The Eye of the Hunter (2 page)

“Got a magnifying glass?” Manion asked. “Take a look at that gun! An 1873 Army Colt, engraved and gold-inlaid and with a genuine ruby in the front sight! We fired a couple of rounds when Rip was in town—just stuck it out the window and let fly at the river!”

Logan found a magnifying glass in a drawer full of tools.

“Squint hard and maybe you can see the ruby,” Manion said.

Logan squinted. “I can't, but I can sure see Rip's diamond. She's a thousand-dollar presentation model herself! Does she look a little foreign, maybe? What's the word? Exotic ...

“Maybe. Her father was a doctor in Arizona, but he practiced in Sonora for years. So maybe she picked up the look, somehow. Rip called her Panchita—Spanish for Frankie. Her name's Frances. Kind of taken by her?” asked the lawyer, amused.

“Well, you know ...” Logan said. “The beautiful face in a crowd thing—ever had that experience? You think, You gorgeous creature, what are you doing on some other man's arm? And look at her expression, John—is that independence, or haughtiness, or ... what?”

“Disdain,” said Manion. “Disdain for her hoorawing husband, clowning for his own wedding picture.”

“So why did she marry him?”

“She's probably wondering that herself, by now. Especially,” said the lawyer, “since he seems to be missing. Cashes his trust checks but hasn't answered a letter since last summer.”

“If he's like me, he probably hates writing letters.”

“He dido't used to. And there are always questions about his trust that I've got to have answers to. How does he want his money invested? Does he want to sell that stock? Buy a little farmland? But he doesn't write to say boo anymore.”

“Ask his wife.”

“She doesn't write, either. But somebody's cashing those checks, Henry. Not Rip, because the handwriting is different. Look at this....”

From his coat Manion took an envelope. He drew out a couple of bank drafts and laid them before the gunsmith. “Before and after,” he said.

The difference was clear. The earlier check, dated August 1898, was signed with a bold flourish. On the later one, dated two months ago, the name
Richard I. Parrish
was traced in the same calligraphic swirls and brown ink as the names on the back of the photograph.

“As the administrator of the trust, I've got to do something pretty soon. Find out whether R.I.P stands for his initials, or ‘rest in peace.'”

“Send a Pinkerton man,” Henry suggested.

“Cost an arm and a leg.” Manion sipped his whiskey and regarded Henry with a grin. And suddenly Henry saw where this whole charade was leading. He laid the magnifying glass down and gave a chuckle.

“Okay, John, I get it. You think a change of climate might be good for me.”

“I really do. You were off two days last week, and you still look like parchment. A trip might do you a world of good. The trust would pay all your expenses, and a couple of hundred to boot. As a bonus, you'll be interviewing Frances Parrish and finding out what she's really like. Can she bake a cherry pie? Does she like to dance? The detective work should be like shooting fish. If Rip's dead, he'll be enshrined in a Hall of Records somewhere. Not to mention a cemetery.

“Think about, Henry. Do us both a favor. Well, I'm off.”

The lawyer had only gotten as far as the door when Henry said, “I've thought about it. When would you like me to leave?”

The lawyer wanted him to leave as soon as possible. A few days later he gave him a folder of correspondence, the wedding picture, and a power of attorney. He provided him with a money belt with a supply of gold pieces, and a railroad ticket. He said, “The picture might help you identify Rip Parrish if you find him in a shallow grave. I don't know whether he wrote a will in Nogales, but he left none here, so if he's dead, the bride is pretty well fixed.

“If you feel so good in Arizona that you decide to stay, I'll have your stuff crated and shipped.”

The night before he left, Henry studied the features of Frances Wingard Parrish. The more he looked at her, the more captivated he was. He liked the quirk of her eyebrows, and thought her throat the most graceful line he had ever seen on a woman. But then he thought, wryly, Mrs. Rip, you wouldn't kill your husband for his ranch, would you?

That would be beyond belief. Yet it was also hard to believe that Rip would cash his checks but not answer his mail. Something was going on out there, and one person who was sure to know what it was, was Frances Parrish.

“Mr. Logan?”

Henry opened his eyes. A man wearing a green eyeshade was peering at him from behind a counter. For a moment he was unable to decide where he was.

“Mr. Henry Logan?” the man said, with a sympathetic smile. He was tall and thin, with a small head decorated with black hair slicked down and parted in the middle.

“Hello,” Henry said.

“Your horse is at the rack, now, my friend. Are you ... everything okay?”

Henry took a lungful of the warm, dusty Arizona air that was supposed to put him back on his feet. The cicada that had put him into a trance was a telegraph key at the end of the counter. “I'm fine,” he said. By a considerable effort, he managed to get on his feet and tried to think of what came next. He had saved a question to ask after the other passengers were finished with theirs. They had all departed now, and he heard his horse pawing the ground at the rack outside, relieved to be out of a railroad car after three days on the road.

“I'd like to find a nice, quiet boardinghouse,” he said. “Not too expensive.”

The stationmaster called to another man down the counter, who appeared to be writing a telegram.

“What do you think, Ben? A boardinghouse.”

Henry turned his head to look at the man, who unhurriedly finished something he was writing, handed it to the telegrapher, and then turned to look coolly at Henry. He held a black cigarillo fore and aft in his teeth, his lips flared back from long, stained yellow teeth. He looked like a small-town dandy, the edges of his long gray coat banded in black, a curl-brimmed gray fedora on the side of his head, the tips of his full gray mustache waxed. Yet his face had an outdoor look, stringy and brown, like beef jerky. He studied Henry for a moment, puffing on the Mexican cigarette.

“What did you have in mind, friend?” he asked. “Semipermanent?”

“Two or three weeks. Maybe more. ”

The man turned to the telegrapher. “How much do I owe you?” He paid him in big silver coins, adjusted his necktie, and came to pick up one of Henry's army bags. He offered his hand, smiling, cigarette still in his long front teeth.

“Ben T. Ambrose,” he said. “I publish the
Globe
, the evening paper.”

“Henry Logan.”

“Logan!” the man said. He turned back to the telegrapher. “Didn't you have something for Mr. Logan, Tom?”

“Sure did.” The telegrapher searched through some pigeonholes and found a small brown envelope, which Ambrose took from his hand and handed to Henry with some formality.

Henry was surprised, and felt important. It was from Manion, of course. He tucked the small brown envelope in the inside pocket of his wrinkled black coat. Ambrose was looking at him as though trying to recall his face. Finally he said, “A woman named Alice Gary has a nice place up on the hill. She's an excellent cook, and it's only a few blocks from the center of town. Out of the dust, too.”

“That's what I would have said,” the stationmaster agreed.

Then why didn't you? Henry wondered. Apparently the editor was someone to be deferred to.

Suddenly Ambrose said: “Logan! If you were older, I'd say you were the brother of Black Jack Logan. The resemblance is fantastic.”

Henry smiled. “I'm his son.”

“Well, I'll be damned!”

His hand was in the editor's lean claw again, being crushed this time. “Welcome to hell's half acre, Henry! Met your father several times when he was posted to Bowie. Fine man—died a hero. Soldier's Medal, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“I gave Black Jack a half page in my book. Have you read it?
On the Border with Stockard: Taming the Savage Apache
.”

“Yes, I know it. Funny about medals, though. Do a chapter on them sometimes. Dead officers die heroes and get medals. Dead troopers are dead troopers and get buried.”

“Wrong! I could give you a list of enlisted heroes as long as your arm—”

“Not at Murphy's Barn, though. Eight dead troopers, one dead officer. Guess who got the medal?”

“You were twelve years old then, Henry! They may have suppressed some of the facts to spare your mother. He was tortured! They tried to make him tell where he'd hidden the payroll box. He didn't tell, either. He died to save it.”

Henry smiled. It was amazing how people would believe what they wanted to. The Black Jack Logan myth, for instance, was one he himself had believed, until last year when a letter had arrived from Central America....

“How do I find Mrs. Gary's place?” Henry asked.

Ambrose settled his hackles and grumbled. “I'll take you myself. Where are you from, Logan?”

“Kansas City.”

“Here on business?”

“Health. I'd appreciate the ride, but what I need first is a beer, a bath, and a barbershop. In that order.”

Ambrose looked closely at Henry's yellowish face. “Liver?”

“Malaria. Every now and then I have a little spell. A friend thought I ought to try Arizona.”

Ambrose nodded. “A friend indeed! The desert will put you back on your feet. Beer—you can get good steam beer in the hotel across from my office, and there's a barbershop also where you can soak out your miseries. I'll leave you and the horse there and take your gear on up to Allie's.”

“Thank you very much.”

Outside, Ambrose put the bags in a buggy while Henry tied his horse to the rig. Henry felt guilty about spoiling the editor's Black Jack Logan scene.

“Ben, I'm sorry about the medal business. But in Cuba, death was the real thing. Nobody gave a damn about medals after a day or two under fire. Sherman was right about Cuba, too.”

“Of course. War was hell in Arizona, too.”

Ambrose shook the reins and they headed up the main street. The editor handled the buggy as ostentatiously as though he were the grand master of a parade, reins held high, his pencillike cigarette pointing the way, and Henry noticed that a number of people waved at him from the walks. He would return the greeting with a salute of a fringed glove.

“What do you do in Kansas City?” he asked.

“I'm a gunsmith.”

“Where'd you get the malaria?”

“Cuba. I was an armorer,” Henry said.

“Then you missed all the real excitement, eh?”

Henry looked at him. He was grinning ferociously, showing his teeth. “No, sir,” he said. “I had it both ways—at a bench and under fire. Colonel Roosevelt watched me zero in his pet rifle one day—a '95 Winchester. I never bench-fired them, I just hauled off and tore out the bull's-eye, offhand. He was so impressed with my marksmanship that he put me in a tree with a rifle and a telescope.”

“Indeed! The great Colonel Roosevelt personally made you a sharpshooter?”

“I suppose God made me a sharpshooter. Colonel Roosevelt only made me a sniper.”

Ambrose's laugh was like a snarl. “That's good,” he said. “You can take the ash off a mosquito's cigarette at a hundred yards, that what you mean?”

“I mean that shooting comes natural to me.”

“You're bragging.” Ambrose was teasing.

Henry shrugged. “No. I'm not bragging.”

As the buggy jounced on its soft town-springs along the street between the flinty little hills, he tried to decide why Nogales was supposed to be so good for the health. Well, the air, he supposed, which though dusty went into the lungs easily, light and warm and dry. Maybe a bit too dry: His skin itched.

Nogales intrigued him. The town had an air of age as well as modernity—the oldest building material in the world meeting cement sidewalks and telephone poles cobwebbed with wires. A few structures were of mellow-looking red bricks, while most of the roofs were tin, or flat and hidden behind parapets.

“What do you think of our town?” asked Ambrose.

“I like it. It looks as foreign as Cuba, though.”

“Got a Mexican accent,” Ambrose agreed. “Fine little town, though. Gateway to Guaymas, the Sonora seaport. Altitude thirty-six eighty-nine. Population over twenty-five hundred. That's my shop,” he said, pointing.

Henry looked left. Directly across from a large hotel was a steep and narrow building with a flagpole protruding from the roof and a golden globe hanging by a chain from the pole. On the globe, in black, were the words:

THE ARIZONA GLOBE

B. AMBROSE, PUB. & ED
.

“The gilt on that globe is genuine Arizona gold, mined fifteen miles from here.”

“Handsome. Does it ever need polishing?”

“Never. Does your wife's wedding ring?”

“No. It might if I were married.”

“Of course you know the name of Miles Stockard,” Ambrose said.

“The Indian-fighting general?”

“Right. He lives here in town, too. Matter of fact, he's my partner in a small way. Fine old gentleman, eye like a hawk, made a sharpshooter out of every man in his outfit. It's all in my book.”

Henry had despised the author's contemptuous attitude toward Indians, as though they were some sort of game to be tracked and shot. He also knew something about fine old officers with eyes like hawks. In Cuba, one had sent his squad out on a night patrol to bring back a prisoner—for the idiotic reason that it was his wife's birthday. They had brought back no prisoners, but one of the squad was badly wounded.

Ben Ambrose, pub. and ed., reined in his horse before a two-story building with verandas. The sign above the wooden awning read,
FRONTERA HOTEL
. Ambrose offered his gloved hand and another fierce, yellow-fanged grin. “Drop in sometime, Logan. I'll stuff your craw full of local history. Not going to read your telegram?”