Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) (14 page)

“McRaven, is it? You’re likely the son of that gambler who got himself killed.”

“I am,” I said, “and he was shot in the back, so I do not believe ‘he got himself killed,’ as you put it. He was never afraid to face a man with a gun or any other kind of weapon. And,” I added, “neither am I.”

He stared at me, a mean, ugly look. “There’s them as are lookin’ for you,” he said, “an’ I hope they find you!”

I smiled at him. “Just be sure you are not with them when they do.”

He stomped back in the other room, and Laurie’s mother gestured to a chair. “Please? I cannot let you go now.”

“I don’t want to cause any trouble,” I suggested.

“You are not causing trouble,” she insisted. “You are perhaps bringing to a head a difficult situation. Please sit down.”

Well, I did so. First I took off my coat and put it over the back of the chair. My hat was on the table beside me, but when I sat down they could see my cartridge belt and pistols. She noticed them, as did Laurie.

“I just came in off the trail,” I said. “I’ve been traveling some rough country.”

“That is perfectly all right, Mr. McRaven. My husband fought in the War between the States and often against Indians.”

The man loomed in the door again and was about to say something else. Then he saw the gun I carried in my waistband, and whatever he was about to say died on his lips. He disappeared.

“We do not often have visitors, Mr. McRaven, and Laurie works all day so we do not often go out. It is good to have company.”

“Since pa died, I’ve been lonesome myself, ma’am. I haven’t talked to a woman…excepting one…in quite some time.”

“It is cold for traveling,” she said. “Many of the high passes won’t be open for another month. That poor Mister Nilson, you know? The man who carried the mail? Some believe he took what money was in the mail and skipped out, but I think he was trapped in a slide. He’s been missing for months.”

“It was a mean winter,” I said.

“Your father was a southern man, Mr. McRaven? I did not know him, but he often talked to Laurie. She liked him very much. Said he was such a gentleman.”

“He was from the South, but I never knew exactly where. He…he never talked about it much. Only some days he would get to remembering and he’d mention places…rivers and plantations and such. But I never did hear him mention a state or a town…only big towns like New Orleans or Charleston, but he spoke of Boston, too, and Philadelphia.”

“Mr. McRaven, I’d like you to know that man is not my husband nor is he Laurie’s father. He is my brother-in-law, married to my sister until her death. He had no place to go and we took him in, and for a few weeks he worked and occasionally contributed to the expenses of living. For some time now he has done neither, but he considers himself the man of the house. You are not the first man he has ordered out.”

“Why don’t you tell him to leave?”

She smiled. “And if he refuses? What am I to do?”

“Ma’am, you tell him to leave and I’ll see that he does, but if I’m not here, you or Laurie just go down to the marshal or some businessman you know and tell them. If that fails, you go to any saloon on Blair Street and tell them your troubles.”

“They might hang him.”

“Yes, ma’am, they might…and good riddance. Even the roughest of those men down along the street won’t see a decent woman abused.”

The floor creaked faintly from the other room. The door was closed, but I had a feeling he had been listening. I put up a hand for quiet and drew my belt gun.

Laurie’s mouth opened and I said, “There will not be any shooting.”

The door opened suddenly, and he stood there with a rifle in his hands. “Now you git!” He raised the rifle threateningly, but it was not aimed, which was his mistake.

He started into the room and then he saw that six-shooter in my hand and he stopped so fast he almost fell.

“Put the rifle down.” I told him, “and take whatever belongs to you and get out. Get out and stay out. If you ever come back here again or if you so much as speak to one of these women, I’ll see you hang. I may not be around too long, but I shall talk to the marshal before I leave, and I’ll also talk to some of the boys down along Blair Street.”

He dearly wanted to shoot. He wanted to lift that rifle and turn it on me, but he knew he didn’t have a chance. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he blustered.

“I’m a friend of the family,” I said.

He blustered and he grumbled but he went. He was a loafer and a bully but a man of no courage, yet I recalled my father warning me against taking such men too lightly.

When he was gone, I moved my chair so that I couldn’t be seen from outside and holstered my pistol. “Sorry, ma’am. The only other thing was to throw him out bodily, and that might have torn up the room somewhat.”

“Thank you, Kearney, thank you very much. He has been…oh, obnoxious! And getting worse every day.”

She refilled my cup, and I sat back and enjoyed it, my eyes straying to the books on the shelf. There were a couple of novels by Sir Walter Scott,
Little Dorrit
by Charles Dickens, and
Vivian Grey
by Benjamin Disraeli.

She saw me looking at the books. “They are presentation copies,” she explained. “My husband knew them all, and his father went to school with Sir Walter. They were pupils of Mr. Luke Fraser, in his second-year class. He lived off Canongate Street, and they often walked home together. Later he moved to a house near that where John Knox died.”

“What did your husband do?”

She smiled. “Nothing very well, I am afraid, but he was a fine man for all of that and I loved him dearly. He wished most of all to paint, but his paintings did not sell. Then we were married and he had a small inheritance, so we came to America. He had known Sir Walter from childhood, but he met Mr. Dickens only when he came to London, and he knew Mr. Disraeli, then, too. In New York he taught painting and the piano, but the life was confining, so he joined the army at last. He became a sergeant major, and when the Indian wars needed men, they made an officer of him.”

“I don’t even know your name,” I said.

“Oh! I’m sorry!” She put her hand to her mouth. “I am Anne McCrae and my daughter is Laurie.”

We talked long, and when I left it was to walk back to the hotel and to bed. First I stopped by the livery stable to see old Chalk. “Well, you don’t look in no hurry, so I guess you’ll be stayin’ over.”

Taking a few minutes, I told him about Mrs. McCrae and Henry.

“Know him,” Chalk said. “He’s no-account. He’s lazy and he’s a boozer. They’re well rid of him. An’ don’t you worry none. They’re fine folks an’ we’ll take care of them.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “You figure on coming back here, son?”

“I do.”

“That there’s a fine girl. We here in Silverton think a lot of her and her ma. They’re good folks, gentle folks.”

“I know.” After a moment I said, “Chalk, there’s a man hunting me…maybe more than one. I think one of them is the man who killed my father. The others are men he has hired.”

“We talked of that. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

In the hotel I put a chair under the knob again and lay down to sleep with my six-shooter on a chair alongside the bed where I could lay a hand on it.

Yet I didn’t go to sleep right away. There were movements in the hallways and horses passing in the street. Lying on my back, hands clasped behind my head, I thought back to my earliest memories.

Finally I got up and went to the small desk in one corner of the room. I found a tablet in the drawer, and taking a pencil, I started to note down all I could recall.

Lying on a boat dock or some such place with the sun on my back…the long-legged birds in the swamp…that time down on the sand by the sea, a lonely place…an old hulk half buried in the mud that pa wouldn’t let me go near, and the big, empty old house with the shutter banging…the gnarled old man in the faded green cloak who came to our house one night when pa was away, a man all crippled and twisted…or so he seemed.

Pa talking. “No, I will not have her in the house! I will have nothing to do with them!”

Somebody said something about a curse. “Curse? I know nothing about that, only they contaminate everything they touch! There’s evil in them…evil!”

A door had closed and I had heard no more.

Just odds and ends of memories, although I remembered my father had reacted strangely when I told him of the old man in the green cloak.

And then there was the night that ended something and began something else, the night my father came home, bundled me up, and took me away, and we never went back.

Names…there had been names—-Old Tolbert…Faustina…Weber…Naomi…There were many, but none of them seemed connected with anything. At last I returned to my bed and slept.

When morning came, I went to breakfast and it was Laurie who served me. She came quickly to my table with coffee. “There are eggs,” she whispered. “If you want them, you’d better order, because there are not many and they do not last long.”

“I’ll have two, scrambled.”

Suddenly the door opened and two men came in. Both men wore badges on their vests and they looked quickly around the room. When they saw me, they turned and walked to my table.

“McRaven? My name is Burns. I am making inquiries about a man named Blazer. Judge Blazer.”

Chapter 11

A
MOMENT ONLY, I held myself very still inside. This could be trouble, serious trouble.

“I met him,” I replied.

“So we understand. Would you explain what happened?”

Laurie came over, looking frightened. “Laurie, would you bring some cups for these gentlemen? And some hot coffee?”

Briefly, I explained about herding Dingleberry’s cattle in the high country, coming down to find my father murdered and then to hear of his heavy winning the night before. Then I told them about my showdown with Blazer.

“I went to his office and he held back the money my father had won, evidently imagining I had not heard of it. So I told him I knew of it and impressed him with the necessity of turning it over to me.”

“And he did?”

“Well, I had to nudge him a mite. He didn’t take kindly to the notion of giving up all that money.”

“And then?”

“Mister, I hadn’t any friends around that I knew of, so I taken out. I figured they’d look up and down the trail for me, so I went back to the hills.”

“‘They’?”

“Yes, sir. He brought some men with him. Tobin Wacker for one. They followed me.”

Choosing my words with care, I explained about the fight in the cabin, how I was badly beaten and escaped into the storm.

“Indian woman fixed my nose. They broke it. She put the bone in place and put some kind of wax or something over it that stiffened up tight. They took good care of me.”

“You never saw Blazer again?”

“No, but I saw Tobin Wacker and that man called Dick. I saw them in Rico.”

They asked me a sight of questions, and I was itching to get away. It was time I started for Georgetown, but there was no way I could leave them.

“Do you believe Blazer killed your father for his winnings?”

“No, sir. I don’t believe he killed my father. I think he just saw all that money and got greedy.”

“The last you saw of him was in the cabin? But you saw Wacker and Dick in Rico? And the cabin had been burned?”

“Blazer’s missing,” the other officer said, “and we have to find him…or his body.”

“My guess would be in the ruins of that burned-out cabin. When Wacker and Dick saw me in Rico, they were scared. That doesn’t make sense. Why should they be scared of me? And that Wacker, he wasn’t afraid of anything. Only I had seen them with Blazer on the mountain before that last snow.”

“We will look around.” They got up. “Are you going to be around town?”

“Not for a while. I am going east…Cherry Creek, and around that part of the country.”

They exchanged a glance. “It would be better if you stayed here until this Blazer affair is straightened out.”

For a moment I said nothing and then I replied. “I cannot. For business and personal reasons I have to go east, but I will come back here when I have done what needs to be done.”

They just looked at me, and finally I said, “There’s a man hunting me, and Wacker and Dick have been helping him. I don’t know why he wants me killed, but if I go east I can find out. I figure if a man is gunning for me, I should know why.”

Burns laughed. “Seems reasonable. All right, you go. Think you can be back here in thirty days?”

“I’ll try.”

Burns pushed back his chair. “That’s good enough for me. Meanwhile we’ll have a look at that cabin.”

“Mr. Burns, you’d better pull back. Unless you know the country, that cabin isn’t easy to find.”

With salt and pepper shakers and the cups, I showed him where the peaks and passes were. He needed no diagram. There’d been two thousand head of cattle driven over trails of as many miles with no more direction than I was giving these men.