Sour Creek Valley Page 16

  “You mean …” said Harry, trembling on the edge of what he hoped but didn’t dare to say.

  “I mean that I’ll have enough money here to make up for the difference between the stock that you have and the stock that you had ought to have. I’ll get it by stealing if there’s no other way,” I said. “Let’s see first what he is able to count on the range. See how short he writes us down. And when he has finished, you tell him that you’ve made a sale of more than the missing number, and the next day you’ll show him the cash for them. You understand? Then I’ll dig up the cash that night.”

  Harry came up to me and held out his hand. His voice fair trembled. “Big Boy,” he said, “what a man you are!”

  I couldn’t shake hands with him. I just despised and hated him too much. So I pretended not to see his hand, and I rolled a cigarette until he left the room.

  Pepillo ran up to the door the minute that it closed, and he did a war dance there, sticking out his tongue at the thought of Harry Randal, pretending to drive a knife through the heart of that thought, and then to cut its throat, very vicious and mean. When he finished, he turned around, saying: “A pig! Ah, what a pig, señor!”

  “You were calling me a pig, a while ago,” I reminded him.

  “No, you are only … how shall I say it … what word is big enough for it? You are only the greatest fool that ever lived in this world. That is all that you are.”

  Nice talk, that, from a kid like him to his boss and friend. But I didn’t mind what Pepillo said, somehow. He might be right, and I might know his rightness. It didn’t rile me so much to hear the truth from him.

  I slept pretty good that night, and when I got downstairs in the morning, we found out that the old man had left the house. He was gone, and he would be making his round. He had made part of it the day before. By the middle of the afternoon, he was back with that mean look of his, written all over his face.

  “It seems to me, Harry,” he said, “that allowing for a decent amount of care, you should have at least fifty-eight more cows than you have at the present time. I wonder if you’re too busy to explain that little mystery to me?”

  That was the way that he talked—smooth and careless and calm, but with an icy devil in his voice and in his eye, which was saying to Harry every minute: “You’ve lost your game and you’ve lost your bet. You’re no good.”

  “You can’t make up your mind on hearsay like that,” said Harry. “You’ve got to give me a chance to make a clear accounting, Grandfather. You’ve got to give me a chance.”

  “Sure,” said the old devil. “I’ll give you all the chance that you want. You can start your roundup right now this afternoon and clear the cows away toward the ranch. By noon tomorrow we can have an exact accounting.”

  Suddenly the tall old chap walked up to Harry and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Harry, Harry,” he said in a voice that shook a little and came from deeper than his toes, “do you think that I want you to lose? No, lad, but I want you to prove to me that you are a man, and that I’m not the last one of the true Randal blood left on the face of this unhappy earth.”

  I forget when anything ever jarred me so much as that little speech, or took me so by surprise, since one time I had started to brush a square-built Dutchman out of my way, down in a crowd at a rodeo, and he turned around and slammed me a perfect right hook that hung itself on the edge of my chin, turning out the lights for half a minute. This was even more of a surprise. I had begun to figure that this here old chap was one of the kind that ain’t got anything human about them. Here he was, turning up with something deep, and something decent, too.

  When I came out of my trance, the boys were climbing into their saddles, to start on the roundup. I began to ride out along, with them, pretty thoughtful. When it came to cheating Henry Randal the way that I had been planning with Harry on doing—well, it was one thing to hand a package to a cold-blooded fish like I thought he was. It was another thing to fool with a man that really had some sort of a feeling for the folks of his own kin. It gave me a flash of that old codger who might be as hard as flint in most ways, but down deep in his heart he was sort of yearning and praying to find out if Harry Randal might be worthy of being his heir. What sort of a hound would I be if I were to help at a low-down trick like this?

  I was thinking these things over, when I saw a commotion among several of the boys that were ahead of me, and then I see that Joe Maxwell, a cowpuncher that had been out riding range that afternoon, had just rode up to them, and he was saying something that excited them a good deal.

  Then they all turned around and came spilling for me as fast as they could quirt their broncos along. They came rushing around me, and the first was Shorty, yelling: “Hey, Big Boy, there’s a flock of cows come down from the hills into this here valley!”

  That was enough to make even Shorty forget how he had been hating me lately. Then here was Joe Maxwell, saying the same story all over again. What he had to say read like a fairy story. He said that in the upper valley he had come across a herd of an even hundred of cows that wore the Sour Creek brand, and of calves that didn’t have any brand at all on them.

  “There’s only one way to figure it out,” said Maxwell. “These cows and calves are part of the herds that the rustlers have got away from us and from other gents in the ranches nearby us, and these have got loose and have wandered down onto their own old range, and here they are.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Not till I came into sight of that same bunch. There wasn’t any doubt about it, then. There was a bunch of maybe fifteen Sour Creek cows, wearing their brands all proper. The rest were calves up to yearlings. They were going along pretty slab-sided, as if they’d been in some sort of a place where the forage wasn’t any too fat. They were going along with their heads down, mowing that grass clean, in front of them, making every lick count, now that they were down here in good grass again.

  Anyway, after one good, long look at them, I decided that this part of the mystery would have to take care of itself, because the one thing that really mattered was that these here cows and calves would more than make up for the lacking numbers in the herd of Harry Randal. And with that deficit covered, Harry was OK, and so was I!

  I wrote that thought down in red in my mind, and then I told the boys to hurry along with the roundup, while I went to hunt up Harry and tell him the good news.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Seven

  What that news did, was to wipe about ten years off the face of Harry Randal. He begun to laugh like a child. Away he rushed to take a look at the new herd.

  “We’ll ask no questions,” said Harry Randal. “But if I was the foreman of this ranch, I would have my men oil up their guns, because it’s a pretty safe bet that the folks that lost those cows and those calves is gonna come looking for them, and they’ll come with their gats ready for action.”

  I didn’t have to be a college graduate to understand as much as this. I spread the word around among the boys, and they were certainly willing. Fighting was ice cream and cake to that tough gang, and they were living every day in expectancy of something big in the way of bullets flying.

  In the meantime, that roundup went along in swinging style. We cleaned out the upper end of the valley pretty well, and it wasn’t hard to do, because most of the cows, for some reason, had wandered down Sour Creek, and they were already bunched pretty close to the ranch house. I left out a few pickets to keep the main bunches from drifting south again during the night, and then we all turned in, very tired but happy.

  Even Pepillo, who never paid much attention to what was happening in the line of business on the ranch, seemed pretty happy. He would rock back his head and open up a song that shortened the miles, coming home. There was never anybody to sing much better than that kid. It just rose up and flowed out from him with no more trouble than out of a singing bird. It made you happy to listen. It was like closi
ng your eyes on a rainy day and feeling sunshine right on your face.

  It was a funny thing to watch old Henry Randal that night at the supper table. He knew that something was up. He could tell it by the high spirits in Harry, for one thing. He would’ve given a lot to understand what that mystery was, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  Not long after supper I turned in. Feeling the way that I did, tired but happy, with the feeling that the job was about done, and the ranch already mine for keeps, I was asleep about as quick as my head hit the pillow. There I lay dreaming about really having the million a year to spend that I had talked about with Pepillo.

  What waked me up finally was the feeling of a strong draft across my face, and when I opened my eyes, there was a small light shining against my face. I sat up in bed, and there in the doorway I saw a dream with my eyes open!

  Yes, what I mean to say is that I saw a thing that couldn’t be real. I knew it couldn’t be real. Still, there it was right before me.

  It was a young girl, about eighteen, say, or nineteen—a dark-eyed, black-haired girl with more beauty in her face than I ever saw before, or that I ever dreamed of. She was wearing a dress of yellow lace that left her shoulders and her arms all bare. To the day I die, I’ll never forget the look of her hand, that was cupped around the flame of the candle that she held. I remember, too, how the highlights slipped and glimmered along her arms, and how her eyes glistened, as the light struck up against them.

  The sight of her lifted me out of my bed like a strong hand and set me on my feet. She seemed to be peering into that room, hunting something, but she didn’t seem to see it. When her eyes fell on me, she looked right through me, as though I was nothing at all. She looked right through me, and then she turned around and went down the hall toward the stairs.

  I got to the door of my room in one long stride, and as I got to it, I had a breath of a faint perfume, that I had breathed not very long before. It was jasmine, and right then I knew what had happened. The ghost of that girl—the dead wife of Stephen Randal—had come back to haunt that house, and it wasn’t any living hand that carried the candle down the stairs in front of me. And it wasn’t any living light, either. That was why the dress that she was wearing was so old-fashioned, and that was why that she moved without making any sound.

  I snuck to the head of the stairs, and at the bottom, she turned and smiled up to me. It was as though the distance and the shadow didn’t let her see that it was only the roughneck and the cowpuncher, Blondy Kitchin. It was as though she thought I was somebody that she loved, because there was real love in her face. It parted her lips and let me see the gleam of her teeth. It flared up in her eyes, too. And she raised a hand and beckoned to me.

  Once, when I was a kid, I came home pretty late at night and I was scared to go inside. I stood out in the garden. It was autumn, mighty cold, with the first frost in the air, but the roses were still living that would be killed by that frost. As I stood there, I was shivering with the cold and turning to ice inside, and all the same, the breath of those roses out of the dark, flowed into my blood, making my heart ache with happiness and with sorrow.

  That was the way that I felt when I stood up there at the head of the stairs and looked down to her. I felt like my heart was breaking because I was so scared and I was so sad. Yet I was never half so happy in my whole life. I felt that if I came close enough to her, I would find the fragrance of the jasmine. It wasn’t sprinkled on the dress that she wore; it seemed to be breathed into the air by the ghost itself.

  There is a saying, you know, that if you follow a ghost that beckons, you’ll be dead before the morning light ever finds you. I thought of that, too. Still, nothing could hold me when I saw her raise her arm. I started down those stairs, and she turned away, without hurrying, and went toward the outside door.

  The light of that candle was gone when I got downstairs. I reached the front door in one jump. It seemed to me that the smell of the jasmine was there in front of me, and I went outside. Still, that perfume seemed to be hanging just before me, while I hurried up and down in the garden.

  I don’t know how long I was there—not very long, I suppose. Finally, I looked up and saw the cold old moon watching me. That seemed to bring me to my senses. I turned around and went back to my room and lighted the lamp. Somehow, I couldn’t stand the rush of that light. It seemed to kill the happiness that was in me and the pain, too. I wanted to keep the pain and the joy, both of them.

  I would’ve busted with it, though. I had to have somebody to talk to, even if it was only a kid. I roused Pepillo. He sat up and cussed me.

  “Pepillo,” I said, “for heaven’s sake, talk soft, or you’ll scare the thought of her away from me.”

  “The thought of what?”

  “The thought of a ghost, Pepillo,” I said. “She came to the door of this here room, and I saw her. It was the dead wife of Stephen Randal, kid. Don’t you talk back to me. Don’t you snicker or laugh, or I’ll choke you. I swear I will. Sit here and gimme hold of your hand to keep, will you?”

  He cussed under his breath, but he sat down there beside me. I told him all over again, and then again.

  “You’ve felt this way before,” said Pepillo. “And you’ve got well of it again. You’ve fallen in love with girls and out again, very pronto. And you’ll fall out of love with this fool ghost of yours, Big Boy.”

  I shook my head. “Words ain’t of much account, old son. I tell you that this is different, because the others bothered me. I didn’t want to lie awake on account of them. But I tell you, I’d lie awake till I die, if I could keep seeing the thought of this here ghost, Pepillo. And so long as I live, kid, I’ll never look at any other woman.”

  Nothing mattered to that kid. He was so hard, nails would be soft compared to him. He was so hard, he would’ve laughed at a funeral going by. But even Pepillo seemed to be sort of worked up by what I had to say. He caught his breath.

  “So, señor,” he said, “when I grow to be a man, I shall find one woman, and I shall love her as you love this ghost. Hush, señor … you groan … are you very sick?”

  Sick? Aye, you might call it sickness. I didn’t care whether I lived or died. “Oh, Blue Jay,” I said, “how come that God could ever have made anything so beautiful and so perfect as that girl, and then let her die? He couldn’t let her die, and that’s why she’s got the power of coming back to earth, now and then. Pepillo, if I thought that praying would bring her back for one second, I would pray, Pepillo.”

  “Bah! Now you talk like a crazy man. Besides, you never knew a prayer. Confess that.”

  “I confess it,” I said. “Sit quiet, will you? I have to talk to you some more about her.”

  He gave my hand a pressure with his cold little fingers, as I said, “I waked up with a breath of wind in my face, and a ghost of a fragrance of jasmine, Pepillo …”

  Heaven knows how long that I went on talking like that. The first thing I knew, something glittered against my eyes, and it was the rising sun, flashing from the pane of my window. I blinked around me. There was Pepillo, with his hand still locked in mine, smiling at me, very gentle and kind.

  I felt like a wonderful fool, but the kid didn’t mock me. You could feel in Pepillo that no matter what a devil of a blue jay and a mischief-maker he was, when it came to anything important, he would understand. It was grand.

  The first thing I did was to sneak into the old room of Stephen Randal’s dead wife. There I looked at her picture on the wall. But I closed my eyes. I couldn’t turn away quick enough. The camera had lied terrible about her, and there was more truth and beauty in the little finger of the ghost than in the picture on the wall. I opened the door of the closet, and the jasmine breathed out around me.

  It was different. It seemed truer and sadder. While I stood there with my eyes closed, I could see her once more at the bottom of the stairs with her lips parting for
love of me as she smiled up, and her hand raised to wave at me.

  Doggone me, it made me weak. I tell you true … I wanted to cry like a fool.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Eight

  What did I know about love? I thought that I’d known everything, and I found out that I knew just nothing at all. I’d come up and knocked on the door a lot of times, but I’d never gotten inside of the house. Well, I was in now, and the look of everything was all different, I can tell you.

  When I came down the stairs, I stood in a trance, looking out the window and listening to a meadowlark that was singing outside the front of the house. I had heard meadowlarks before, of course, but this here lark was made particular to sing for me.

  I said to Pepillo, “Did you ever hear a lark sing so mighty well as that, kid?”

  The Blue Jay laughed. He never missed a chance for laughing, you understand. “You look sick,” he said. “Is the singing as bad as all of that?”

  We got outside, and there I was standing and looking at the blue of the morning sky and at the shapes of the clouds—feeling that they must be as lonely in the wind up there as I was lonely down below on the ground. How come that a grown man should have thoughts like that? It was love aching inside of me.

  “Blue Jay,” I said, “you did me a lot of good last night. But I still need some help for today. Stick close beside me.”

  He did it, too, and he acted like I’d never seen him before, extremely kind and understanding.

  “It’s what you told me,” I said to him. “I found a real woman. None of the rest ever counted. This is the first real one, you understand.”

  “Ah, well,” said Pepillo, “when I grow up, I hope I can find a woman I can love as you love this one.”