The Man on the Bed
Beulah Rutherford found it impossible to resume a relation of
friendliness toward her guest. By nature she was elemental and direct.
A few months earlier she had become the teacher of the Big Creek
school, but until that time life had never disciplined her to repress
the impulses of her heart. As a child she had been a fierce, wild
little creature full of savage affections and generosities. She still
retained more feminine ferocity than social usage permits her sex. It
was not in her to welcome an enemy with smiles while she hated him in
her soul. The best she could do was to hold herself to a brusque
civility whenever she met Beaudry.
As for that young man, he was in a most unhappy frame of mind. He
writhed at the false position in which he found himself. It was bad
enough to forfeit the good opinion of this primitive young hill beauty,
but it was worse to know that in a measure he deserved it. He saw,
too, that serious consequences were likely to follow her discovery, and
he waited with nerves on the jump for the explosion.
None came. When he dragged himself to dinner, Beulah was stiff as a
ramrod, but he could note no difference in the manner of the rest. Was
it possible she had not told her father? He did not think this likely,
and his heart was in panic all through the meal.
Though he went to his room early, he spent a sleepless night full of
apprehension. What were the Rutherfords waiting for? He was convinced
that something sinister lay behind their silence.
After breakfast the ranchman rode away. Jeff and Slim Sanders jogged
off on their cowponies to mend a broken bit of fence. Hal sat on the
porch replacing with rivets the torn strap of a stirrup.
Beaudry could stand it no longer. He found his hostess digging around
the roots of some rosebushes in her small garden. Curtly she declined
his offer to take the spade. For a minute he watched her uneasily
before he blurted out his intention of going.
"I'll move up to the other end of the park and talk windmill to the
ranchers there, Miss Rutherford. You've been awfully good to me, but I
won't impose myself on your hospitality any longer," he said.
He had dreaded to make the announcement for fear of precipitating a
crisis, but the young woman made no protest. Without a word of comment
she walked beside him to the house.
"Hal, will you get Mr. Street's horse?" she asked her brother. "He is
leaving this morning."
Young Rutherford's eyes narrowed. It was plain that he had been caught
by surprise and did not know what to do.
"Where you going?" he asked.
"What do you care where he is going? Get the horse--or I will," she
ordered imperiously.
"I'm going to board at one of the ranches farther up the park,"
explained Roy.
"Better wait till dad comes home," suggested Hal.
"No, I'll go now." Royal Beaudry spoke with the obstinacy of a timid
man who was afraid to postpone the decision.
"No hurry, is there?" The black eyes of Rutherford fixed him steadily.
His sister broke in impatiently. "Can't he go when he wants to, Hal?
Get Mr. Street's horse." She whirled on Beaudry scornfully. "That is
what you call yourself, isn't it--Street?"
The unhappy youth murmured "Yes."
"Let him get his own horse if he wants to hit the trail in such a
hurry," growled Hal sulkily.
Beulah walked straight to the stable. Awkwardly Beaudry followed her
after a moment or two. The girl was leading his horse from the stall.
"I'll saddle him, Miss Rutherford," he demurred, the blanket in his
hand.
She looked at him a moment, dropped the bridle, and turned stiffly
away. He understood perfectly that she had been going to saddle the
horse to justify the surface hospitality of the Rutherfords to a man
they despised.
Hal was still on the porch when Roy rode up, but Beulah was nowhere in
sight. The young hillman did not look up from the rivet he was
driving. Beaudry swung to the ground and came forward.
"I'm leaving now. I should like to tell Miss Rutherford how much I'm
in her debt for taking a stranger in so kindly," he faltered.
"I reckon you took her in just as much as she did you, Mr. Spy."
Rutherford glowered at him menacingly. "I'd advise you to straddle
that horse and git."
Roy controlled his agitation except for a slight trembling of the
fingers that grasped the mane of his cowpony. "You've used a word that
isn't fair. I didn't come here to harm any of your people. If I could
explain to Miss Rutherford--"
She stood in the doorway, darkly contemptuous. Fire flashed in her
eyes, but the voice of the girl was coldly insolent.
"It is not necessary," she informed him.
Her brother leaned forward a little. His crouched body looked like a
coiled spring in its tenseness. "Explain yourself down that road, Mr.
Street--_pronto_," he advised.
Beaudry flashed a startled glance at him, swung to the saddle, and was
away at a canter. The look in Rutherford's glittering eyes had sent a
flare of fear over him. The impulse of it had lifted him to the back
of the horse and out of the danger zone.
But already he was flogging himself with his own contempt. He had
given way to panic before a girl who had been brought up to despise a
quitter. She herself had nerves as steady as chilled steel. He had
seen her clench her strong white little teeth without a murmur through
a long afternoon of pain. Gameness was one of the fundamentals of her
creed, and he had showed the white feather. It added to his
punishment, too, that he worshiped pluck with all the fervor of one who
knew he had none. Courage seemed to him the one virtue worth while;
cowardice the unpardonable sin. He made no excuses for himself. From
his father he inherited the fine tradition of standing up to punishment
to a fighting finish. His mother, too, had been a thoroughbred. Yet
he was a weakling. His heart pumped water instead of blood whenever
the call to action came.
In dejection he rode up the valley, following the same hilly trail he
had taken two days before with Miss Rutherford. It took him past the
aspen grove at the mouth of the gulch which led to the Meldrum place.
Beyond this a few hundred yards he left the main road and went through
the chaparral toward a small ranch that nestled close to the timber.
Beulah had told him that it belonged to an old German named Rothgerber
who had lived there with his wife ever since she could remember.
Rothgerber was a little wrinkled old man with a strong South-German
accent. After Beaudry had explained that he wanted board, the rancher
called his wife out and the two jabbered away excitedly in their native
tongue. The upshot of it was that they agreed to take the windmill
agent if he would room in an old bunkhouse about two hundred yards from
the main ranch building. This happened to suit Roy exactly and he
closed the matter by paying for a week in advance.
The Rothgerbers were simple, unsuspecting people of a garrulous nature.
It was easy for Beaudry to pump information from them while he ate
supper. They had seen nothing of any stranger in the valley except
himself, but they dropped casually the news that the Rutherfords had
been going in and out of Chicito Canon a good deal during the past few
days.
"Chicito Canon. That's a Mexican name, isn't it? Let's see. Just
where is this gulch?" asked Beaudry.
The old German pointed out of the window. "There it iss, mein friend.
You pass by on the road and there iss no way in--no arroyo, no gulch,
no noddings but aspens. But there iss, shust the same, a trail.
Through my pasture it leads."
"Anybody live up Chicito? I want everybody in the park to get a chance
to buy a Dynamo Aermotor before I leave."
"A man named Meldrum. My advice iss--let him alone."
"Why?"
Rothgerber shook a pudgy forefinger in the air. "Mein friend--listen.
You are a stranger in Huerfano Park. Gut. But do not ask questions
about those who lif here. Me, I am an honest man. I keep the law.
Also I mind my own pusiness. So it iss with many. But there are
others--mind, I gif them no names, but--" He shrugged his shoulders
and threw out his hands, palm up. "Well, the less said the petter. If
I keep my tongue still, I do not talk myself into trouble. Not so,
Berta?"
The pippin-cheeked little woman nodded her head sagely.
In the course of the next few days Roy rode to and fro over the park
trying to sell his windmill to the ranchers. He secured two orders and
the tentative promise of others. But he gained no clue as to the place
where Dingwell was hidden. His intuition told him that the trail up
Chicito Canon would lead him to the captive cattleman. Twice he
skirted the dark gash of the ravine at the back of the pasture, but
each time his heart failed at the plunge into its unknown dangers. The
first time he persuaded himself that he had better make the attempt at
night, but when he stood on the brink in the darkness the gulf at his
feet looked like a veritable descent into Avernus. If he should be
caught down here, his fate would be sealed. What Meldrum and Tighe
would do to a spy was not a matter of conjecture. The thought of it
brought goose-quills to his flesh and tiny beads of perspiration to his
forehead.
Still, the peril had to be faced. He decided to go up the canon in the
early morning before the travel of the day had begun. The night before
he made the venture he prepared an alibi by telling Mrs. Rothgerber
that he would not come to breakfast, as he wanted to get an early start
for his canvassing. The little German woman bustled about and wrapped
up for him a cold lunch to eat at his cabin in the morning. She liked
this quiet, good-looking young man whose smile was warm for a woman
almost old enough to be his grandmother. It was not often she met any
one with the charming deference he showed her. Somehow he reminded her
of her own Hans, who had died from the kick of a horse ten years since.
Roy slept in broken cat-naps full of fearful dreams, from which he woke
in terror under the impression that he was struggling helplessly in the
net of a great spider which had the cruel, bloodless face of Tighe. It
was three o'clock when he rose and began to dress. He slipped out of
the cabin into the wet pasture. His legs were sopping wet from the
long grass through which he strode to the edge of the gulch. On a flat
boulder he sat shivering in the darkness while he waited for the first
gray streaks of light to sift into the dun sky.
In the dim dawn he stumbled uncertainly down the trail into the canon,
the bottom of which was still black as night from a heavy growth of
young aspens that shut out the light. There was a fairly well-worn
path leading up the gulch, so that he could grope his way forward
slowly. His feet moved reluctantly. It seemed to him that his nerves,
his brain, and even his muscles were in revolt against the moral
compulsion that drove him on. He could feel his heart beating against
his ribs. Every sound startled him. The still darkness took him by
the throat. Doggedly he fought against the panic impulse to turn and
fly.
If he quit now, he told himself, he could never hold his self-respect.
He thought of all those who had come into his life in connection with
the Big Creek country trouble. His father, his mother, Dave Dingwell,
Pat Ryan, Jess Tighe, the whole Rutherford clan, including Beulah! One
quality they all had in common, the gameness to see out to a finish
anything they undertook. He could not go through life a confessed
coward. The idea was intolerably humiliating.
Then, out of the past, came to him a snatch of nonsense verse:--
"Li'l' ole hawss an' li'l' ole cow,
Amblin' along by the ole haymow,
Li'l' ole hawss took a bite an' a chew,
'Durned if I don't,' says the ole cow, too."
So vivid was his impression of the doggerel that for an instant he
thought he heard the sing-song of his father's tuneless voice. In
sharp, clean-cut pictures his memory reproduced the night John Beaudry
had last chanted the lullaby and that other picture of the Homeric
fight of one man against a dozen. The foolish words were a bracer to
him. He set his teeth and ploughed forward, still with a quaking soul,
but with a kind of despairing resolution.
After a mile of stiff going, the gulch opened to a little valley on the
right-hand side. On the edge of a pine grove, hardly a stone's throw
from where Roy stood, a Mexican _jacal_ looked down into the canon.
The hut was a large one. It was built of upright poles daubed with
clay. Sloping poles formed the roof, the chinks of which were
waterproofed with grass. A wolf pelt, nailed to the wall, was hanging
up to dry.
He knew that this was the home of Meldrum, the ex-convict.
Beaudry followed a bed of boulders that straggled toward the pine
grove. It was light enough now, and he had to move with caution so as
to take advantage of all the cover he could find. Once in the grove,
he crawled from tree to tree. The distance from the nearest pine to
the jacal was about thirty feet. A clump of _cholla_ grew thick just
outside the window. Roy crouched behind the trunk for several minutes
before he could bring himself to take the chance of covering that last
ten yards. But every minute it was getting lighter. Every minute
increased the likelihood of detection. He crept fearfully to the hut,
huddled behind the cactus, and looked into the window.
A heavy-set man, with the muscle-bound shoulders of an ape, was
lighting a fire in the stove. At the table, his thumbs hitched in a
sagging revolver belt, sat Ned Rutherford. The third person in the
room lay stretched at supple ease on a bed to one of the posts of which
his right leg was bound. He was reading a newspaper.
"Get a move on you, Meldrum," young Rutherford said jauntily, with an
eye on his prisoner to see how he took it. "I've got inside
information that I need some hot cakes, a few slices of bacon, and a
cup of coffee. How about it, Dave? Won't you order breakfast, too?"
The man on the bed shook his head indifferently. "Me, I'm taking the
fast cure. I been reading that we all eat too much, anyhow. What's
the use of stuffing--gets yore system all clogged up. Now, take
Edison--he don't eat but a handful of rice a day."
"That's one handful more than you been eating for the past three days.
Better come through with what we want to know. This thing ain't going
to get any better for you. A man has got to eat to live."
"I'm trying out another theory. Tell you-all about how it works in a
week or so. I reckon after a time I'll get real hungry, but it don't
seem like I could relish any chuck yet." The cattleman fell to
perusing his paper once more.
Royal Beaudry had never met his father's friend, Dave Dingwell, but he
needed no introduction to this brown-faced man who mocked his guard
with such smiling hardihood. They were trying to starve the secret out
of him. Already his cheek showed thin and gaunt, dark circles shadowed
the eyes. The man, no doubt, was suffering greatly, yet his manner
gave no sign of it. He might not be master of his fate; at least, he
was very much the captain of his soul. Pat Ryan had described him in a
sentence. "One hundred and ninety pounds of divil, and ivery ounce of
ivery pound true gold." There could not be another man in the Big
Creek country that this description fitted as well as it did this
starving, jocund dare-devil on the bed.
The savory odor of bacon and of coffee came through the open window to
Beaudry where he crouched in the chaparral. He heard Meldrum's brusque
"Come and get it," and the sound of the two men drawing up their chairs
to the table.
"What's the use of being obstinate, Dave?" presently asked Rutherford
from amid a pleasant chink of tin cups, knives, and forks. "I'd a heap
rather treat you like a white man. This 'Pache business doesn't make a
hit with me. But I'm obeying orders. Anyhow, it's up to you. The
chuck-wagon is ready for you whenever you say the word."
"I don't reckon I'll say it, Ned. Eating is just a habit. One man
wants his eggs sunny side up; another is strong for them hard-boiled.
But eggs is eggs. When Dan went visitin' at Santa Fe, he likely
changed his diet. For two or three days he probably didn't like the
grub, then--"
With a raucous curse the former convict swung round on him. A revolver
seemed to jump to his hand, but before he could fire, young Rutherford
was hanging to his wrist.
"Don't you, Dan. Don't you," warned Ned.
Slowly Meldrum's eyes lost their savage glare. "One o' these days I'll
pump lead into him unless he clamps that mouth of his'n. I won't stand
for it." His voice trailed into a string of oaths.
Apparently his host's fury at this reference to his convict days did
not disturb in the least the man on the bed. His good-natured drawl
grew slightly more pronounced. "Wall yore eyes and wave yore tail all
you've a mind to, Dan. I was certainly some indiscreet reminding you
of those days when you was a guest of the Government."
"That's enough," growled Meldrum, slamming his big fist down on the
table so that the tinware jumped.
"Sure it's enough. Too much. Howcome I to be so forgetful? If I'd
wore a uniform two years for rustling other folks' calves, I reckon I
wouldn't thank a guy--"
But Meldrum had heard all he could stand. He had to do murder or get
out. He slammed the coffee-pot down on the floor and bolted out of the
open door. His arms whirled in violent gestures as he strode away. An
unbroken stream of profanity floated back to mark his anabasis.
Meldrum did not once look round as he went on his explosive way to the
gulch, but Roy Beaudry crouched lower behind the cactus until the man
had disappeared. Then he crawled back to the grove, slipped through
it, and crept to the shelter of the boulder bed.
It would not do for him to return down the canon during daylight, for
fear he might meet one of the Rutherfords coming to relieve Ned. He
passed from one boulder to another, always working up toward the wall
of the gulch. Behind a big piece of sandstone shaped like a flatiron
he lay down and waited for the hours to pass.
It was twilight when he stole down to the trail and began his return
journey.