The Cure of Silver Cañon Page 8

  For what? To climb again down that irregular ladder of lattice and bars? She thought the thing over while she bundled up the overalls that were her stock in trade. After all, that descent should not be a big problem to one who could climb a rope like a sailor. She tied the bundle of clothing to her shoulder, scanned the street, blessed its emptiness, and in a moment had swung down to the pavement.

  What those clothes were worth she could not guess, but she had left a full hundred dollars on the dressing table of the room above. For she felt, somehow, that it would not do to go as a thief in a thief’s apparel on this night, when she was to witness what seemed to Skeeter a sacred thing that only a church should house.

  Her feet found their way across the town. Her mind was not on the streets and the turnings, but raced forward to deal with great images of struggle and death. So she found herself almost by surprise at the coolness of the river air.

  She had come down onto the river road and now she was passing a familiar place. She stopped. For she remembered that this was exactly the spot at which earlier in the evening Liddell had ridden into the tulles.

  She tried to walk on but some imp of the perverse made her step to the edge of the tulles. The infinitesimal waves that worked through the growth whispered against the shore. The faint night breeze went with shiverings through the tulles. And silently sounding the pitch in the back of her mind, she whistled a high, long note, followed by two short ones. When she waited, there was only the whispering sound of the little waves again and the hushing sound of the wind.

  She had to get on to the dance under the cypresses and to the last scene of big Slip Liddell. Yet something held her there at the verge of the river, as fire is said to hold horses enchanted until they burn. Once more she whistled and listened.

  And now she heard the dim noise of oars in their oarlocks. She heard something pushing through the tall reeds. Again she whistled, more softly, and almost at once the tulles were parted. A light skiff was barely distinguishable, and the loom of a man’s figure against the paler rushes. He was standing in the boat.

  “Hi … Slip?” he called softly.

  That name, out of the dimness, did strange things to her. She said: “Are you a friend of Slip Liddell?”

  The boatman thrust his skiff back into instant invisibility among the reeds. “Come back! There’s no danger!” she called, careful of the pitch of her voice.

  The boat returned, very slowly. “What you got? Money or just news?” asked the boatman.

  “What’s Slip to you?” asked Skeeter.

  “He’s OK to me,” he answered.

  “Would you lift a hand to help him?”

  “Maybe I would, at that. Is he in a pinch?”

  She found her voice altered, breathless, rapid with excitement as she said, “He’s going to die. They’ve ganged up on him … because they say he killed Frank Pollard. He’s going to the dance and they’re going to gang up on him.”

  “That’s easy,” said the boatman. “Stop that fool from going to the dance. Why not?”

  “Who can stop him when he’s made up his mind?” she demanded. “But he’s going to need his friends tonight.”

  “Did he send you to tell me that?” asked the man from the river.

  She pretended not to hear and, waving her hand, turned and hurried down the bank.

  “Why’d he send you?” called the boatman after her, but still she went on, hurrying, until she saw before her the cloudy heads of the cypress trees and heard the singing of the strings of the orchestra.

  The big dance floor under the cypresses was swarming with people. They had hung the lights from the outstretching branches of the trees and placed some of them high in the foliage where they twinkled like stars, and each of those immense trees might have been called a separate heaven, a particular little firmament. Crowds of little tables surrounded the dance floor and off at one side had been erected an open-air bar draped with gaudy bunting where a long line of bartenders served a crowd that never diminished.

  Everyone in San Jacinto seemed to be there, but in fact everyone was not, for there was a $2 admission and a good many were ruled out. They stood in compacted lines outside of the barrier that had been built shoulder-high around the place of festival. They were free to see and they were enjoying the sight to the full. This was no occasion for babies to be put to bed early. They were carried around on the shoulders of their mothers so that they could enjoy the color and the noise and their squealing and shouting made a background of sound that gave a certain unexpected privacy to the conversations at the tables inside the barrier.

  Beyond all, certain lit, decorated floats stood out into the river, like stages in a green meadow, the water lilies grew so thickly in the still shadows of the San Jacinto. She saw all this at once but her anxious eye had to wander a bit before it located Liddell. He sat at a table well back toward the barrier, looking very much like any of the other cowpunchers who were there except that, to her eye at least, something about the carriage of his head made him different from every other man in the world.

  And now, as she passed the entrance toward the dance floor, she saw three figures take a place at a table not two away from Liddell. She knew them almost before her eyes could distinguish their faces clearly. They were Pudge McArthur, Soapy Jones, and Mark Heath, and they had not gone so near to Liddell except that they looked for trouble. She had come in time for the execution, then, and there were the three executioners.

  A big cowhand, all silk and silver and jingle, plunged up to her and said, “Don’t leave yourself without a man. Leave me try to fill in till your regular man comes around.”

  She did what the proud ones do in the movies. She walked ahead looking at nothing but her future, and she could feel the big fellow wilt behind her. She walked the way some of them do in the movies, too. That is to say, she put her feet down one exactly in front of the other. She could feel that make her body go forward on a level line. Somehow, she despised herself for doing this. A girl looked at her, looked down at her feet—smiled. She stopped walking with one foot placed exactly in front of the other.

  Somewhere in the crowd was undoubtedly the girl from whom she had taken the green dress. Perhaps when she unveiled that dress it would be like exhibiting a face, well-known to all its friends. There might be an outcry of, “Thief! Thief!”

  She slid off the black cloak and waited for the yell to begin. It did not begin.

  She could see that Heath, McArthur, and Soapy Jones were seated on one side of their table so that they could face, not the dance floor, but Liddell. Other people, in nearby places, were moving hastily to distant tables. An open desert was forming around Liddell and his three enemies as she came up with the cloak fluttering over her arm and stood by Slip’s table, saying, “I’m sorry, Slip, that I’m late.”

  His bewildered glance ran from her face to her feet and from her feet to her face again. Then he was up, taking her hand.

  “How did you do it, Skeeter?” he asked. “Are you sitting or dancing?”

  “Dancing,” she said, throwing the cloak over a chair, and then they were out on the floor and swinging into the rhythm. He danced pretty well. He was not like one of those hobo specialists who have feathers on their heels and interpret the music better with their feet than a conductor can with his baton, but he danced well enough.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You look fine,” she declared, with wonder. “You look steady and fine.”

  “Where did you find that much Paris in San Jacinto?” he asked.

  “I bought it,” she answered. “It doesn’t matter where.”

  “You didn’t get enough money from me to pay for it,” he told her.

  “A hundred bucks … everything from the skin out,” said Skeeter.

  “How many horses did you throw in to b
oot?” demanded Liddell.

  “Slip, tell me what you’ve planned.”

  “I haven’t planned, except I want to watch what the people spend. If you see anybody breaking loose with a lot of easy money, let me know, will you?”

  “What has the spending of money to do with you, Slip? It’s not money that you are going to spend tonight, is it?”

  “I’m going to hand you something when we get into the thick of that bunch. Get that bag of yours open. And now take it.” He pushed a sheaf of bills into the bag. “There’s several hundred,” Liddell said. “Use it to get back to civilization. And then stay civilized. Promise me that you’ll stay off the road.”

  “I might have known that it would be this way,” Skeeter said bitterly. “I might have known that you’d be clean, and right, and generous, and everything that I want in the world.”

  “Quit talking about me,” said Liddell. “Watch the faces as they sail by you. See the men put on the brakes. Look at them lifting their heads. They’re seeing a new country, with gold in them hills, Skeeter. You grew two inches on your legs and let yourself out and pulled yourself in all over.”

  “I mugged myself up with makeup,” said Skeeter. “And the rest is all clothes.”

  She saw Mark Heath dancing, but staring earnestly at her. On a sudden impulse, she gave Mark Heath her sweetest smile. A good Hollywood director would have known the star from whom that smile was copied, the slowness of it, and the melancholy.

  When she looked again, someone had tagged Mark’s girl and he was waiting on the edge of the dance floor.

  “What did you say again about a cabin off in the mountains somewhere?” asked Liddell. “Say it again, will you?”

  “I’ll say it if you want,” she answered. “I’ll say it now and mean it all my life.”

  She looked up at his face and saw that he was smiling a little. He looked old. He looked the way a man in front of guns might have looked.

  “I don’t want you to say it,” answered Liddell. He looked like a man at whom guns had pointed for a long time. If she could gain for him even an added hour of life, it seemed to Skeeter the most important objective in the world.

  She had almost forgotten Mark Heath, but suddenly Liddell was stepping back and Heath was there, taking her in his arms to finish the dance.

  “Get away and keep away,” Heath said not too softly.

  And he took her away, and she could see the insult strike the face of Liddell like a fist as he turned and went off.

  “Was I wrong?” asked Mark Heath. “Did you give me the eye, or was I wrong?”

  “You weren’t wrong,” she said.

  “I thought you were glad to see him, but maybe that was my mistake,” said Heath. “You know what kind of an hombre that one is? He shoots ’em in the back. He’s murdered his partner for the blood money. He killed Frank Pollard. Why, that’s”—he laughed—“Señor Coyote.”

  She saw big Liddell walking from the edge of the dance floor to his table. He was not waiting to cut in again. How much nerve was left to him, she wondered, if he accepted an insult in front of her? But that must not be the topic of her thought. Her one effort must be to stay close to Mark Heath. He could not pull guns, surely, when she was with him. And the other two, would they matter at all if Heath were not there to lead them?

  XI

  It wasn’t a long dance because San Jacinto had an artist up from Mexico City, a girl who was all smile and eyes and a few ounces of fluff to protect her from the weather, and now they turned out the lights and flashed the spot for her and the orchestra started up some shudderingly fast rhythms. She had the footwork to go with it. Skeeter, taken from the floor as the regular dance ended, had been guided back not to Liddell’s table, but to that of Heath and the other two. Soapy Jones was on one side of her, Mark on the other, and Pudge farther away watched the dance over his shoulder and made a sour face.

  “It makes me kind of sick,” confided Soapy Jones. “I mean the way they strip, nowadays. You’d think off here at the end of no place that they’d try to be a little decent.”

  “Legs like that … wouldn’t it be a crime not to show ’em?” asked Skeeter.

  “Legs like them? Scrawny things,” said Soapy Jones confidentially. “When the knee sticks out like that, it don’t mean anything to me.”

  “I know what you mean. You like ’em overstuffed,” said Skeeter. “Well, I’ve got a pair of shanks like those out there, and I’m proud of ’em.”

  “Why, you know what I mean …” commenced Soapy.

  “Shut up, Soapy. You don’t know how to talk to her,” declared Mark Heath. He explained to the girl, “Soapy’s all right, but he don’t understand.”

  She hated the complacency of Mark Heath with all her heart, and from the corner of her eye she watched Liddell seated alone at his table. He was trying to catch the eye of a waiter to order a drink, but they walked past him with a deliberate insolence. They did not want him there. Even his money seemed to be no good.

  Then the dance ended. The flashlight went out. The regular lights came on.

  “But you understand,” she heard her voice saying to Heath as she kept herself smiling. “You know how to dance. You know how to talk. What else do you know?”

  “You ask me questions,” said Heath.

  “Will you know the answers?” she asked.

  “Ah, I get by most of the examinations,” Heath answered with a grin, and his eyes began to take possession of her. “What are we drinking?”

  “It ought to be a good drink,” said Skeeter. “Because I’m meeting a fellow who knows all the answers, it ought to be the best. What about champagne?”

  She waited for them to laugh, all three. She was ready to laugh herself. She never had tasted the stuff.

  Pudge, in fact, said, “Aw, take it easy. That stuff puts a tingle up your nose and makes you sneeze, and it costs …”

  “Who cares what it costs?” asked Heath. “We’re going over to the bar where they got it good and cold. Come on over to the bar with me where we can get it cold. You come, Pudge … and you come along, Soapy. I’m going to show you what it’s like.”

  They were all trailing across the dance floor. Then the orchestra was swinging into its beat again, and they were off the dance floor and at the long bar, with its gaudy drapings of bunting, and the crowd lined up three deep, and the cool damp of the river air kept drifting in and pinching at the bare shoulders of Skeeter with small, chilly fingers. But nobody else seemed to think that she was cold. It was very wonderful to see what clothes would do. It was she who made a place for them all at the bar, in fact. A dumpy fellow with enormous shoulders spread out his arms, when he saw her coming, and backed up, jostling many people behind him.

  “Clear the track,” he said. “Can’t you bozos see the green light and give it the right of way?”

  “… and stick a couple more bottles into the ice,” Mark Heath was saying. “We’ve gotta drink three times to get the taste. And fetch down those big glasses. Here’s to you, sweetheart.”

  The bubbles came racing up and bursting at the brim, but there were not as many bubbles as there are in ginger ale and the water didn’t squirt up with the bursting of them in the same way. But the bubbles kept on rising from the bottom of the glass in the exact center, as though there were a magic source of life at that point.

  The stuff had a funny taste. It tasted sour and it tasted sweet. It tasted sharp and brittle, and it tasted smooth and long-drawn out, like molasses. Then, while she was savoring it, Skeeter remembered that she was supposed to be having a good time with young Mark Heath and Pudge McArthur and Soapy Jones. So she finished off her glass and flourished the emptiness over her head. And she sang out, “Mark, Mark, here’s to all the good fellows, all over the world … and down with the rats and the shacks wherever they are!” She turned her glass upside down and the last drop
s trickled away to the fate that should overtake all rats and shacks wherever they may be.

  This gesture enchanted Mark Heath. He stood up on a chair so that he could make his eyes felt as well as his voice heard, and he shouted, “Open ’em up down the line, there! Everybody’s gotta have a drink with me. Open ’em up right down the line of the bar, there. Crack out a dozen bottles!” shouted Mark Heath.

  The bartenders looked at him for a moment, wildly. He laughed in their faces.

  “A dozen of ’em!” he shouted.

  The dozen bottles popped open with a lively cannonade. Then Mark Heath took a small billfold out of his hip pocket and carelessly tossed on the bar a $100 bill. It was the first bill of that denomination that Skeeter had ever seen. She snatched it up with a swift motion, like a bird picking up a seed. She looked at it on both sides, and then laid it down again with a sigh. It was rather strange, but there was no doubt about it that the possession of money made a man into a new thing. Mark Heath might be an enemy of Slip Liddell, but nevertheless a certain aura, a certain dignity attached to any man who could throw $100 bills around, in this fashion.

  The head bartender came down the line, picked up that bill, glanced at both sides of it, and then stuck it into the cash register, calling out, “Sixty … out of a hundred!”

  It was magnificent—$60 out, and still $40 left in that single little piece of paper, and a whole handful of crinkling change being brought to Mark Heath. Now the glasses were filled and lifted, and expectant, broad grins were turning to Heath. He held the drinkers from their wine for a moment.

  “Nobody would wanna be any place but San Jacinto,” he said, “but when there’s a rat in the house, why don’t you poison it? And there’s a rat over there at that table. There’s Slip Liddell. There’s the gent that pats his partner on the back with one hand and shoots him through the head with the other. D’you want him in San Jacinto? There ain’t even any man in him. He’s a yella, yella, yella hound.”

  Skeeter tasted those words far deeper than champagne, and a black agony rose like a mist across her eye. She stared at the table where Liddell was sitting, and now in fact she saw that he was rising and advancing straight toward the bar.