The End of the Trail (3 page)

She came back and paused in front of him to ask, “Ready for your supper?”

He told her he was, and she went on into the kitchen without waiting for him to give his order.

A few minutes later she returned with a loaded tray which she set on the counter beside him, and he realized that the little cafe didn't boast a menu; that when a man ordered supper he was served whatever Karen Larson had prepared.

She placed a thick piece of meat and a baked potato in front of him, with a small dish of canned corn on the side.

He said, “This is a funny place for you, Ma'm.”

She was lifting a knife and fork from the tray. She stood motionless, holding them in mid-air for a second, then placed them beside his plate. “What do you mean by that?”

He shrugged. “Mighty out-of-the-way place. I reckon you never see anybody outside of the train crew and TB cowpunchers.”

The pulse was throbbing in her smooth throat. She said, “Perhaps that's why I like it here,” and went back to the kitchen.

He cut into his steak. It was thick, and juicy and tender. He munched on a piece and decided it was from a young elk.

Karen came back with a cup of coffee and he said appreciatively, “Mighty fine piece of meat, Ma'm. Who does your hunting for you?”

She said, “Hunting?” lifting her eyebrows over the word.

“Elk, isn't it?”

“Suppose it is?” She sounded weary and defensive. She set his coffee down and passed on to the three railroad men who were finishing their pie.

Morris worked on his elk steak and baked potato until the train crew had paid for their meals and gone through the rear door to the rooms in the back. He lifted his eyes and saw Karen Larson watching him from the front of the counter. Her eyes were wide and they gazed at him steadily with a look of pleading. She moved slowly toward him, as though inexplicably drawn to him against her will.

She stopped in front of him and put her hands flat on the counter. “Who are you?”

“Name's Nate Morris, Ma'm.”

“Who
are
you?”

Morris swallowed his last piece of steak. He said, “I'm just a rancher from Wyoming, Ma'm,” in a disarmingly gentle voice.

“Why did you come to Sanctuary Flat?”

“I'm interested in cattle breeding.”

“Are you connected with the TB ranch?”

Morris shook his head. “But I'm riding out there tomorrow to look the layout over … on Henderson's invitation. Do you know the three trappers I saw in the saloon?”

“The three … trappers?”

“Hey, You, and Slim is what Henderson called 'em.”

He pushed his plate away and took a swallow of coffee. “Was that apple pie I saw you serving the other men?”

She went into the kitchen and brought him a thick slice of apple pie, moved back a step and folded her bare arms; stood with chin lifted, her eyes turned away from him.

He cut into the thick pie with his fork. The crust was flaky and tender, the center spicy and delicious.

He munched a bite of pie and said musingly, as though he spoke to himself and not to the woman who didn't look at him, “I never tasted apple pie this good but once before in my life.”

She made no movement but her body seemed to take on added rigidity.

“That was in Denver one time,” Morris went on in the same casual tone. “She was a mighty fine cook too. Knew how to hang elk meat to tender it up like your steaks. But her name wasn't Larson.”

Without turning her head, Karen asked in a low voice, “What was her name?”

“Weatherby. Mrs. Doane Weatherby. She wasn't a woman a man'd be likely to forget easy.”

He finished his pie and drained his coffee cup. When he got up, Karen said, “That'll be three dollars, counting the room.”

He put three silver dollars on the counter in front of her and went back to his room.

He opened the door and stopped on the threshold, sniffing the air intently. There was an earthly, animal smell in the room that hadn't been there when he went out.

He drew one of his guns and struck a match. The room was empty.

3

Morris pulled the door shut and barred it behind him, struck another match and went across to light the candle, then stood in the center of the room looking about him carefully.

When he went out he had left his mackinaw neatly folded over the foot of the bed. It now lay partly opened. In getting out the shirt he had used for a window curtain, Morris had left one end of a folded towel sticking up out of his valise. The towel was now neatly flattened down.

Small things, these, but Nate Morris had long trained himself to look for the small things. His was a precarious and dangerous way of life, and the man who neglected small precautions was not likely to survive long.

His shirt remained where he had hung it over the window. He went to it and unhooked one corner to peer out. It was quite dark outside, and very still. He could see nothing from his window. He replaced the improvised curtain and moved back to sit on the edge of the bed.

He lit a cigarette and smoked it, sitting immobile as though he were waiting for something without quite knowing what it was.

When the cigarette was smoked down until it burned his fingers, he got up and put the butt in the stove. His movements had a quality of finality about them.

He withdrew the pair of silver mounted guns from their shoulder holsters and laid them on the bed. He picked up his heavy mackinaw and put it on over his leather jacket, slid the guns into the convenient canvas sheaths sewed inside the slanting outside pockets. He hesitated for one last searching look about the room, then blew out the candle and went to the door. He opened it silently and went up the hall to the front of the cafe.

Karen Larson was standing beside the stove looking out of the window. She turned to look at him and her eyes seemed troubled when she noted the heavy coat. “Are you going out?” The words seemed to require great effort.

He smiled and said, “I thought the bulls might be lonely down by the tracks.”

She said, “No,” and her eyes pleaded with him.

He shook his head and the smile stayed on his lips. “I have to go out there, Karen. You know that, don't you?”

She didn't seem to notice that he had used her first name. A tremor shook her body and she wheeled back to the window again.

Morris waited a moment but she did not turn back. He went out the front door and closed it firmly behind him.

The afternoon promise of near-zero temperature was being fulfilled. Wispy clouds obscured a crescent moon overhead. The saddled TB horses still stood patiently outside the saloon next door. The thin night air was hazy with the threat of snow, and the Flat was blanketed by a stillness that seemed to ring in his ears.

Morris turned up the collar of his mackinaw and started to move toward the railroad siding. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Karen had moved from her position by the window.

He swerved to the right and made a wide circle that brought him around behind the cafe. In the dimness of the night, he saw two figures standing close together by the corner. He thrust his hands in his slanting pockets and strode toward them.

One of the figures melted away into the night. The other remained, waiting for him.

It was Karen Larson. She wore a hooded fur jacket, lined with fox fur that outlined her white face turned up to his.

Morris moved very close to her, but she did not flinch or attempt to retreat. She said, “I thought you were going to the cattle pens.”

“I changed my mind. Which one of the trappers was it that just left you?”

“Does it matter?” she asked composedly.

“The men in the saloon told me they never spoke to any of you others around here.”

“They furnish me with my meat.”

Karen didn't appear to move, but suddenly her body was pressed close against him. The top of her fur-lined hood tickled his nose. Her voice was muffled against his mackinaw: “Go inside. Please don't go down there.”

Her body trembled and he imagined he felt the warmth of her through his heavy clothing. She put her hands on his shoulders and threw back her head, lifting her face to his. Her lips were parted and they seemed to offer themselves to him.

He remained remote and strong, shaking his head slowly. “It won't do, Karen. You know it won't.”

She pressed her face against him and slid her hands down the sleeves of his mackinaw, down to the slanting pockets where his hands remained.

He stepped back abruptly as her hands started to creep inside the pockets with his. He said, “You'd better go inside, Karen,” and turned on his heel to swing around the side of the cafe.

This time he continued on toward the railroad siding where the prize bulls were bedded down for the night.

There was no sound from the wooden pens when he reached them. It was too dark to see the animals inside and he presumed they were asleep.

The two empty cattle cars still stood on the track where they had been spotted for unloading that afternoon.

Morris began to make a cautious circuit of the pens, pressing between the empty cattle cars and the heavy board fence.

A tiny, improbable sound stopped him as he passed in front of the open door of the first car. He whirled to face the door and a silver mounted six-gun came from his pocket.

Faint moonlight glittered on a thin sliver of polished steel a brief instant before it was buried deep in his throat. He sank to the frozen ground without uttering a sound.

4

A week later five men were seated about a long table of polished mahogany in the director's room of the Sanctuary Cattle Syndicate Inc. in Denver, Colorado.

The president of the Board sat at the head of the long table. He was John Hazeltine, a rancher with extensive holdings throughout the state: a forward-thinking and energetic citizen who believed in the future of the West and was aggressively identified with many projects for the betterment of the cattle industry. Hazeltine was a big man, with the wrinkled, leathery face and far-seeing eyes of a man whose youth was spent in the saddle; and his reputation for honesty and square-dealing was unquestioned throughout the land.

At his right sat Philip J. Morrow, president of the Colorado Cattle Breeder's Association. Morrow was also a range-bred Westerner, with a stringy body and whipcord muscles and a curt, incisive manner of speech. He had started life as a ranch-hand, and was inordinately proud of the way he had lifted himself by his bootstraps to his present position. With no great personal fortune, every dollar he owned had been personally earned and he had a reputation for being a hard man to bargain with.

O. Manley Raine sat beside Phil Morrow. He was a fat man with shrewd blue eyes. President of the Denver National Bank and holding membership on the directorates of many other important corporations in the city, he was considered the leading financial power in the state.

A quiet, slender man sat directly at Hazeltine's left. He was unobtrusively dressed, and he spoke only when a question was put to him directly. He had the ascetic face of a dreamer and the long slender hands of an artist. He was Dexter Van Urban, an Eastern railroad engineer who had come to Colorado a few years previously to regain his health: a man of vision and of quiet, unswerving determination.

The fifth member of the Board was Joseph Bancroft, head of one of the largest Stock Commission houses in Denver. He was tall and gaunt-faced, with twinkling eyes beneath bushy brows. His firm acted as brokers in handling shipments of cattle from ranchers, selling them to local slaughterhouses on a commission basis. He knew the value of a carload of cattle as few men in the state and was implicitly trusted by his clients to realize every possible dollar from any shipment placed in his hands.

The hands of a large clock on the wall pointed to 10:18, and O. Manley Raine cleared his throat to direct a querulous question to the president of the Board:

“How much longer will we have to wait for this fellow, John? I have an important conference at eleven.”

“Pat Stevens will be here,” Hazeltine told him confidently. “His train didn't arrive until almost ten. Give him a few minutes to find his way up here from the depot.”

“I don't understand why you put such faith in Stevens,” Philip Morrow put in impatiently. “Isn't he just an unimportant rancher from Powder Valley? What makes you think he'll succeed when others like Morris have failed?”

“That's because you don't know Pat Stevens,” Hazeltine answered. “He's the man who cleaned up …”

“I know all about his past exploits.” Morrow waved aside the explanation. “He's fast with his guns, of course, and back when gun-speed was all that counted he was a good man, I suppose. But this is a different matter.”

“He's shipped a lot of good beef in from his Lazy Mare ranch,” Bancroft put in lazily.

“Shipping good beef doesn't mean …”

“I own a small spread right beside his ranch in Powder Valley,” John Hazeltine intervened. “I've known him for years and seen him in action. He's a lot more than just a gunman. He's got brains and …”

The opening of the outer door interrupted him. Five heads turned in that direction as Pat Stevens walked into the director's room.

For his trip to the city in response to Hazeltine's request, Pat wore a new white Stetson and a brilliant red and yellow silk scarf loosely knotted about his neck. His Levis were old, but clean and unpatched, and he didn't wear a gun. He was tall and firmly-built, with a lot of muscle concealed behind the smooth lines of his body. His face was strong and sun-bronzed and unlined, with a network of laugh crinkles radiating out from, the corners of his eyes. He stopped just inside the door with his thumbs hooked inside the front of his belt and surveyed the five men with cool interest.

John Hazeltine pushed back his chair and went to him with hand extended, saying heartily, “Mighty glad to see you, Pat. It was good of you to come without any more explanation than my telegram gave you.”