A Part of the Past
The doctor, who was younger and more cruel than even a doctor has a
right to be, said that Martha had died from a stoppage of the heart,
undoubtedly induced by the strong drug in the sleeping powder that had
been administered. In other words, Sam had killed her. He loved her.
How deeply he had loved her, none of us had ever had sense enough to
realize.
We had her funeral, and Chad’s, two days later. They were buried in
the second grove of aspen trees, two miles beyond the cabin. All the
people in the valley came. At first, I thought that they had come to
honor the dead, and Sam. But, as I stood by the graves, and watched
the faces about me, faces that held suspicion, horror, curiosity; sly
faces, cruel faces, eager faces, I did not care to think why most of
them had come.
Sam noticed it, too. For, though I had not said a word to him, as we
walked home from the graves, he said to me, “Don’t blame them, Mary.
What else could we expect? Decency breeds decency, and—filth draws
filth.”
There were only four of us around the table that evening. Mrs. Ricker
had gone straight to her room, after the funeral. Danny, with no
protest from Sam, had left the day before to take Gaby’s body to San
Francisco. It had seemed heartless to allow her to go alone; but I
could not be spared, and there was no one else to go with her. John
might have gone; but Danny refused to allow him to, saying,
unselfishly, that Sam needed John more than she needed him.
“You people,” Hubert Hand spoke suddenly, to John and Sam and me, as
we sat there, looking at a supper that nobody pretended to eat, “have
been awfully decent about not asking questions since the other
afternoon.”
“I’m done with questions,” Sam said. “Through. Finished.”
“Just the same,” Hubert Hand replied, “there are a lot of answers that
are going to have to be given, sooner or later. You heard Mrs. Ricker
say that I was Martha’s father——”
“Never mind that, now, Hand,” Sam interrupted. “I’ve known, since the
first week you came to the ranch, that there was, or had been,
something between you two. You’d been her lover, I suppose. Well—men
do. That’s all. I never went around thinking you, nor any man, was a
plaster saint. I reckon you deserted her, eh? And treated her like
hell, generally. And she found a refuge here. And, later, probably,
heard that you were in trouble, and sent you a letter and told you to
come here. Put you wise about the chess racket. Helped you. Made a
refuge for you. Women do.
“I suppose she slipped poor Martha in, in place of the child she’d got
from the orphanage—used the same papers. Well—to keep on repeating
myself, mothers do. You and she have both lived straight and acted
decent for the years you’ve been here. If the two of you want to keep
on living in this hell-hole, and keep on straight and acting decent,
you’ll get the same treatment from me you’ve always got. If you are
Martha’s parents, that’s more reason, not less, for my not wanting to
break up our family here, or make trouble for either one of you.”
Hubert Hand pushed back his chair, got up, and walked to the window.
“By God, but you’re a white man, Sam!” he said. “You’re so damn white
that you make every one around you look yellow as sulphur by contrast.
“You’ve got it doped out right about Ollie Ricker and me. She was
twelve years older than I was—I always felt like that was kind of an
excuse for me. Guess not, though. She was a good enough girl until I
came along, just out of prison, and as rotten as two years in prison
can make a kid. That’s pretty damn rotten. I shouldn’t have been sent
up, that time. Nothing but a kid’s trick—grand row in a dump down on
Barbary Coast.
“My mother was dead. My dad was a high-hatter. He went back on me,
cold, after that. Found my room locked when I went home. I went back
to Ollie. She kept me pretty straight for a while. I ought to have
married her, and I know it, before the kid was born. But she was so
jealous that she made life a living hell for me. I—well, I wouldn’t
marry her.
“It was her fault that I got sent up the second time. She talked to a
girl friend of hers, and the girl snitched. Up to that time, I think
that Ollie Ricker talked more than any living woman. She took a vow,
the day they got me, that she’d never speak an unnecessary word again
in her life. I’ll say she’s kept that vow pretty well. I wish to God
I’d taken the same vow, before I shot my mouth off about John, the
other day.”
“You don’t think that I did it, then?” I wished John could have seemed
less eager.
“On the square,” Hubert answered, “I don’t see who else could have
done it. That makes no never minds. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut, on
account of Sam——”
“Leave me out of it,” Sam growled, “and forget it. Forget the whole
damn thing, if you can. I’m through. If I hadn’t been so busy playing
the fool while Martha was dying, we could likely have saved her. We’ll
never get any place with this thing. Nobody will. Look at us, messing
around with a lot of damn fool clues, and suspicions, telling one lie
to cover another—like a batch of gossiping old grannies, while Martha
was lying there, dying. And me growling and snarling at her all
afternoon. I’m a fool. I’m a damn sight worse—I’m an old fool. A girl
got killed on the Desert Moon Ranch. A boy killed himself for love of
her. The killer got clean away. So far as I’m concerned, it is going
to rest there. I’m closing the book. Soon as I can, I’ll sell out the
damn place, lock, stock and barrel.”
“That doesn’t go for me, dad,” John said. “And I think you’ll change
your mind. I’m not willing to go on the rest of my life with half a
dozen people thinking that I killed Gabrielle. No sir, not with one
person thinking it. Hubert Hand seems to be in a sort of sentimental
mood, right now. How long’s he going to stay that way? When he gets
over it, what’s he going to do with the club he has in his hand?
Nothing? Maybe. Depends on how much he might need some cash, sometime
in the future.”
Hubert said, “I’m no damn blackmailer.”
“What did you serve your second term in prison for?”
“None of your business.”
“All right.”
“No. Hold on, I’ll tell you. It’s up to me to tell things to-day, and
I’m telling them. It was forgery, all right; but, just the same, I
don’t feel, yet, like I was much to blame. I’d gotten in with a rotten
crowd, and——”
“Never mind. Let it go at that. Here’s another thing, dad. Danny
honestly believes that, someway or other, you are mixed up in this
thing. We can’t marry, with a thing like that between us. I guess it
doesn’t make any difference in the way we feel toward each other; but
it makes a barrier, just the same, that will have to come down before
we marry. I haven’t talked it over, exactly, with Dan, but I’m dead
certain she feels the same way I do about it.”
“You think Danny is coming back here, then?” Hubert questioned.
“How do you mean?”
“I’m not looking for her to come back—that’s all.”
“You’re crazy with the heat. They read a telegram to me, not an hour
ago, saying that she’d get in on number Twenty-one Friday afternoon.”
“I’ll bet she’s not on it.”
“Say, Hand——”
“Keep your shirt on, John. We all know that Danny is innocent of the
crime, and that she is a good little scout—a lot better than Gaby was,
if not half as charming and attractive. But—she knows more than she
wishes to know. She knows more than she’s going to tell. Maybe more
than she can tell, in safety. For the love of Mike, folks—couldn’t you
see that she had some reason for working up that case against Sam?
Cutting it out of whole cloth. If she’d been trying to shield John, do
you think she’d have used Sam for that purpose? Not on your life she
wouldn’t have, she’d have pinned it on me, or Mrs. Ricker, or even on
Mary. She did try to pin it on Chad——”
Mrs. Ricker came tottering into the room. Sam jumped to meet her, and
helped her over to his own big chair at the head of the table.
She leaned forward, her long black-sleeved arms stretched straight in
front of her over the white cloth, her hands clenched into fists.
“For hours,” she said, “I have been trying to reach a decision. I have
reached it. I have come here to confess.”