A Confession
John came into the room. “The outfit is back, or most of it,” he said.
“Darn their souls! Curiosity, nothing else. But for this, they
wouldn’t have shown up for two days yet. I think the women went into
the kitchen just now, Mary.”
There they were, Belle, Sadie and Goldie, all huddled up together like
a bunch of something, near the back door. As I came into the room,
they jumped and screeched. The only thing that makes me madder than
being scared myself is to scare somebody else. I spoke to them right
sharply.
I told them that I expected them to go about their work, and to act
like sensible girls while so doing. I told them that we had enough to
put up with, just now, without adding a parcel of jumping, squealing
girls to our load.
Sadie, the sauciest of the lot, on account of imagining that being
married made her more independent than the other girls, spoke up.
“We haven’t decided yet that we want’a go workin’ in a house where a
murderer, and maybe moren’ one, is livin’.”
“If that’s the way you feel about it,” I said, “the sooner you leave
the better. It is an honor to work in the Desert Moon ranch-house, and
you know it.”
“Maybe ’tis. Maybe ’tain’t.” Sadie sauced back. “You’ll not get girls
as easy to-day as you would of yesterday. Murders and suicides—if it
was a suicide—don’t do much in makin’ a ranch pop’lar for help.”
“Very well,” I said. “If you are going, go now. If not, put on your
aprons and get to work.”
I could scarcely believe my eyes. The three of them skedaddled out
through the door. I felt sort of sick, watching them go. Not because
I’d have to teach new girls the work and my ways, but because their
leaving gave me my first realization that the Desert Moon Ranch was
darkened by the shadow of sin, that the eclipse I had feared was upon
us.
When I telephoned to Sam, down in his office in the outfit’s quarters,
I tried to keep the truth from him; saying, only that the girls and I
had had a spat, and asking him to find some new girls for me.
He came up, in about half an hour, with an Indian girl, not more than
fifteen years old, trailing along behind him. Answering his nod, I
went with him into the living-room.
“She is the only one I could get,” he said. “We’ll have to send to
Reno or Salt Lake. None of the outfit want their women folks working
here. I don’t blame them. The Desert Moon Ranch is disgraced——” He
stopped short.
I thought that it was because he could not bear to go on with what he
had begun to say; until, following his eyes, I saw that he was looking
at a piece of paper on the writing desk just in front of him. It had
been propped up against a vase; but it had slithered down into a
curve. He reached for it; read it, and handed it to me.
“I killed her. Chadwick Caufield. P. S. Sorry to put you to the
trouble of disposing of me. Make it cheap and snappy. I haven’t a
relative in the world. P. G.”
“A lie,” Sam said.
“I think so.”
“I know damn well it is. I tell you, she had been dead two or three
hours, anyway—probably longer—when we found her. Listen, Mary. Between
four and five o’clock—we all saw her alive at four—Chad sat right
there at that piano, and he never left it once. Did he?”
“No, he didn’t. I kept thinking he would, to join Gaby. But he
didn’t.”
“Between five and six o’clock,” Sam went on, “he was with me, every
minute of the time, down in the barn, and coming up to the house.
Never out of my sight. Between six and seven he was with us all at
supper. If he’d been gone all afternoon, I’d know that note was a lie;
know it just as well as I know it now——”
“But, why did he shoot himself, then, Sam?”
“God knows. He thought he loved her.”
“But this note! A confession! Why would he die in disgrace, when we
know he was innocent?”
“God knows. To shield someone else, I reckon.”
“Who?”
Sam dropped his pipe.
I heard him stamping the sparks out. I did not look down. I did not
want to look down.