The Sixth Western Novel Page 14

  That first five hundred dollars which Dorn gave her as they sealed their “purely business partnership” vanished much after the fashion of a stack of hot cakes set before a hungry ranch hand. From the first, men and horses convoying the freighters must be fed and bedded down; there was hay in the barn on which stock could dine, on which men could sleep. But she looked ahead and saw that the hay would not last, nor would the barn suffice as a wayside inn.

  When she selected the spot where a lunch room and some sort of sleeping quarters should be erected, she sent word down to Cap Jinks in Liberty for materials and for workmen. The next freight team brought her a carpenter, a carpenter’s helper, and three strong-arm men, all of whom went immediately on her pay roll. Along with them came a handful of lumber, their tools and, as she had ordered, a thousand feet of pipe. The pipe was to bring water down to the new camp from a place higher up Palm Creek.

  She got into the way of writing brief scraps of notes to Jinks by nearly every team that went through, Liberty-bound. At first Josefa cooked for the teamsters and laborers; then a man cook was demanded and came up, endorsed by Ashbury Jinks, a clean, happy Chinaman with multitudinous knives and cleavers, who became one of Halfway’s chief assets.

  The lower end of Palm Valley was in alfalfa; it needed to be cut, the hay hauled to the barns, ready for the horses. More men were required. Then the girl demanded, “Why shouldn’t we be selling hay to County Line, too?” So the cultivated area was broadened, virgin acres were taken in, the irrigation ditches carried the needed water to the lands which were dry and brown one month, lush and green the next. And then Jinks got a letter which read: “Dear Captain: We’re running mighty short lately on milk and eggs, so please send me up by the next wagon some cows and chickens.” And by the time he had had his laugh over it and then had got busy in obedience, she wrote him: “It’s a shame the prices we have to pay in Liberty for fresh vegetables, because you told me so; and what is worse, they’re never fresh. So I am having some vegetable gardens made; I’ll need a good gardener and some seeds and things. You know: onions and cabbages and potatoes mostly, but greens and cucumbers and tomatoes too. And one of the men told me that we could have the finest melons in the world up here. So send me some to plant, that’s a darling. And we might plant some more fruit trees too while we’re doing it. And send me some men who can make a good dam. We have to raise the water level to cover all our fields, and besides a man told me it would be a good idea to have a dam big enough for storage. And we need a new broom, and Wong says for you to send him a nice new big restaurant range or he heap quit plitty damn quick. The men are eating themselves fat on Wong’s cooking; they’ll be sure to mutiny if he goes. So better send the stove. And don’t forget the broom.”

  He sent both. The broom had a pink ribbon tied around the handle.

  “You’ll see,” muttered Cap Jinks to the first man he ran into—it happened to be Bill Dorn, just arrived in Liberty—“nex’ thing, she’ll be askin’ for a typewriter an’ a private seckertary.”

  “And some more money,” said Dorn.

  “Shore. An’ likely she’ll git ’em all. But you jus’ listen to this, Will.” He read a note as yet unanswered; in it she asked for flower seeds. She listed the various flowers, a score of varieties the very names of most of which were unfamiliar in Jinks’ ears. But what he did know was a rose when he saw it, and when she mentioned roses—“all kinds, lots of the climbing ones”—he realized that she was a mere human after all. “Seeds for roses?” he snorted. “Hell, Will, they don’t come from seed.” He was sure of that. Then he scratched his head. “What’n hell do they come from? It ain’t bulbs, is it?”

  Offhand Bill Dorn couldn’t think up the answer. He said: “Better send what she wants, Cap. She’s doing a great job up there—even if she is putting fancy trims around the edges. Unless Bundy busts us before we can bust him, Palm Ranch is going to be a big money making proposition one of these days.”

  “Got her figgered out yet, Will?”

  “No,” said Dorn, and was very short about it.

  “There was a lot of things you was goin’ to find out—”

  “So long, Cap,” said Dorn, and went away.

  He did know that she was creating something fine and fertile and beautiful. He realized that not another person in ten thousand, man or woman, would have grasped this sudden opportunity in quite the same sympathetically skillful hands. Look at Bundy’s town, County Line; it was raw, uncouth, ugly; a blister spot ready at any time to fester. Then look at Halfway! The establishment in which Wong presided was low and somehow cozy with wide overhanging eaves, and was built about three sides of a square, and in the square were green benches, green tables, a tree and running water piped down from the hills. It wouldn’t be long before vines crawled all over the place and flower beds set it off in the gayest colors flowers knew. While at County Line they were gouging into the entrails of the earth, making gaping wounds preparatory to dragging gold out, always they were marring beauty and leaving scars that would not entirely disappear in a thousand years. And there at Halfway, as though to make amends, fields were being clothed in tender green, trimmed in colors like a lady’s gown with soft bright laces, and even the bright little houses were like pictures.

  Then there was the dam. Instead of coming into being as the small, unambitious thing Lorna had at first requested to raise the water level a necessary few inches, it became, after several prolonged discussions and much labor and expense, one of the major features in the Palm Valley Ranch development project. Men who understood this sort of construction were imported, materials hauled from Liberty; a sturdy concrete wall was erected at an ideal spot where the jaws of the ravine narrowed between steep rocky banks; water was impounded in sufficient quantity to assure many and many a now dry acre of teeming fertility in the months and the years to come. Here, too, Lorna insisted on the planting of trees, cottonwoods and slim young aspens for the most part; thus here, as everywhere, she contrived her lacy edging of beauty to that which was sturdily utilitarian.

  Altogether these were the fullest, busiest of days, and all the while the strings of freight teams pulled back and forth, gray under desert dust, the groaning wagons high-piled with everything in the world from mining machinery to flower seeds. Here at Halfway the hours ran by swiftly, crowded with fresh creative endeavor, while up at County Line activity was hectic day and night, and in Mike Bundy’s great barn of a place, given over to drinking, gaming and dancing, there was scarcely a night without a fight, hardly a week without a killing. Yet in all this purposeful activity there was one man who began to grumble that he guessed he’d lost step with the world. It was Sheriff MacArthur. He said to Bill Dorn:

  “Dammit, Bill, you’re having a lot more fun than what I am. I started proving to myself who killed Jake Fanning, and even who rubbed out One Eye Perez; and it did make me a mite curious what happened to old lady Kent and where, if anywhere, she’s buried now—and I even wondered if this girl here is really her niece—and I came pretty close to wondering who that other girl was down at Liberty, and what happened to her—and seems like I’d go on wondering about all these things for quite a spell yet.”

  Dorn regarded him narrowly. You never could tell when the sheriff was coming clean with all that was in his heart, when he was just beating around the bush and poking into it to see what he could scare out. Now, when his listener did not answer, he added:

  “You don’t know any more about this girl than you did, do you, Bill?”

  “No,” said Dorn.

  “Haven’t even been asking her about herself, I’ll bet a man,” said MacArthur. Then he rode away without saying where, and that same day Bill Dorn did at last ask the girl a question.

  He met her down in the cañon under the palms as she was returning to the ranch house from a busy, happy afternoon at Halfway. It was growing dusk, and there was a lemon sky with the palms looking very black again
st it, when he saw her coming toward the narrow footbridge across the creek. He met her there and stopped at his end of the bridge, so she had nothing to do but stop where she was, halfway across. He said, “Howdy,” and after she had looked at him curiously she said, matching his tone the best she could, “Howdy.”

  He started rolling a cigarette, and her lips twitched into a smile which she banished hurriedly before he could see it; she knew that he was making an excuse of cigarette-rolling in order to take time to get his next words lined up.

  “We can’t go on like this forever, you know,” said Dorn.

  She appeared puzzled. “Like what, Mr. Dorn? Isn’t everything going splendidly?”

  Having completed his cigarette he tossed it into the stream and for a moment watched it whirl away. When he looked up it was to catch her eyes bent steadily and very soberly on him.

  “You heard all about that other girl down at Liberty,” he said slowly. “I’ve never mentioned her to you, but I know MacArthur has and of course Jinks has.”

  “Of course I’ve heard about her.”

  “Do you happen to know who or what she was?”

  “I know absolutely nothing about her.”

  “She said that she was Lorna Kent. I believe a good many people are persuaded that she was. I’ve never asked you a thing—”

  “Why haven’t you?” she flashed back at him challengingly; he fancied he saw a faint flush in her shadowed cheeks and a quick hard brightness in her eyes.

  “That time when Diana Villaga said that you were a—that you were not what you pretended—”

  “Impostor is the word, if you’ve forgotten it, Mr. Dorn.”

  “Well, dammit,” said Dorn, suddenly heating up, “I ask you now and you’ve got to answer: Are you Lorna Kent or not?”

  She looked at him defiantly, then answered with a curt, unexpected, “No.”

  “Then who in the devil’s name are you? What do you mean by this sort of thing? Somehow I’ve banked on you; I’ve gone to all sorts of fool lengths and—I say, who are you?”

  “Will you let me pass, Mr. Dorn?” she said, as cool as ice. “So far, having answered your first question, I fail to see why you should be interested further. But out of the overflowing goodness of my heart, I’ll warn you of one thing: I’m here to stay, and this place is going to belong to me before I’m through, and you—you can go right to thunder!” She tried to thrust by. He caught her by the arm, turning her around so that she faced him.

  “I know who you are,” he said, remembering Diana. “You are a girl named Lorna all right; maybe that’s what put the Lorna Kent idea into your head in the first place. But you’re Lorna Brown! And now am I right?”

  Her eyes opened up, big and round with astonishment.

  “Lorna Brown? Why, yes I am. But how on earth you know—” She broke free and fled through the grove and up to the house. He did not attempt to hold her, did not at the moment wish to follow her. He didn’t even watch her go, and she didn’t look back but ran as though she felt he were close behind her. He heard the quick light patter of her feet going up the steps, then the slam of a door. And still he stood where he was, staring down into the darkening creek, thinking. There was, he judged, much to think about.

  “I was always a fool anyhow,” he muttered once. “Just after Bundy gets through making a monkey out of me I take this wild chance on her!” In profound disgust he reminded himself of one of his many nicknames, one which now appeared to fit him. “Born-a-Dorn,” he grunted.

  For one thing, a devil of a lot of money had been spent here on Palm Ranch, Bill Dorn’s money, spent freely because he believed in her. True, she hadn’t taken a cent of it for her own use; it had gone into the ranch itself. Just the same—if Mike Bundy did succeed in gathering the place in—all this would go to Mike Bundy.

  For another thing, he had allowed himself to grow to think a lot of this Lorna Brown. “Always taking fool chances, that’s me, Born-a-Dorn. Why haven’t we got a good mule on this job? I’d go and poke a stick at him until he kicked me to death.”

  It was dark before he left the creek. He went, walking slowly, to a spot from which he could get a good look at Halfway, all gay and bright with a score of lamplit windows. Anyhow she had made the prettiest little bit of a town he had ever seen. He’d have to give her credit for that.

  He turned back slowly toward the ranch house. It was not too dark for him to make out the string of freight wagons which, heavily laden, had arrived from Liberty in the late afternoon, which had stopped here for the night as usual, breaking the trip to County Line. Well, they represented a venture that was paying; its profits were steady and about twice as big as he had hoped in the beginning. He shook his head and his sigh came pretty close to being a groan. If this Lorna girl was no longer to have a hand in all this, a good part of his interest was going to go with her. Funny, what a girl could do to a man.

  He had almost reached the house when he came to a sudden involuntary stop, arrested by the sound of voices within—Lorna’s voice and Cap Jinks’—pulled up short by Lorna’s laughter. She was laughing as though this were the happiest, most carefree evening of her lifetime. And that, altogether inexplicable to Bill Dorn, was what stopped him dead in his tracks and pulled the heavy scowl back upon his brows.

  “There’s no understanding a girl like that!”

  It might have been two minutes that he stood there, three minutes even. Then the door opened and he saw old Cap framed in it, his disgraceful old Stetson crumpled in one hand while his other held Lorna’s in a lingering good night. Then Jinks came out and down the steps, walking like a boy, and the door closed after him, and he blundered full tilt into Bill Dorn.

  “What in the devil can she find to laugh at like that?” demanded Dorn.

  “Oh, hello, Will. I jus’ got here an’ am pokin’ over to Halfway to wrastle a late supper out’n Wong. Didn’t see you, Will. What are you hangin’ aroun’ out here for? Let’s see, you asked me something. Lorny’s real cute, Will. An’ she’s a humdinger, too. An’ she darn near made even me laugh that ain’t et supper yet. An’ still an’ ever I’m dinged if I could see anything funny in what she said!”

  “What did she say?”

  “We was talkin’ about this puzzle of who was the real Lorny Kent an’ who wasn’t. She ups an’ tells me. ‘I ain’t Lorny Kent an’ never was,’ she tells me. Then I says, gogglin’ sort of, ‘Hell’s bells! Then that girl down to Liberty was!’ An’ she says, sharp an’ sudden, ‘No, she wasn’t nothin’ of the sort!’ Then I says, ‘Then who in blazes was she?’ An’ she says, ‘I dunno.’ An’ I asks, ‘Then how in thunder do you know she wasn’t the real Lorny Kent?’ An’ you couldn’t guess what she says to that, Will! Not in a thousand years you couldn’t guess!”

  “All right, tell me then.”

  Old Cap snagged him by the arm with fingers which nipped him like a crab’s pinchers.

  “She says to me—an’ then she starts laughin’!—she says, ‘She wasn’t Lorny Kent because there isn’t any Lorny Kent and never was!’ An’ what do you say to that?”

  Dorn’s frown didn’t come off. He removed Jinks’ hand and said only: “You better toddle along to your supper, old-timer. When I know what else to say I’ll tell you.”

  So Jinks went his way, and for a time Bill Dorn stood where he was, staring at the house with its closed door and lighted windows.

  Then he went up purposefully to the door, and knocked just as purposefully.

  “It’s time you and I had a good talk, with no monkey business,” he said when she let him in.

  “I’d love it!” cried Lorna, very gay. “What shall we talk about? There are so many interesting topics of conversation. Suppose I suggest that we discuss the problem, How old is a rooster? And may I take your hat, Mr. Dorn?”

  He said quite soberly, “Do you mind if we skip the nonsense this tim
e?”

  Lorna opened up her eyes big at him. “But surely, Mr. Dorn, you don’t call it nonsense about a rooster? Josefa was asking me. She said, ‘When it’s first born you call it a chick, and when it’s grown up enough to run all over the place with the rest of them, you call it a chicken, and after a while you call it a rooster. Just when—’”

  “What did you mean by telling Jinks just now there never was any Lorna Kent?”

  “So he told you?” She made lovely arches of her brows, round limpid mystery-pools of her eyes, a sort of rosebud of her mouth. “The gabby old thing! He promised not to tell.”

  “I could shake you until your teeth chattered,” said Bill Dorn, and meant every word.

  It had not yet come to be fashionable to say, “Oh, yeah?” so Lorna said, “Is that so?” Never was a girl more in the mood to tease and tantalize a man, never a man more prone to an irritated response. Perhaps he would have caught her by the shoulders and shaken her, but it was just then that the explosion occurred which shook this upper end of Palm Ranch like an earthquake. There was a booming roar which shocked the eardrums, and the floor trembled.

  They could only stare at each other, speechless. And before either found a word to say the second explosion came. By that time both were running to the door, and Josefa came scurrying in from her room, screeching in terror.

  From the porch they heard men’s voices shouting, some from the stable yard, some heard faintly even from Halfway; and they saw a great angry yet beautiful flame shoot up from the barn. Next came a cracking of rifle and pistol shots, mostly from Halfway, though there were other shots being fired somewhere beyond the blazing barn. And on top of all this, as though Palm Ranch were a victim of spontaneous combustion, bright lights of fire flared up in several other places.

  Lorna didn’t in the least realize that she was clinging to Bill Dorn’s rigid arm with both hands. She said in an awed, frightened voice: “What is it? What is happening?”

  It dawned on him first, and he shook her off and ran down the steps, racing toward the barn. He was yanking his gun out of its holster as he ran, but bethought himself to yell back at her without stopping or turning: