bacon down to haggle off some for the pan in his bungling way. "Where'd you 'a' been at if I hadn't run them sheep of mine in here and stood them fellers off? Who done the fightin' that time? that's what I want to know. I'll bet you money if you found the bullet that went through that other feller you'd see it come out of my gun. And that ain't no dream."
"You're welcome to all the glory, Peck."
"You and Tippie tried to git me shot up over there when I was green and didn't know the ropes. You thought you was pullin' something smart on a dude from St. Joe; you thought you'd either git me killed off or run out of here so I'd be out of your way with Edith. I was green, all right, but I wasn't so green I couldn't see your game. Where're you at now with Edith? She's shook you cold; she's gone chasin' off to meet some man that's pumped her full of hot air. Maybe he'll marry her, maybe he won't. I know how I'd bet."
Rawlins sat still, keeping his mouth shut. But he was considering, with gravity that amounted to a great peril for Peck, whether he ought not to grab the hammer that lay on a cross-studding and knock the slanderous scoundrel cold. His muscles were setting for a quick reach and a quicker blow, when his more generous nature restrained him. Peck was not without justification in his rancorous recollection of that plot against his safety and dignity. There was not much that he could say in self defence.
"You ain't got nothing on me," Peck insisted meanly. "This is as much my place as yours. You couldn't 'a' held it down if I hadn't been here to stand 'em off."
Peck allowed the argument to rest there, concentrating his talents on frying the bacon, which he always managed to put a black border around, with curled-up ends almost raw. He slashed and speared his food vindictively all through the meal, looking up from his operations occasionally with his round glassy eyes more bulging and expressionless than usual, as if to begin the one-sided quarrel again. But he evidently thought better or worse of it, and held his peace until he was through.
When Peck pushed back, everything cleared up, he seemed to be in a better humor. His thin face was glowing with replenishment; he stroked the grease and coffee out of his prideful moustache with both hands, giving a twirling, wringing movement to his fingers that was marvelously efficient for the job. He looked at Rawlins with the expressionless round stare of an octopus in his big eyes, in which there seemed to be something of insolence, something of malevolent greed, yet all so far dispersed over the hard glittering globes as to be elusive and undefinable.
"I'm goin' to be square with you, Rawlins," Peck said, producing a wallet as suddenly as it was astonishing. "I'm goin' to pay you, cash money, for your shack and so-called improvements on this place, and take your receipt for it. Then you're goin' to hit the breeze."
Rawlins was so amazed by this sudden discovery of Peck's hand that he sat across the table from him, staring. He was uncertain whether Peck was trying to pull off some kind of a joke of his own, to even past scores, or whether he had some fool notion in his head for getting possession of the homestead, the choicest site for sheep headquarters in that locality, as the sheepmen on the coroner's jury had said.
"What the devil are you drivin' at, Peck?" he asked at length, as Peck began to put money down on the table beside a folded piece of paper he had taken from the greasy leather wallet that never could have been his own.
Up came Peck's gun, which he steadied in his peculiar fashion with both hands, the left clasping the wrist of the right.
"I mean you're goin' to hit the breeze out of here," Peck announced, trying to look mean, succeeding fairly well. "There's five hundred dollars, and there's a bill of sale for you to sign. If you make a break for a gun I'll bust you wide open!"
"Peck, you're a bigger fool than I thought you were," Rawlins told him, apparently without any deeper feeling than a man would have in stating an obvious fact.
"I'll show you how big a fool I am if you keep on talkin', Rawlins. I'm just big enough fool, maybe, to shoot you like I did that other feller. Who's here to swear you didn't pull your gun first?"
"Well, anyhow," said Rawlins, apparently undisturbed, "I decline your offer for my improvements and possession of this place. It wouldn't do you any good even if you could make your bluff go."
Rawlins, calm as he seemed, was boiling with inward rage. He was picking up and casting away the fugacious schemes which came rushing into his mind for getting the upper hand of Peck. It was as if he ran swiftly along in a dream, snatching at something on which his life depended, only to clasp nothing, his despair increasing at every step. Peck's cupidity, his new sense of importance, with the promises of reward which Rawlins knew to be behind it all, might impel him even to murder. He was cunning enough to know he had a long chance, in that none too particular community, of getting away with his plea.
"You'll have to pull your freight, money or no money—you can take it or leave it—that's up to you."
And this was the man, thought Rawlins, who talked simperingly a few days ago about suitings, and the allurements of St. Joe, and bewailed the loss of pencil-striped trousers, and a blue coat cut waist-form, with roll lapels. Cupidity had made a tyrant out of a fool, as had happened before in the history of princes and potentates, and plain scrubs of the stripe of Peck. Here was declaration of war following war, as always falls out among the victors, a new and more distressing conflict over the spoils.
The best thing to do was to try to play him on a little while for an opening, and grab his chance when it came.
"I'll send your things over to the hotel at Lost Cabin in a day or two," Peck said. "You can go and claim 'em or you can leave 'em, but if you ever show your face around here agin I'll bust you wide open!"
"All right, Peck; you're the boss right now," Rawlins seemed to yield. "Shove that paper over here—I'll sign it."
"No, you don't! You don't git me to put this old gun down till you're saddled up and gone out of here. Come around here and sign it, and watch your step!"
Peck got up, backing away from the chair, keeping his gun held on Rawlins, his bony shoulders haunched up, head to one side, one eye squinting along the barrel. Rawlins pushed his chair away from the table, trying to assume a dejected and conquered mien. He went slowly around the end of the table where Peck's old Mexican hat lay on the slab of bacon from which their dinner had been cut. The handle of the butcher knife presented a hopeful invitation to Rawlins' eye as he passed, unseen before that moment, unthought of until that breath.
Rawlins snatched the knife and made a lunge at Peck, who backed off trying to cock his pistol, a precaution which he had overlooked, one to which Rawlins perhaps owed his life. Rawlins jabbed the knife against Peck's ribs, disconcerting his business of raising the hammer—it was a single-action, old-time weapon—which slipped from under his thumb and came down with aroar. The bullet went somewhere; Rawlins was not concerned where just then, knowing it had not gone through him.
"Drop it!" he yelled, making Peck jump with the threat of sudden death he put into the command.
Peck let it go. There was a look of terror in his bulging eyes as he lifted his long arms and begged for his life. He backed off, his legs striking the cot drawn against the wall, bloodless agony in his face, Rawlins pressing him unmercifully.
"Don't kill me, Rawlins! For God's sake, don't kill me!" Peck begged. "I wasn't goin' to hurt you—it was only a bluff."
"Yes, I'm going to kill you!" Rawlins said savagely, pushing the knife till it bit. "You're not fit to live, you traitor!"
Peck begged in broken ejaculations as Rawlins faced him to the wall and stood him there with raised hands appealing to the roof. Rawlins dropped the knife, snatched his gun from the holster hanging in its accustomed place behind the door.
"Yes, I'm going to kill you!" he said again, with the unaccented tremolo of passionate rage rising from a base wrong. "Yes, I'm going to kill you!" repeating it like the click of a wheel in stated revolution.
"It's the old woman's fault!" Peck pleaded. "Kill her if you kill anybody. For God's sake, don't shoot me—don't shoot me!"
"Yes, I'm goin' to shoot you!" Rawlins said, in that same panting, hasty, hard voice, believing in his soul that he was going to do it.