Steve Bordereau was a showman of sorts; else he’d never have made the
Stag Horn so widely publicized across hundreds of Southwestern miles.
He knew values and how to emphasize them.
A murmur went up when all eyes were drawn to Sally Dawn. She was pale,
with no rouge on her cheeks, and her lips were scarlet. She wore long
ruby-red earrings--ruby-red but not rubies. No others of Bordereau’s
glass gems adorned her. Her gown was exquisite, costly and in marked
contrast to La Florinda’s flashy one, a beautifully simple thing of
white satin. She carried a large black ostrich-feather fan in her left
hand. Her eyes looked enormous.
“My friends!” sang out a triumphant Bordereau, “I have a new surprise
for you, and here she is! It is Miss Sally Dawn Cannon, and I guess
some of you already know her, the daughter of the late cattle king,
Big Bill Cannon. She has consented to come here to be still another
hostess, like the Señorita Florinda de Valdez y Verdugo, and to be
friendly with all my friends. And to start with, she asks everyone
here to drink her a little toast! Nothing in the house is too good for
tonight, and it comes to you with Steve Bordereau’s compliments.”
Sally Dawn smiled upon them. It was a lovely smile, thought Jim
Torrance, and he thought also, “Well, money can buy most things.”
Bordereau’s announcement was greeted with cheers and hand clappings.
Torrance went on with his faro, playing as though he did not care
whether he won or lost, and so he started winning. He saw Sally Dawn go
straight to the Mexican girl; Florinda showed her beautiful white teeth
in what went for a glad smile of greeting. The two girls spoke together
a moment, Sally Dawn eagerly, Florinda appearing more reserved; perhaps
she was striving for a hauteur to match the proud names Verdugo and
Valdez.
Then men began surging forward, flocking for the most part about the
new girl; in champagne of Bordereau’s providing or their own choice of
liquor they drank her health and happiness. And to Jim Torrance, still
at his faro table, it seemed that she was the gayest of the gay ones;
he thought that he had never seen eyes sparkle and glimmer as hers did.
Then she was swept away by a small party who wanted her at their table,
and La Florinda went her own way with her own friends, hovering with
them over a roulette wheel, and Torrance finished his game, pocketed
his winnings and moved farther down the long room. He stood there
at the end of the bar, his glass twirling slowly between lean brown
fingers, his eyes, always low-lidded, looking lazy, yet secretly
watchful.
He marked the face of every man and woman in the place; he took
stock of winners and losers, of hard drinkers and hard players. When
any newcomer arrived--and men were coming in all the time, the room
filling and overflowing--he saw them. When some went out from time to
time, he took note.
A very few departed early through the front doors, going down the front
stairs and about their business, homeward bound perhaps. Several went
out through one of the three doors set in the wall toward the rear end
of the room. He gathered, without asking, that these were off to play
poker in private rooms. He spotted the men, two of them, who would play
for the house. Perhaps later Steve Bordereau would play for himself.
Again the new girl caught his attention, and his eyes still further
narrowed until they were mere light-flickering slits. She seemed gayer
than ever, eager, electric; he thought he had never heard such bright
laughter. The warmth of color now staining her cheeks might have
resulted, along with the exhilaration gripping her, from the wine that
had flowed so generously.
And then he saw her eyes, and knew instantly that he had her all
wrong. They chanced to meet his across the room--frightened, panicky,
desperate eyes. Whatever reason the girl might have to bring her here,
she was scared half to death.
She had just risen swiftly from a table where she was being made much
of by four men. Steve Bordereau, who had never lost sight of her,
hastened to her side; his hand, firm and agile and powerful, came to
rest on her arm. As the men at the table rose, too, one of them drunk
and leering, Bordereau said cheerfully:
“Go on ahead, boys; we’ll be back with you in two shakes.”
The four went out at one of the rear doors. Bordereau, with his hand
still on the girl’s arm, stooped closer, his face close to hers. His
words, so softly spoken were they, did not carry any farther than he
meant them to carry. Then, though the girl for a moment stood very
stiff, she turned to go with him, out of the room at the rear. The two
passed quite near where Jim Torrance stood at the end of the bar.
The girl said, “That man is a beast, the one who wants to pay me to be
his mascot--”
Bordereau said: “Shut up, you little fool! You’ll do what I tell you!”
She answered, in a queer, strained voice, “You can’t make me do a thing
like that.”
She had pulled back, but they were passing on again.
Bordereau said angrily, “You know I can make you do anything!”
She said, scarcely above a whisper: “I won’t. I’d kill you!”
They went on then. A door opened and closed after them.
* * * * *
“Know a man around here named Jim Torrance?” Jim Torrance asked the
nearest bartender.
“No. Never heard of him.”
Jim Torrance paid for his drink with a silver dollar. As things
happened, he did not wait for his change. Above the noise in the room,
he heard the shot, not loud but clear and eloquent enough. Nor did he
wait to note whether any others heard and marked it too. Two or three
swift, long strides brought him to the door through which the gambler
and the girl had just passed. There was a hallway with another set of
doors on the farther side; a couple of shaded lamps gave their dim,
colorful light. He saw Bordereau and Sally Dawn.
Bordereau had not yet fallen, but had his back against the wall and
appeared to be sliding slowly sideways. The girl had dropped her big
black fan; the only thing she held was a small pistol. There was a
look of horror on Bordereau’s face, a look of horror, almost twin with
it, on hers. Her fingers opened slowly and the pistol clattered to the
floor.
“I have killed him! I am glad! He--”
From her, Jim Torrance looked swiftly at Bordereau again. The man was
down now; he had flung up an arm as he lurched; a hand brushed his
face; Torrance saw the bloodstain there. He started to shrug; what
affair was it of his?
Then he heard a clamor as a door was thrown open against a wall and men
called out and came running. At the same moment he saw the head of the
back staircase.
“Get out of here, quick; on the run!” he commanded. “They’re all
Bordereau’s friends, not yours.”
She didn’t move; she didn’t appear to have heard. He stooped to pick up
the fallen pistol and her black fan; he caught her by the arm and ran
with her to the stairs. They plunged downward together, the girl half
falling, half carried by the strong hand that bore her along. Together
they darted out at the rear of the house.
His one thought was to get her clear until she could have her own
friends at her back, until the Bordereau pack had cooled a bit. He ran
with her to the front of the building where horses were. He meant to
throw her onto a horse, to pile onto another and be off with her that
way. Then he saw the one wheeled rig, a buckboard as lean and light as
a greyhound, with a pole team.
“Yours?” he demanded, seeing that there was but the one team here,
knowing that most men came on horseback, and arguing that she, if she
had dressed at home, would have mussed her dress on a saddle and hence
had come in the buckboard.
She gasped out something, he couldn’t make it out. Well, it didn’t
matter. He swung her up bodily over a wheel to the seat; he ran and
untied the horses; he slipped the reins into her hand.
“Get going, on the run,” he commanded. “I’ll grab my horse and follow.”
His horse was tied only a few feet away. He jerked the tie rope free,
swung up into the saddle--and saw that she had not stirred; there she
sat, a slim, white, rigid figure on the seat. He rapped out again, “Get
going!” and lashed the horses over their rumps with the end of his tie
rope. The horses were off at a run, frightened; the girl began to sway,
then to lean sideways, reminding him of Bordereau settling to the floor.
With the horses running, he spilled out of his saddle to the tail end
of the buckboard, keeping the tie rope still in one hand, leading his
own horse. As he came to the back of her seat he saw that the girl’s
hand lay loosely at her sides; she had dropped the reins and they
were about to vanish over the dashboard. He made a wild grab for them,
caught them just in time--and just in time caught her, too. She had
fainted dead away.
“Here’s hell to pay,” he growled. Never had he had his hands so
filled--with the reins of the runaway team, his own horse’s lead rope,
and now an unconscious Sally Dawn.
He managed to ease her down on the seat, her head and shoulders on his
knee; he gave the lead rope a couple of turns about the guard rail
at the back of the seat, thrust the free end under him, anchoring it
against any but a severe tug by sitting on it while he used both hands
for a fighting second or two, getting the runaway team under control.
Then he looked back through the starlit dark of the night to see
whether they were followed and made out that they were not as yet. He
looked ahead and briefly wondered where he and the girl were headed.
There had been no time, no chance to choose a direction.
They were speeding north, and his ranch lay to the north of Sundown,
so, at the first side road, a wavering, little-used lane through the
pines, he swung homeward. If the confounded girl hadn’t slumped into a
faint on him she could tell him where she lived, where she wanted to go
now; he himself hadn’t the least idea. Now the only thing he saw to do
was carry her to his place; they might not look for her there--and even
a Sam Pepper couldn’t see in the dark.
He kept the horses on the run on the down grades, saving them on the
pulls, letting them blow a time or two. When he pulled up at the side
of the gray and ghostly road where the old dead pine leaned over the
big white rock, the girl stirred and moaned sobbingly and sat up. He
got down, tied the horses in the dark under the pines, put up his hands
to her, and said curtly, “Better hop down.”
“Where are you taking me?” she asked then.
“My place. It’s only a step beyond the gate there. Then I’ll come back
and get rid of this team somehow; they won’t be able to follow the
tracks tonight, but tomorrow they will. By that time I can get you
home.”
She did not stir to get down.
“Why not now?” she asked.
“Suit yourself. But if Bordereau’s dead-- Well, where will they look
first of all for you?”
She put her face down into the shelter of her hands; he stood close
enough to see how she shuddered.
Once again he tried to shrug away all responsibility, yet somehow he
couldn’t quite make a go of it. He didn’t like Steve Bordereau and
he didn’t care much for the gambler’s crowd of friends; further, he
remembered two things--how the gambler had gripped her by the arm, and
how a strange terror had dilated her eyes. He stood a moment looking up
at her uncertainly; then he simply reached up and lifted her down in
his arms.
“Come along with me; I won’t hurt you any. Whatever you do now, you had
better take time to think.”
She slipped out of his arms and answered quickly, “Yes.”
He led the way, opened the gate and showed her the house; it was dark
but the dull gray adobe walls were revealed by the glimmer of the
stars. He waited for her at the open door; he heard her teeth begin to
chatter.
“Step in and I’ll light a lamp; we’ll have no light until the door is
shut.”
With the door shut and a smoky-chimneyed coal oil lamp burning wanly on
a box that served as table, she did not look about her to see what this
bare room was like but lifted her eyes straightway to his; they were no
longer sullen but were bright with burning anguish.
“I killed him,” she said. “I wanted to kill him--and I did.”
“Maybe not,” he told her. “A man doesn’t die every time a bullet from a
small caliber gun hits him.”
“If I did kill him, I can only hope that I won’t live long. If I
didn’t-- Well, I might as well be dead.” And then she demanded: “Why
did you step in? Why are you trying to help me? You don’t even know me.”
“I meant to take you straight to your folks, but you toppled over and
we had to start on the jump, and I don’t know where you live. That’s
why I brought you here--”
“I can’t get his face out of my mind--how he looked when he slumped
down. He-- Oh, God!”
“Look out!” said Jim Torrance sharply. “Don’t you start going to
pieces!”
There was not a chair in the room, so she dropped down in a corner, her
face hidden in her hands as it had been in the buckboard, as though she
were fighting desperately thus to shut out something she could not
bear to look at.
“How far from here,” he asked her, “to your home?”
“It’s not far, just across the hills, but there’s no road.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d have to go back the way we came, almost to Sundown; the road turns
off there. And I’d be sure to meet them--”
“Just across the hills? We could make it on horseback.”
“Yes.” She stood up. “I’ll go now, right away. My mother is desperately
ill.”
“And you left her to go to the Stag Horn!” His tone was as good as a
slap in her face. He softened it somewhat, however, when he saw the
anguish seeming to burn higher and higher in her eyes, and said: “Well,
your folks will be taking care of her. But about going right now--”
“I haven’t any other folks. There is just Mother, and I think she is
dying. I left her alone with an ignorant, shiftless and pretty nearly
heartless Indian woman. That’s why I must hurry.”
He realized that there was a lot he did not know about this girl. He
asked: “What about your team? It is yours, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She looked down at her gleaming white gown, soiled and rumpled
now, and set her hands to it as though she wanted to rip it off her
body. “I drove over, so as not to muss this thing! The team? What do I
care--”
“I’m going to ride along with you,” said Torrance, “anyhow until you
sight your house. Now you just wait here while I go saddle a horse for
you; it’s in the pasture, so it’ll be a few minutes.”
“Hurry!” she begged him.
He went first of all to where he had left the buckboard. He swung the
team back into the road, still leading his own horse, and drove on at
a run for a good mile. Where there was a possible though roadless way
down into the dark, timbered canyon, he drove down into it, a winding
way among the trees. There he left the buckboard; the horses, hastily
unhitched and unharnessed, he turned loose, trusting that they’d return
home in the course of time but not in any great haste. After that he
hunted in the buckboard against the mere chance that the girl’s fan or
the gun he had dropped there had stayed with them on their rapid flight
from Sundown; he found neither.
He met Sally Dawn, a slim white satin shape, at the gate.
“Where have you been? I thought you had gone away!”
He told her briefly, then at last went for a horse for her, cinched on
his spare saddle, wondering how the devil she was going to manage with
that dress on, and returned to her.
She managed all right. As a matter of fact she had thought of the
problem before he did and had solved it after a fashion. While he was
away with the team she had found a sharp knife and some string in his
kitchen. With a sort of savage delight she ripped that satin gown fore
and aft so that it hung in two panels like a divided skirt. With the
string she bound the two separate divisions about her legs from ankle
to thigh. When he saw her mount it was like seeing a young page from
some old court.
The way they rode, the girl leading along dim, dark trails, it was but
four or five miles to the old King Cannon Ranch. The first winking
light which she was first to glimpse was, she told him, home. He
spurred to her side and put his hand on her horse’s reins.
“Listen! You said you left your mother alone with the Indian woman.
Well, listen!”
The night was still, and sounds carried far and clearly. There were
men’s voices; there were drumming hoofbeats, still in the distance.
That meant that already there were several men here, others soon to
arrive.
“I don’t care! I’ve got to go to her. They won’t dare--”
“Wouldn’t Steve Bordereau have dared a pretty good deal?”
“He can’t now!” Her voice was brittle. “I’m glad! Now, let me go.”
“No. Keep your hair on. Wait here for me. I’ll ride down, find out how
things stand, and be back before you know it. You wait here!”
He dipped forward in the saddle and shot away, and what he had
commanded her to do she did. There was a quality in his voice which as
much as said, “When I say you’ve got to do a thing, you’ve got to do
it.”
A thin little night breeze blew around her and she shivered, not so
much with cold as with nervous dread. She listened to the hammering
of his horse’s hoofs, and they sounded like far, sinister drumbeats.
She lost sight of him down in a hollow brimming with black night, and
for a little while she stared into the utter dark down there and felt
its symbolism sweep over her like a palpable, drowning tide. When she
raised her eyes and looked straight up at the millions of twinkling
lights bespangling the wide sweep of cloudless sky, they seemed
infinitely farther away than ever before, and as chill as a wintry
morning glinting on frost.
She began to listen for his return long before she heard it. The thing
that put a new dread into her was the slowness with which he was
riding. She told herself: “He’s just saving his horse. He has ridden it
hard tonight. And it’s uphill.”
But when he returned to her and didn’t speak out immediately, she
understood that something terrible had happened. He came very close;
this time, instead of putting his hand on her reins, he put it on her
hand.
“We’ve got to take things the way they come, youngster. In this life,
we don’t deal ourselves all the cards we’ve got to play.”
“It’s my mother!” she gasped.
His hand closed, hard and firm on hers.
“Yes.”
“She is dead!”
“Yes.”
“And I wasn’t there! Let me go now; let me go! Quick!”
“Hold it. Hold it, youngster.” It was he who held her. “You can’t go
now, not right now. There’s a bunch of roughnecks down there that--
Well, I’d rather deal with coyotes. They’re a lot of low-lifes of the
Bordereau crowd. They’re half drunk and mean, and they say-- Well,
they’re talking wild. They won’t stay all night. Let them go first.”
“I don’t care, I don’t care!” She wrenched furiously to break his grip.
“I’m going--”
“Steve Bordereau’s dead,” he said bluntly. “They were talking about it
down at the house.”
“I tell you I don’t care about anything now! She wouldn’t be dead if it
weren’t for Steve Bordereau--he ought to have been killed long ago. Let
me go. You can’t stop me--”
“Can’t I?”
He removed his hand only to scoop her out of her saddle and onto his
own. Then he swung his horse about and turned back along the way they
had come.