Marshal Jeremy Six #4 the Proud Riders Page 4

She was as dark-haired as he was. Her lips came open: wide lips, sensual and pretty; her eyes were gray and large. The black hair tumbled heavily below her shoulders.

  The tight-belted Levi’s she wore revealed that the years had not added any thickness to her small waist. Paradise lifted his eyes to her face and said, “You haven’t changed at all.”

  She was looking at his empty right sleeve as if she couldn’t take her eyes off it. All she seemed able to say was, “I didn’t know, John.”

  “Don’t fret about that, he said. “I’m used to it by now. It’s not as much of a handicap as you might think.”

  She seemed to shake herself invisibly. She said, “One of the ranchers told me you were in town. I’ve been expecting you.”

  “And Tracy?”

  “Tracy doesn’t know anything about it. He’s up in the mountains hunting a wild horse.”

  His expression changed and became speculative. After a moment he said, “Do you mind if I get off my horse, Connie?”

  Her fists were closed. “It might be better if you didn’t. If you went back to town.” Her voice was small; she wasn’t meeting his glance.

  His eyes were sad. “Is that all we’ve got to say to each other, after all these years?”

  It made her lower her face in surrender. “All right. Come in, then.” She turned and went into the house.

  Paradise stepped down and wrapped the reins around the hitching post; climbed up on the porch and followed her inside, taking off his hat.

  The parlor seemed severely simple. There wasn’t too much furniture. Connie didn’t sit down; she stood by the window, arms folded under her breasts, and spoke bluntly. “It’s a bad time for you to come, John.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve got our hands full of trouble,” she said; she went on more softly, “—without adding you to it.”

  He said, “I didn’t come to make trouble for either one of you.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  It made him shrug and turn his one hand palm-up. “Who knows? When you get like I am, you get so you can’t stand to stay in one place very long. I keep moving along, and my trail takes me to places I didn’t exactly plan to visit. But once I’m there, I don’t turn around and run away.” He took a pace closer to her; he studied her face and said in an earnest low voice, “I was hoping you might be a little happier to see me than you seem to be.”

  She said, “I’m sorry if I seem curt, John. But what you and I had between us was a long time ago. Bringing it all back now can only complicate things—and my life doesn’t need any complicating just now, God knows.”

  “What’s the trouble, Connie? Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Yes. But not to you.”

  “I didn’t come here to make triangles,” he told her. “Look at me. Do I look like a man who could possibly take himself seriously as the ‘other man’ in Tracy Chavis’ marriage?”

  She looked hurt. “Don’t, John.”

  “I’m only facing the truth, Connie. I’m a dried up little prune of a man with half the proper number of arms. I wish you’d believe I didn’t come riding in here planning to carry you off with me. Maybe you ought to remember that I knew your husband long before you and I ever met each other. He’s a friend of mine too, you know.” His voice dropped. “I only came to pay my respects, Connie. If you want me to leave, I’ll be on my way.”

  He reached for his hat and turned toward the door. His shoulders were bent like an old man’s.

  “No. Wait, John.” She made an apologetic gesture with her hand. “We’re all on edge, I guess.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it, then?”

  She said, “There’s not that much to tell. It’s a familiar story, I imagine. We’re broke—that’s all. Between three years of drought and a blizzard last winter, we’ve had our savings wiped out. And on top of that, a vicious family of rustlers has robbed us blind. We’re about to lose the ranch to the San Francisco bank.”

  Paradise covered his thoughts by using his teeth, tongue, and hand to roll a cigarette. He lighted it with a sulfur match and said, “I don’t think I get this. You’re in a tight place for money—and Tracy’s up in the hills somewhere chasing wild horses. What sense does that make?”

  “Nothing makes much sense anymore,” Connie said. “It’s a crazy gamble, that’s all. You know Tracy, John. He decided that there’s a wild stallion in the Sangres that’s faster on its legs than any horse this side of St. Louis. He’s determined to catch the stallion and break it, and ride it in the Fourth of July race. He thinks we can win enough money to pay off the mortgage and save the ranch.”

  “You can’t be serious,” he said incredulously.

  “Maybe I’m not, at that. Who knows.” She seemed wistful and vague.

  He said, “Connie, it’s less than a month till the Fourth of July. And he hasn’t even caught that bronc? How does he expect to train it in time to run in that race, much less win it?”

  She gave a helpless gesture. “Those are all the same arguments I used. There was no talking him out of it. He’s made up his mind that it may be a terribly long chance, but it’s the only chance we’ve got. I don’t know, John, maybe he’s right.”

  He was about to answer when a corner of his vision picked up a small motion. He moved swiftly, like a coiled mechanism: the sheath-knife slipped into his hand in quick synchronization with his drop to a crouch behind the leather-upholstered divan. He was like that, knife poised, by the time the kitchen door came fully open.

  Connie uttered a small cry and dashed in front of him. A tiny figure appeared in the door—a girl not more than seven or eight years old, in a yellow cotton dress with a big cloth bow at the back of the waist.

  Paradise stood up, let out his breath, put away his knife and grimaced. The little girl cocked her head curiously to one side and stared at him, puzzled, not at all afraid of him. Finally Paradise grinned at her. “Hello there.”

  “I don’t know that game,” the little girl said.

  It made him laugh, low in his throat. Connie walked quickly to the little girl and gathered her up in her arms. Connie’s eyes were moist. “It’s a boys’ game, dear,” she said.

  “I thought it might make you laugh,” Paradise said gravely.

  Connie gave him a grateful look. She put the little girl down. “This is Mr. Paradise, Peggy.”

  The little girl curtsied politely. Paradise dipped his head in exact courtesy. He murmured, “She looks like you, Connie.”

  The little girl said abruptly, “That’s a funny name.”

  “I suppose it is,” Paradise agreed. “But there’s not too much I can do about it, is there?”

  But by then her interest had shifted. She said in a piping voice, “What happened to your arm, Mr. Paradise?”

  He heard the quick intake of Connie’s breath; he said gently, “It was an accident.”

  Connie reached down to take her daughter’s hand and led the little girl toward the kitchen, talking quickly: “That’s enough, now, Peggy. Mr. Paradise is busy and has to leave soon.”

  “Can I play in the tree house that Daddy built?”

  “May I.”

  “May I, then?”

  “Yes, if you’re careful,” Connie said, and watched the little girl hurry outside.

  Paradise said, “She’s pretty. Like her mother.”

  It made Connie smile. “You always knew what to say to a woman, didn’t you?” She made a brusque gesture. “Peggy asked what I didn’t have the courage to ask.”

  “About my arm? It was an ambush. Nothing I could do about it. Bushwhacked from the brush. I crawled two miles into the nearest town, but it took me twenty-four hours. I was passed out a good deal of the time. By the time I got to town the wound was infected and the doctor had to saw the arm off.” He made a face. “I’m sorry. It’s an ugly story.”

  “I asked,” she replied. “Did you catch the man who did it?”

  “No. I never got close enough to see his
face. He had red hair, though, and I’d remember his voice if I saw him again. He yelled a few things I’d rather not repeat.” He shook his head; he added, “But I decided not to waste the rest of my life on a search for vengeance. It just isn’t worth it.”

  “You have changed,” she observed. “Is that why you’re not carrying a gun?”

  He looked down at his waist. He couldn’t help the crooked smile that crossed his face briefly. “No. That’s your town marshal’s doing. He’s got my gun locked up in his desk.”

  “And you let him take it?’

  He answered, “I didn’t want to kill him for the sake of a twelve-dollar piece of steel. It was the only choice he’d have given me if I’d refused to hand over my gun.”

  “Why did he take it from you?”

  “I killed a man in Spanish Flat,” he told her, watching her eyes. “I’m out on bail.”

  Her face fell, as he knew it would. She said, “Then you haven’t changed as much as I thought.”

  “He was an idiotic kid who—” He cut himself off, shaking his head. “What’s the good of it? I won’t make excuses.” He lifted his hat again and went across the room to the front door. He opened it and stood in the doorway, holding his hat. “No excuses,” he said again. “I don’t know what I expected to find here. Maybe I was hoping to win your forgiveness. But I guess it’s pretty late for that.”

  “I’ve got nothing to forgive you for,” she said. “We owe each other nothing, John. We’re two people who met one night and knew each other for a little while. That’s all.”

  “I guess it is,” he said. He put his hat on and turned away. Her voice stopped him:

  “John?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do I have the right to ask you for help?” Her voice, and her eyes, were level and even.

  He said, “You’ve always had that right, Connie.”

  “Help us, then. Help Tracy.”

  He tugged his hat down firmly. “Where will I find him?” was all he asked.

  Chapter Five

  Jeremy Six stiffened. Through the window he saw them plainly: two red-haired horsemen, riding forward along the street. They were easy to spot, those two, by their flame-red shocks of hair. The younger one was Seth’s brother, Malachi; the older one, chunky in the saddle and wearing a spade beard two shades darker than his hair, was Ike Lockhart. He looked like a Biblical patriarch; and in fact he was a kind of Old Testament character. A brutal, no-quarter land had made him over in its image. The main difference between Ike Lockhart and a Biblical clan-father was that Ike and his family stood opposed, foursquare and righteously, to the law.

  The law was to Ike Lockhart what the Flood had been to Noah: a pestilence, a challenge, a handiwork of God which God had established purely for the purpose of testing Ike Lockhart’s mettle. With never-waning enthusiasm, Ike Lockhart threw himself wholeheartedly against the law. He gloried in his successes, and suffered through his failures. He had, in fact, spent roughly one-third of his whole life in jails and penitentiaries.

  Ike Lockhart had raised four sons. The eldest, Ephraim, was dead these seven years, laid low by a bullet from the gun of an arrogant-faced little gambler named John Paradise. The other three sons, Seth and Malachi and Elihu, were peas from the same pod; they rode undeviatingly in their father’s retinue, never questioning Ike’s decisions, never challenging his unreasoned hatred of the law.

  Jeremy Six, on this warm spring afternoon, stepped out of his office with a double-barreled eight-gauge shotgun in his hands, hammers cocked. He brought the big bores around; the muzzles followed Ike and Malachi forward.

  Ike folded both hands on the horn and halted his horse at the hitch rail, ten feet from Six. Malachi did the same. Their faces were guarded and grim; they looked like pallbearers, Six thought.

  Ike Lockhart’s beard tended to chop up and down when he talked. “Afternoon, Marshal.”

  “Lockhart.”

  “Mr. Lockhart, to you.”

  The muzzles of Six’s shotgun lifted an inch. “You’re hardly in any position to call the tune, Lockhart.”

  Lockhart blinked. “One day you’ll call me mister. I pledge you that, Marshal. The day will come.”

  “Doubtful,” Six replied. “Where’s your other son, Lockhart?”

  “On business in Mexico. What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing, I suppose. What’s on your mind?”

  “Want you to let my son out of there.”

  “I guess not.”

  Lockhart leaned forward on his hands, shifting his seat on the saddle. He said, “Now, me and my son here had a long and right unpleasant ride to get here, Marshal. It’d be kind of a shame if we had all that ride for nothing.”

  “Would it,” Six said. “You’ll understand if I don’t seem to get all broken up with sympathy for you.”

  Ike extended his hands in a reasoning way. “Look, Marshal, you know perfectly well you got no proof whatever against that boy in there. You gonna have to let him out soon as they’s a hearing held.”

  “That may be,” Six said. “And if that’s the case, then that’s when I’ll let him loose. In the meantime, he stays right where he is.”

  Malachi was so thin that Six had the feeling it would be difficult to spot him if he turned sideways. Malachi had a funeral grin. He didn’t say anything; he just grinned. It was the kind of grin that might have made a sphinx uneasy.

  Ike suddenly chuckled. “I reckon you expected us to come bustin’ in here like a bunch of troopers to smash Seth out of jail. Fess up now, Marshal—ain’t that what you figured us to do? Only, you didn’t figure me right, Marshal. I ain’t stupid enough to let you euchre me into something like that.” He settled down in the saddle and lifted his reins. “No, sir. Me and Malachi here, we just gonna set ourselves up in the hotel here and wait, nice and quiet as you please, until you let my boy out of jail. No trouble at all, Marshal. Ain’t that right, son?”

  “Sure,” said Malachi. The voice that came out of his flat chest was a ringing basso profundo.

  Ike added, in a self-satisfied voice, “And they ain’t a damn thing you can do about it, neither, Marshal. We ain’t wanted for no crimes in Arizona, Malachi and me. And we got plenty money in our jeans. You can’t arrest us for vagrancy. And we sure don’t intend to provoke no nonsense that might disturb the peace.” All the while he spoke, the grin behind his beard kept getting wider.

  Six didn’t like any part of it. It had the smell of week-old halibut. His big jaw crept forward to lie in a flat, hard line.

  “Suit yourselves. But if you so much as spit on the sidewalk I’ll clap you in irons. Understand?”

  “Why,” said Ike, “we aim to be little angels, Marshal.” Sardonically, he tipped his hat; reined around and drummed away down the street with his son riding at his heels.

  When the two horsemen were out of sight, Deputy Dominguez came into view in an alley-mouth across the street. Dominguez slung his rifle across his shoulder and ambled forward. When he reached the courthouse porch he said, “I don’t know if I really believe any of that.”

  “You hear what they said?” Six asked.

  “Ike’s got a nice loud voice.”

  Six shook his head. He went back into the office and put up his shotgun. “I will be honest with you. I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Dominguez said.

  “They’re up to something.”

  “Sure. But what?”

  Six poked his finger at the big deputy’s wide chest. “Somebody has got Ike Lockhart’s ear.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If ever a stupid man was born,” Six said, “it’s Ike Lockhart. By himself he hasn’t got enough sense to get in out of the rain. Am I right?”

  “I reckon. So what?”

  “Piece it together. Here’s Ike, sitting in some cantina down in Mexico, drinking tequila and bragging about how he’s going to ride north to Spanish Flat and bust his son out of jail. Now, somebody changed
Ike’s mind. Somebody told him that was exactly what I’d expect him to do. Somebody talked him out of it—by giving him a better idea.”

  “What better idea?”

  Six muttered an oath. “I’m a marshal, not an oracle. But there’s somebody new mixed up in this thing. Ike’s got a silent partner somewhere. And I’ll tell you this—you and I aren’t going to let ourselves close both eyes at the same time until we find out what it is that Ike’s up to.”

  John Paradise dismounted and drank from a warm spring, whereupon he sat back on his heels to have a look at the country. Canyon walls dropped away behind him; he could see all the way down past the foothills whence he had come.

  From this altitude the length of the vast desert seemed foreshortened; it unrolled away from the cactus-studded foothills, expanding in yellows and tans to the far horizon. Curling along the bases of the hills, the track of a river ran, marked by dark cottonwood groves strung out along the banks. A haze of heat undulated over the plain, making it shimmer: it wouldn’t be too long before the full hard-battering heat of summer would assault the land. The sky was brass-blue; against its brightness Paradise had his eyes half shuttered and his hat brim pulled low.

  He put his back to the panorama, gathered the reins in his left hand, and swung up into the saddle. His expression was that of a man who had resigned himself to an unpleasant day’s toiling.

  He set his knees and gigged the horse up toward the head of the canyon, leaning forward to ease the pinto, letting it pick its own path while he used his single hand to hook his canteen, freshly filled, onto the saddle.

  At the top of the canyon he took the reins out of his teeth and lifted the pinto to a canter that took him, over the course of the next hour, up a series of switchbacks and precariously tilted mountainsides into the bare windswept heights of the Sangres. Up here he was glad he had his coat. The air was thin and had an edge to it.

  Paradise was thin-mouthed and narrow-faced. He wore a peaked black hat with an absolutely flat brim that had no curl anywhere, but made a severe level disc across his forehead. The black vest, under his dark blue suit, was held together by a silver watch-chain across the belly. His eyes had a cool glitter; they gave away nothing. His nose was a long blade; his high-boned face was arrogant, intolerant in appearance. A life of traveling hard, fast trails had left its tracks on him. His dark eyes were couched deep in hollows under raven-black overhanging brows.