SUSPICION
"If the repairs on the ranchhouse were not finished by this time you
would not be reading this," began a letter drawn from a tightly sealed
envelope Betty had given Calumet after he and Dade had completed the
painting. Supper had been over for some time, but the dishes had not
yet been cleared away, and when Betty had handed Calumet the letter he
had shoved the tablecloth back to make room for his elbows while he
read. Bob had gone to bed; Malcolm and Dade were somewhere outside.
Calumet had started to go with them, but had remained when Betty had
told him quietly that she wanted to talk to him on a matter of
importance. She sat opposite him now, unconcernedly balancing a knife
on the edge of a coffee cup, while she waited for him to finish reading
the letter.
"Therefore," continued the letter, "by this time your heart must have
softened a little toward me. I am certain of this, for I know that, in
spite of your other weaknesses, that cupidity and greed have no place
in your mental make-up. I know, too, that you are no fool, and by this
time you must have digested my first letter, and if you have you are
not blaming me as much as you did in the beginning.
"I have talked this over with Betty, and she is of the opinion that as
you have thus far obeyed my wishes you should be permitted to have a
free hand henceforth, for she insists that perhaps by this time the
restraint she has put on you will have resulted in you hating her, and
in that case she says she will not care to remain here any longer. But
as I have said, I do not think you are a fool, and nobody but a fool
could hate Betty. So I have persuaded her that even if you should come
to look upon her in that light she owes it to me to stay until the
conditions are fulfilled.
"It is my own hope that by this time you have made friends with her.
Perhaps--I am not going to offer you any advice, but Betty is a jewel,
and you might do worse. You probably will if you haven't sense enough
to take her--if you can get her. I have given her your picture, and
she likes you in spite of the reputation I have given you. She says
you have good eyes. Now, if a girl once gets in that mood there's no
end of the things she won't do for a man. And the man would be an
ingrate if he didn't try to live up to her specifications after he
found that out. That's why I am telling you. Faith made a certain
disciple walk on the water, and lack of it caused the same one to sink.
Do a little thinking just here. If you do you are safe, and if you
don't you are not worth saving.
"This is all about Betty. Whatever happens, I think she will be a
match for you.
"Betty will give you another thousand dollars. With it you will fix up
the corrals, the bunkhouse, and the stable.
"Perhaps you will want to know why I have not so much faith in you as
Betty has. It is because one day a man from the Durango country
stopped here for a day. He told me he knew you--that you were
cold-blooded and a hard case. Then I knew you hadn't improved after
leaving home. And so you must continue to do Betty's will, and mine.
Do you doubt this is for your own good?
"YOUR FATHER."
When Calumet folded the letter and placed it in a pocket, he leaned his
arms on the table again and regarded Betty intently.
"Do you know what is in this letter?" he said, tapping the pocket into
which he had placed it.
"No."
"There is something missing from the letter, ain't there?"
"Yes," she returned; "a thousand dollars." She passed it over to him.
As before, there were ten one-hundred-dollar bills.
His eyes flashed with mocking triumph. "If you don't know what is in
this letter--if you didn't read it--how do you know that I am to have
this money?" he said.
She silently passed over another envelope and watched him with a smile
of quiet contempt as he removed the contents and read:
"BETTY:--Give Calumet a thousand dollars when you turn over letter
number three to him.
"JAMES MARSTON."
Calumet looked at the envelope; Betty's name was on the face of it.
The triumph in his eyes was succeeded by embarrassment. He looked up
to see Betty's amused gaze on him.
"Well?" she questioned.
"Most women would have read it," he said. He got up and went outside,
leaving her to look after him, not knowing whether he had meant to
compliment her or not.
He found Dade and Malcolm standing near the stable. There was a
brilliant moon. At Dade's invitation they all went down to the
bunkhouse. In spite of the dilapidated appearance of its exterior, the
interior of the building was in comparatively good condition--due to
the continual tinkering of Malcolm, who liked to spend his idle hours
there--and Malcolm lighted a candle, placed it on the rough table, took
a deck of cards from the shelf, and the three played "pitch" for two
hours. At the end of that time Malcolm said he was going to bed. Dade
signified that he intended doing likewise. He occupied half of
Calumet's bed. Since the day following the clash with Dade, Calumet
had insisted on this.
"Just to show you that what you said ain't botherin' me a heap," he had
told Dade. "You're still yearlin' and need some one to keep an eye on
you, so's some careless son of a gun won't herd-ride you."
That Dade accepted this in the spirit in which it was spoken made it
possible for them to bunk together in amity. If Dade had "sized up"
Calumet, the latter had made no mistake in Dade.
Dade snuffed out the candle and followed Malcolm out. The latter went
immediately to the ranchhouse, but Dade lingered until Calumet stepped
down from the door of the bunkhouse.
"Bed suits me," suggested Dade. "Comin'?"
"I'm smokin' a cigarette first," said Calumet. "Mebbe two," he added
as an afterthought.
He watched Malcolm go in; saw the light from the lamp on the table in
the kitchen flare its light out through the kitchen door as Dade
entered; heard the door close. The lamp still burned after he had seen
Dade's shadow vanish, and he knew that Dade had gone upstairs. Dade
had left the light burning for him.
Alone, Calumet rolled the cigarette he had promised himself, lit it,
and then, in the flood of moonlight, walked slowly around the
bunkhouse, estimating the material and work that would be necessary to
repair it. Then, puffing at his cigarette, he made a round of the
corral fence. It was a long trip, and he stopped twice to roll new
cigarettes before he circled it. Then he examined the stable. This
finished, he stepped over to the corral fence, leaned his arms on the
top rail, and, in the moonlight that came over his shoulder, reread his
father's letter, making out the picturesque chirography with difficulty.
As during the first days of his return, when he had watched the army of
memories pass in review, he lingered over them now, and, to his
surprise, discovered that he felt some little regret over his own
conduct in those days preceding his leave-taking. To be sure, he had
been only a boy at that time, but he had been a man since, and the cold
light of reason should have shown him that there must have been cause
for his father's brutal treatment of him--if indeed it had been brutal.
In fact, if he had acted in his youth as he had acted since reaching
maturity, there was small reason to wonder that he had received blows.
Boys needed to be reprimanded, punished, and perhaps he had deserved
all he had received.
The tone of his father's letters was distinctly sorrowful. Remorse,
sincere remorse, had afflicted him. His father had been wronged,
misled, betrayed, and humiliated by the Taggarts, and as Calumet stood
beside the corral fence he found that all his rage--the bitter,
malignant hatred which had once been in his heart against his
father--had vanished, that it had been succeeded by an emotion that was
new to him--pity. An hour, two hours, passed before he turned and
walked toward the ranchhouse. His lips were grim and white, tell-tale
signs of a new resolve, as he stepped softly upon the rear porch,
stealthily opened the kitchen door, and let himself in. He halted at
the table on which stood the kerosene lamp, looking at the chair in
which he had been sitting some hours before talking to Betty, blinking
at the chair in which she had sat, summoning into his mind the picture
she had made when he had voiced his suspicions about her knowledge of
the contents of the letter she had given him. "Nobody but a fool could
hate Betty," the letter had read. And at the instant he had read the
words he had known that he didn't hate her. But he was a fool, just
the same; he was a fool for treating her as he did--as Dade had said.
He had known that all along; he knew that was the reason why he had
curbed his rage when it would have driven him to commit some rash
action. He had been a fool, but had he let himself go he would have
been a bigger one.
Betty had appraised him correctly--"sized him up," in Dade's idiomatic
phraseology--and knew that his vicious impulses were surface ones that
had been acquired and not inherited, as he had thought. And he was
strangely pleased.
He looked once around the room, noting the spotless cleanliness of it
before he blew out the light. And then he stepped across the floor and
into the dining-room, tip-toeing toward the stairs, that he might
awaken no one. But he halted in amazement when he reached a point near
the center of the room, for he saw, under the threshold of the door
that led from the dining-room to his father's office, a weak,
flickering beam of light.
The door was tightly closed. He knew from the fact that no light shone
through it except from the space between the bottom of it and the
threshold that it was barred, for he had locked the door during the
time he was repairing the house, and had satisfied himself that it
could not be tightly closed unless barred. Someone was in the room,
too. He heard the scuffle of a foot, the sound of a chair scraping on
the floor. He stood rigid in the darkness of the dining-room,
straining his ears to catch another sound.
For a long time he could hear only muffled undertones which, while they
told him that there were two or more persons in the room, gave him no
clue to their identity. And then, as he moved closer to the door, he
caught a laugh, low, but clear and musical.
It was Betty's! He had heard it often when she had been talking to
Dade; she had never laughed in that voice when talking to him!
He halted in his approach toward the door, watching the light under it,
listening intently, afflicted with indecision. At first he felt only a
natural curiosity over the situation, but as he continued to stand
there he began to feel a growing desire to know who Betty was talking
to. To be sure, Betty had a right to talk to whom she pleased, but
this talk behind a barred door had an appearance of secrecy. And since
he knew of no occasion for secrecy, the thing took on an element of
mystery which irritated him. He smiled grimly in the darkness, and
with infinite care sat down on the floor and removed his boots. Then
he stole noiselessly over to the door and placed an ear against it.
Almost instantly he heard a man's voice. He did not recognize it, but
the words were sufficiently clear and distinct. There was amusement in
them.
"So you're stringin' him along all right, then?" said the voice. "I've
got to hand it to you--you're some clever."
"I am merely following instructions." This in Betty's voice.
The man chuckled. "He's a hard case. I expected he'd have you all
fired out by this time."
Betty laughed. "He is improving right along," she said. "He brought
Bob another dog to replace Lonesome. I felt sorry for him that night."
"Well," said the man, "I'm glad he's learnin'. I reckon he's some
impatient to find out where the idol is?"
"Rather," said Betty. "And he wanted the money right away."
The man laughed. "Well," he said, "keep stringin' him along until we
get ready to lift the idol from its hidin' place. I've been thinkin'
that it'd be a good idea to take the durn thing over to Las Vegas an'
sell it. The money we'd get for it would be safer in the bank than the
idol where it is. An' we could take it out when we get ready."
"No," said Betty firmly; "we will leave the idol where it is. No one
but me knows, and I certainly will not tell."
"You're the boss," said the man. He laughed again, and then both
voices became inaudible to Calumet.
A cold, deadly rage seized Calumet. Betty was deceiving him, trifling
with him. Some plan that she had in mind with reference to him was
working smoothly and well, so successfully that her confederate--for
certainly the man in the room with her must be that--was distinctly
pleased. Betty, to use the man's words, was "stringing" him. In other
words, she was making a fool of him!
Those half-formed good resolutions which Calumet had made a few minutes
before entering the house had fled long ago; he snarled now as he
realized what a fool he had been for making them. Betty had been
leading him on. He had been under the spell of her influence; he had
been allowing her to shape his character to her will; he was, or had
been, in danger of becoming a puppet which she could control by merely
pulling some strings. She had been working on his better nature with
selfish aims.
Who was the man? Malcolm? Dade? He thought not; the voice sounded
strangely like Neal Taggart's. This suspicion enraged him, and he
stepped back, intending to hurl himself against the door in an effort
to smash it in. But he hesitated, leered cunningly at the door, and
then softly and swiftly made his way upstairs.
He went first to his own room, for he half suspected that it might be
Dade who was downstairs with Betty, and if it was-- Well, just now he
remembered vividly how Dade had defied him, and he made a mental vow
that if it were Dade who was with Betty the young man would leave the
Lazy Y before dawn quite suddenly. But it was not Dade. Dade was in
bed, snoring, stretched out comfortably.
Calumet slipped out of the room and went to Malcolm's. Both Bob and
Malcolm were sound asleep. He hesitated for an instant, and then made
his way slowly downstairs. Again he listened at the door. Betty and
the man were still talking.
Calumet found his boots. He decided not to put them on until he got to
the kitchen door, for he was determined to go around the outside of the
house and lay in wait for Betty's confederate, and he did not want to
make any sound that would scare him off. He was proceeding stealthily,
directing his course through the darkness by a stream of moonlight that
came in through one of the kitchen windows, and had almost reached the
kitchen door when his feet struck an obstruction--something soft and
yielding.
There was a sudden scurrying, a sharp, terrified yelp.
Calumet cursed. It was Bob's pup. The animal planted himself in the
stream of moonlight that came in through the window, facing Calumet and
emitting a series of short, high-pitched, resentful barks.
There was humor in this situation, but Calumet did not see it. He
heard a cry of surprise from the direction of the dining-room, and he
turned just in time to see the office door closing on a flood of light.
With savage energy and haste, he pulled on his boots, darted out of the
house, ran across the rear porch, leaped down, and ran around the
nearest corner of the house. As he ran he jerked his pistol from its
holster.
When he got to the front of the house he bounded to the door of the
office and threw it violently open, expecting to surprise Betty and her
confederate. He was confronted by a dense blackness. He dodged back,
fearing a trap, and then lighted a match and held it around the corner
of one of the door jambs. After the match was burning well he threw it
into the room and then peered after it. There came no reply to this
challenge, and so he strode in boldly, lighting another match.
The room was empty.
He saw how it was. Betty and the man had heard the barking of the dog
and had suspected the presence of an eavesdropper. The man had fled.
Probably by this time Betty was in her room. Calumet went out upon the
porch, leaped off, and ran around the house in a direction opposite
that which had marked his course when coming toward the front, covering
the ground with long, swift strides. He reasoned that as he had seen
no one leave the house from the other side or the front, whoever had
been with Betty had made his escape in this direction, and he drew a
breath of satisfaction when, approaching some underbrush near the
kitchen, he saw outlined in the moonlight the figure of a man on a
horse.
The latter had evidently just mounted, for at the instant Calumet saw
him he had just settled into the saddle, one foot searching for a
stirrup. He was about seventy-five feet distant, and he turned at
about the instant that Calumet saw him. That instant was enough for
Calumet, for as the man turned his face was bathed for a fraction of a
second in the moonlight, and Calumet recognized him. It was Neal
Taggart.
Calumet halted. His six-shooter roared at the exact second that the
man buried his spurs in the flanks of his horse and threw himself
forward upon its neck.
The bullet must have missed him only by a narrow margin, but it did
miss, for he made no sign of injury. His instant action in throwing
himself forward had undoubtedly saved his life. Calumet swung the
pistol over his head and brought it down to a quick level, whipping
another shot after the fleeing rider. But evidently the latter had
anticipated the action, for as he rode he jumped his horse from one
side to another, and as the distance was already great, and growing
greater, he made an elusive target.
Calumet saw his failure and stood silent, watching until Taggart was
well out into the valley, riding hard, a cloud of dust enveloping him.
A yell reached Calumet from the distance--derisive, defiant, mocking.
Calumet cursed then, giving voice to his rage and disappointment.
He went glumly around to the front of the house and closed the door to
the office. When he stepped off the porch, afterward, intending to go
around the way he had come in order to enter the house, he heard a
voice above him, and turned to see Dade, his head sticking out of an
upstairs window, his hair in disorder, his eyes bulging, a forty-five
gleaming in his hand. Back of him, his head over Dade's shoulder,
stood Malcolm, and Bob's thin face showed between the two.
At another window, one of the front ones, was Betty. Of the four who
were watching him, Betty seemed the least excited; it seemed to Calumet
as he looked at her that there was some amusement in her eyes.
"Lordy!" said Dade as Calumet looked up at him, "how you scairt me!
Was it you shootin'? An' what in thunder was you shootin' _at_?"
"A snake," said Calumet in a voice loud enough for Betty to hear.
"A snake! Holy smoke!" growled Dade in disgust. "Wakin' people up at
this time of the night because you wanted to shoot at a measly snake.
Tomorrow we'll lay off for an hour or so an' I'll take you where you
can shoot 'em to your heart's content. But, for the love of Pete, quit
shootin' at 'em when a guy's asleep."
Calumet looked up sardonically, not at Dade, but at Betty. "Was you
all asleep?" he inquired in a voice of cold mockery. Even at that
distance he saw Betty redden, and he laughed shortly.
"A foxy snake," he said; "one of them kind which goes roamin' around at
night. Lookin' for a mate, mebbe." He turned abruptly, with a last
sneering look at Betty, and made his way around the house.