The Trail Rider/Chapter 22
IT was late that evening when the news began to fly around Cottonwood that Johnnie Mackey had transferred his interests to Jud Springer and quit the town in the dark. It was the biggest sensation that Cottonwood ever had experienced. Even the thrashing of the mayor became a secondary incident in the town's history, and in the minds of the knowing ones merely a forerunning branch of this great event. For, closely as their meeting with Mackey had been guarded, there were some who were aware of it, and Texas and the dark little stranger were at once clothed with a mysterious importance that lifted them to a conspicuous situation in the public eye.
Detectives, it was generally said they were, who had a line on Mackey's past, brought in by Jud Springer for the purpose of smoking him out. Springer got the credit for it; nobody ever had heard of a shrewder business move.
The town remained awake longer than usual to talk about it, the citizens and visitors shifting from one of Jud Springer's gaping doors to the other, almost everybody rejoicing in the overthrow of Mackey, who had made his office a position of oppression. On account of public felicitation, and the unusual celebration among the normally staid and domesticated citizens, the town was drowsy next morning and asleep later than its accustomed hour.
Cattlemen began to arrive before the sun had struck down to the door lintels of the stores, and before anything but the restaurants and all-night saloons was open. Several came to the Woodbine Hotel for breakfast, and Mrs. Goodloe was showing more teeth than a shark.
Hartwell was up early, waiting the opening of the bank, to exact justice, and the fulfillment of his agreement, from Stott. Back and forth, like a sentry, he walked a short beat opposite the bank, waiting the opening-hour. People who recognized him in passing spoke with respect, and turned in curiosity to look at him again, wondering what new eruption was to come in the business of Cottonwood out of that early patrolling in the street.
Hartwell was concerned over the arrival of the cattlemen, whose horses were already thick along the hitching-racks up and down the street. These had come from near-by ranches, as the freshness of their animals told, and there was none among them who seemed to recognize him, no one whom Hartwell identified as a member of the recent expedition against the Texans.
There was one advantage of having a crowd of them in town looking for him, at any rate—Stott's audience would be the larger for his confession, if he had not already made it to Duncan. His distrust of Stott, stirred by Fannie's declaration that he never would implicate himself by his own confession to clear another, had grown through the night. Hartwell was uneasy over the outlook now, for if Winch should come in before the bank opened it would mean a fight, and the useless sacrifice of one or the other of their lives.
It wanted a few minutes of nine o'clock when Major Simmonds, the teller, arrived, his hat at a gallant slant. He unlocked the door with high importance, swung it back, and put the brick against it, and disappeared behind the grill. Hartwell roamed anxious eyes up and down the street, watching for Stott, determined to go across and stop him before he could get into the bank.
He was thus engaged in his survey of the street when Major Simmonds came rushing out, bareheaded, hair disarranged from the bald spot which he took such studious care to conceal. Hartwell was the nearest person to him, directly across the street. Major Simmonds came running toward him, making a signal with his flapping arms like a switchman stopping a train.
"The bank's robbed!" he yelled, stopping in the middle of the street. Hartwell hurried to him.
"What's that?"
"Robbed—cleaned out—vault open, everything gone!"
"Run for Stott—I'll call the marshal!"
Texas hurried off toward the little calaboose, behind which the town marshal lived, and the teller started off to summon Stott, leaving the bank door wide open. People who had heard the shouted alarm came running, and when Texas returned with the marshal in a few minutes the street before the gaping bank door was filled by the crowd of deeply concerned patrons.
The marshal posted himself in the door, refusing to allow even the anxious directors of the concern to enter until the arrival of Stott. The teller came panting back presently, his face white, his eyes fairly hanging on his cheeks.
"Gone!" said he.
A big gray man in a grocer's apron laid hold of the teller's shoulder and shook him, as if to settle him down to coherency.
"Gone? Who's gone?" he shouted.
"Stott!" the teller groaned.
"Where's his wife?" another anxious-faced business man inquired, pushing forward.
"She left for Kansas City yesterday afternoon."
"Oh, well, Stott's around town somewhere, then," said the grocer. "Come on, we've got to find him."
A general alarm for Stott went through the town, on the heels of the news that the bank had been robbed, and everything down to the last security carried off. The marshal held his place in the door, and would not allow anybody to enter until it became a determined fact that Stott was gone.
Then the directors took possession of the concern, to find that the president's hand, and no other, had cleaned it to the crumbs. There was no doubt about that; he had left his mark behind him in a hundred ways. He had left nothing but a heap of silver representing a few hundred dollars, too heavy and unprofitable to carry away.
Hartwell turned away from the sullen crowd that waited the final announcement of the bank's directors, feeling the defalcation and flight of the banker as keenly as any man whose all was on deposit there. Stott had robbed them only of their money, and a man could replace that if he lived long enough, and denied himself, and good fortune kept its hand over him; but a man who had been robbed of his main chance of saving his honor had been left bankrupt beyond repair.
The only temporary advantage of the situation was that it drew the thoughts of the cattlemen from himself to Stott, for most of them were depositors of the bank. There was hurried mounting among them, fevered riding away to spread the alarm, for Stott had not left by railroad. He had either gone toward the Nation, heading for No Man's Land, or in the direction of Wichita, where he would take a train on his flight to the security of Canada. On the chance that he might cross some line of information before he got away, the directors telegraphed his description abroad.
Hartwell had not seen Fannie that morning. He turned to the hotel now to look for her.
"He was up before you, Texas, and et only a snack of breakfast," Mrs. Goodloe told him. "I saw him ride past a little while afterward, headin' south."
"Some business of his own, I guess," said Texas.
"He paid his bill like he wasn't comin' back."
"The little rascal—to go off thataway and never leave me a word! Oh, well, I reckon he'll be around di-rec'ly."
"I'll bet he's gone to see his girl. He had a pinin' look in his eye like a boy that was in love. He's a nice quiet little feller, as soft-spoken as a woman."
"Pure gold, ma'am, right down to the tacks of his boots."
Texas was troubled over Fannie's peculiar behavior as he walked toward Uncle Boley's shop. Perhaps she believed that things were finished for her in Cottonwood and had gone back to her cousin's ranch. It might be that what he had said about their ways beginning already to part had something to do with it. Maybe she had gone away thinking that he was selfish and ungrateful. Remorse at this thought came over him, to make that dark hour more bitter.
It wasn't like Fannie to leave him as long as there might be need of her testimony to clear him in the cattlemen's eyes, and she did not know at the hour she left that Stott had cleaned out the bank and gone. Something had urged her upon her lonely road, but Texas was not vain enough, sophisticated enough, even to consider that it might be her love for him, hopeless as she knew it to be.
Uncle Boley was in his door, looking down the street toward the bank. He had his apron on, and his beard tucked out of the way, signs which told Texas that he had left the bench but lately, and did not intend to allow the rascality of Henry Stott to rise up between him and his work very long.
"Well, he's run off, has he?" Uncle Boley inquired, his bright eyes livelier for the excitement, his voice eager.
"Yes, and everything gone with him that he could lay his ornery hands on, Uncle Boley."
"Serves 'em right for trustin' to that man. He never done an honest deed in his life 'cept when he was druv to it, and then it went so hard agin the grain you could hear him crack. I tell you, Texas, when this town finds out what you and that girl made him do for that widder woman yesterday it'll rair up and whoop."
"You didn't tell her—Mrs. McCoy—that we had any hand in it, did you, Uncle Boley?"
Texas asked him the question with such haste and eagerness that it was almost a plea.
"You know I never," said Uncle Boley, reproachfully. "When I pass my word to a man it sticks."
"I know it, Uncle Boley, and I beg your pardon, sir. I was nearly in a fit when I thought maybe they'd found out."
"It'd do you a hell of a lot of harm if they had!" Uncle Boley was sharply sarcastic. He spat on the sidewalk, and worked his mouth in that chopping manner so alarming to behold by one who did not know his ways.
"Well, this town it'll never think any better of me for it, Uncle Boley. That scoun'rel sneaked off and left me holdin' the sack, never said one word to them cattlemen that'll clear me."
"No, I don't reckon he did," said Uncle Boley, thoughtfully. "It wasn't to be expected of him. I see them cow-men ridin' in here early, and they're all stirred up, they tell me, 'count of fever breakin* out on the range."
"They're comin' in for a settlement with me, I've been told, Uncle Boley. This is the day of the big doin's, I guess."
"Yes, I was told; the news has went around. Well, where's that Fannie girl?"
Texas told him that she had gone, with no word behind her.
"What do you reckon got into her to fly up and leave that way?"
"I don't know, Uncle Boley, unless she felt hurt, sir, because she thought I was ungrateful for all she'd helped me to do, for all I never could 'a' done, sir, without her help."
Uncle Boley shook his head, bent over his work, shook his head again from time to time, through a long interval of silence.
"It wasn't that, Texas. She left because she was jealous. One agin the other, and you lost both of 'em. Well, you wasn't to blame; it just come out: that way."
"I bungled it up so, sir!" said Texas, regretfully. "I always was as clumsy as a colt for gettin' my legs tangled up in the rope."
"Well, if Sallie don't come on her knees to you when she finds out what you've done for her and her mother, I'll take in my horns."
Texas put his hand on the old man's shoulder and looked him earnestly in the face.
"Uncle Boley, the best kindness you can do me is never to mention my name in that matter to them. Give Fannie the full credit for it; it rightly belongs to her. As she said, she gave me the cards—all I did was play them. Keep my name out of it the same as if I was a man that'd been hung."
"I don't see what you're goin' to gain by that," said Uncle Boley impatiently.
"There's nothing to be gained, one way or the other. I'll have to walk out there in the road direc'ly, sir, and face them cattlemen, for no man nor set of men's ever goin' to say they come a lookin' for me and I couldn't be found. I'll go out there and I'll face 'em, Uncle Boley, and I'll do my best for the sake of the land I come from, and the right that I know is on my side."
"It ain't right for you to have to go that way, Texas," the old man protested, "and you a burnin' your heart up for Sallie."
Texas did not deny it. He sat with drooping head, leaning forward a bit, dejection over him, his world so dark that he could not see more than the length of his arm ahead. And what he looked on then was only a world of strife.
A picture of a man staggering backward, his hands outfiung, his gun falling by his side, persisted in his mental vision against the background of men and horses and dust in the trampled street. This was a picture that did not change, that he could not divert his faculties from for one hour of complete peace. The central figure in it was always the same, and that falling man was Texas Hartwell, a death-wound in his breast.
"If you come through it, Texas, then what're you aimin' to do?"
Uncle Boley had put down his work, for the gloom of that threatening hour was heavy over his heart. He pulled his beard from under his suspender and spread it on his breast, sure indication that his work for that morning was at an end. Texas sat up stiffly, his eyes fixed as in a dream on the little window looking dustily into the street.
"Sir, I'm goin' to straddle a horse and take out after that pore little bird that's gone off draggin' her broken wings, and I'm a goin' to foller her till I find her, and if I can make her glad I'll do it, no matter what it costs."
Uncle Boley was moved by this declaration, almost to the point of panic. If Texas had been his son he could not have felt a sharper pang at his declared intention of allowing gratitude to push his life's promise all behind him, and go riding away on a quest like that.
"If Fannie was a good woman, Texas!" said he, a pathetic tenderness in his trembling voice.
"A woman don't have to be very good to be better than a man, Uncle Boley."
"And even if she was a good woman you couldn't give her your heart. It'd be a sin to throw yourself away on Fannie."
"I could give her a man's name and protection, and I could lift her pore face up to the sky."
"God help you, son, if you're set on doin' that!"
"Never mind," said Texas, soothingly, "never mind it at all. When I'm gone from here, no matter which way I leave, cross me out and turn over the leaf."
Uncle Boley turned to the row of boots on the little shelf, took them down, boot by boot, and wiped the dust from them on his sleeve. He kept his back turned toward Texas, for tears were rolling down his beard.
"Well, I declare, Uncle Boley, sir, if I didn't clean forget that old ant-eater we shut up here night before last!" said Texas, starting up.
"He's gone—slep' off his drunk about sundown yesterday and come walkin' out. Stopped to cuss me, place of thankin' me for his lodgin'. I've seen some ornery men in my time, but I never seen one that had all the ornery p'ints Zeb Smith's got."
"He'll not be needed, anyhow, it's just as well he's gone. He's lost his boardin'-house pass, now Stott's left; he'll have to rack out and hunt him up once more."
"I hear Ollie Noggle's packin' a gun for him."
"I expect Zeb'll live to be a mighty old man if he waits till Noggle bores a hole in him, Uncle Boley."
"I reckon he will."
Texas stood in the door. Down the street where there had been so much excitement and activity an hour before, all was quiet. Few horses remained hitched at the racks before saloons and stores, the midday somnolence of ordinary times having settled over Cottonwood again. Many of the cattlemen had gone riding for the trail of Henry Stott, the business that had brought them to town so early having been driven from their thoughts by this new calamity.
For a while Texas was more than half in the mind to buy a horse and strike out at once after Fannie, and leave that tangle of trouble behind. But he could not outrun it very long. A blot would remain on his name to spread and enlarge after him, and reach again to him in time, no matter where he might go in the world of cattle. And there was no other world for him, no other pursuit of which he was master enough to make a bluff of living by.
On the other hand, staying on there for the violent adjustment that the cattlemen were bent on making might never lead to anything more than his death. The waters of his disgrace would close above his grave, never to be parted again. So he stood weighing it, and a man came riding around the corner below him, and turned his horse toward the Woodbine Hotel.
There was no mistaking the rider, for, once seen in the saddle, Dee Winch was not to be forgotten. His traits on horse-back were as marked as his peculiarities on foot.
Dee Winch it was. He had come to keep his appointment and carry out his word. Winch would go straight to the hotel looking for him, for he had sent word to the little man-slayer that he would find him there when wanted.
Winch should not be disappointed. Hartwell would keep the engagement as honestly as a lover. All thought of riding away from Cottonwood dissolved from his mind, all the business of life that involved him sprung to a sudden point. He was conscious suddenly of an unaccountable lightness, of a relief from a long and heavy strain. Dee Winch should not look for him in vain, a sneer on his thin lip, his protruding teeth laid bare. Life's business had come to a sudden head. His adventure lay before him; he was no longer a listening man.
"They're thinning out down there, most of them's gone," said Texas, turning to the old man, speaking with his accustomed slowness and serenity. "I'm goin' to step down to the ho-tel a, minute, sir, and see if Fannie didn't leave a letter for me that they over-looked."
Uncle Boley went to the door and looked out* and seemed relieved by the appearance of placidity that had fallen again over the town.
"Well, you'll be back in a little while I reckon, Texas?"
"I'll be back almost di-rec'ly, Uncle Boley," Texas replied, standing a moment with his foot on the step to smile before he turned away to keep his rendezvous with Winch.