CHAPTER III

FROM her door, Gulla Slogum watched the night fade into the red sky of morning that spoke to her of a troubled day. But by the time the sun stood clear and hot over the hogback, the Slogum yard was much as always. The voices of the Wyoming cowboys drifted back from the trail into the hills and the long wagons of the freighters began to move out into the roads that were velvet soft with dust.

Before they were gone, Dodie brought the team up, cramped the yellow-wheeled buggy at the porch, and Annette and Cellie got in, lifting their skirts high, foamy petticoats swirling. Annette took the lines and the red-lashed whip and waited. But this morning, for the first time, the mother denied her the privilege of carrying the money and handed the drawstring bead purse to Cellie. “Remember now, something nice and stylish, with a little color,” Gulla said, as though she were alone with the girl. “And what news you can pick up,” she added, apparently as an afterthought, for Dodie was still at the bits of the trotters.

Then she stepped back. Annette slacked the lines and the horses plunged forward as Dodie loped ahead to open the gate. Ward, on his way to the pasture with the milk cows, stopped and turned around in his saddle to wave to the girls. And from a flat-topped post the black tom blinked in the sun.

Libby looked after the girls from the dining-room window, absently tipping the saucer of poison flypaper to wet it well. They made a pretty picture, those twin sisters of hers, flirting with everybody, including hunchbacked little Dodie and the fourteen-year-old Ward. A pretty, a gay picture, even when Annette could not be sure at all whether Gulla’s anger was over the girl’s treatment of Tad Green the night before or because she knew about the young French boy René and was only waiting until she had used the daughter to her purpose. Yet here Annette was, going to make up with the sheriff at Dumur, to get what information and help she could for the Slogum sons from him while her thoughts were with the slim, curly-haired boy whose father had founded the town. The sleek black horses, impatient in their quivering yellow fly nets and clicking blue harness rings, were a present to her from Beardley, last year’s beef contractor for the Sioux—animals as smooth as the steers that the Indians got were gaunt and bony and lump-jawed. The yellow spokes of the buggy wheels glittered in the morning sun and two little strings of dust hung low to the ground and settled slowly back into the ruts behind them.

And when the girls were gone Gulla climbed to the second floor to look out over the empty roads of Oxbow Flat, where not even a tumbleweed moved. After A while she came back down the stairs and for an hour there was only the steady tap-tapping of her rocker in her room. Several times during the morning Libby paused in her work with a moment of sharp pity for the mother. How could she be sure that Hab and Cash had n’t departed, skinned out, as the cowboys called it, gone to set up for themselves somewhere, maybe Wyoming or Montana, free from the woman who rode them with saw-roweled spurs these last few years? Thoughtfully the girl cracked one egg after another, releasing the whites to string down into the transparent pool in her whipping platter. No, the two Slogum sons would never dare go their own way. They were like Ruedy, like Annette and her René, like all of them—caught and held as the sand of the hills was held in the long, wiry roots of the blue joint and the clumpy bunchgrass, the earth of Oxbow in the tight black matting of nigger wool.

She shivered a little even as she opened the oven to test its heat for the marble cake. It was Annette, with her loveliness, who was the chief asset of Slogum House, and the mother would never let her go; even less than all the rest would Gulla let her go.

 

As the sun climbed, a little cloud, fluffy as a jack rabbit’s tail, rose and grew into a high white pile in the northwest, but Libby knew it would n’t be anything—a little wind, a few drops of rain heavy as chilling lead in the dust, perhaps a crash of thunder or two, then more sun on the crops of the settlers of Sundance Table and Cedar Flats, more sun and more wind.

Toward ten o’clock Ward rode in from the lower pasture on a high lope. Gulla met him at the yard gate but he brought no news. Only his shirt and overalls blood-streaked from his palm, that was laid open by the old wire stretchers Hab picked up from some fence crew long ago. The chain had—broken and let the barbed wire rip through his hand. Libby ran out and helped the shaking boy into the kitchen. And when she unfolded one finger after another from the ragged palm to cleanse it, and the blood gushed out and splattered the floor, he slumped against her in a faint.

“Poor child,” she whispered over the sun-bleached hair she held against her shoulder. “Poor, poor child.”

“Oh—poor fiddlesticks—” Gulla snorted, shaking the boy to consciousness. “Make a bawl baby out of him! Anybody can get a hand cut. Poor child?—Poor white, manure-pile maggot!”

Libby lowered the boy’s hand into boiled, blood-warm water from the teakettle before she answered. “It’s not him alone I meant—” she said, dribbling the soothing liquid over the ragged cut that went deep as the bone while the boy gripped his wrist with the other hand and bit his lip, his frightened eyes on his mother.

By noon, when Libby had Ward asleep upstairs and the storm clouds of the morning were scattered, Ruedy plodded down the long, loose slope of the hogback to Slogum House. It was the first time he came home for his dinner in months and the black tom strolled out to meet him, turning and walking a little ahead of him back into the yard. Washed, Ruedy slipped into the kitchen with a sack of fresh vegetables. He made no inquiries, not even of Libby, only sat at the kitchen table to eat with her. Once the girl started to tell him of Ward’s cut hand, but the father seemed to have enough for this day, and so she poured another cup of coffee and talked a little to the black cat dozing on his shelf. Several times as the man ate he looked sadly toward Gulla’s room, but the woman did not come through the doorway at all.

On the freighters’ table Babbie set out ham boiled with parsnips, potatoes, and hot rolls, and rhubarb sauce with fresh marble cake for the straggling of sunburned ranch hands who stopped. They talked a little, making low noises among themselves, like blue flies on a humid afternoon, with nothing of the excitement of news about them, least of all news of the Slogum sons. Quietly they paid and went away.

Before he left Ruedy slipped to Gulla’s open door. Standing where she could see him, he waited, his old rush hat hanging from his hand. But the woman gave him no sign and so at last he went out to plod up the sandy slope. At the crest of the hogback he looked down over the weathering house, the sheds and corrals, the windmill cocky as a rooster on a post. Yesterday there had been the smell of menace about Slogum House, the known menace of men who had lost a little church they had built even though the rains failed and times were desperate hard. Men with Winch esters across their saddles, led by the hotheaded Pastor Zug. It would be fine, Ruedy thought, to know a preacher like that—one who could ride at the head of an armed mob, even though he let the older men talk him away to Leo Platt’s when Slogum House was almost in sight.

But to-day Libby could not stand on the hogback to warn against the approach of danger. The Slogum sons might be hiding out, or already in jail, perhaps even shot down somewhere for the buzzards. Or they might have deserted.

Ruedy wiped his sleeves over his wet temple. Desertion—that the mother would understand least of all.

 

Under a moon of smoky flint the girls came home from Dumur. Gulla met them at the outside door, her face heavy as a soaked clay bank in the light of the lamp she held high over her head. And long after Dodie had rubbed down the horses and returned to his bunk in the grainery there were low whisperings in the mother’s room.

The next morning Libby dressed Ward’s hand, already healing, and then hurried to help her mother sew while the girls ran about ready for fittings in their embroidered petticoats and ruffled, ribbon-run corset covers under open morning jackets. Annette’s was a pale yellow-green that made her hazel eyes soft and deep and sad as wet brown plush, her skin even more delicate, her hair a brighter auburn; the plumper Cellie ruddy in cactus red, but unusually quiet, with no laughter in her round throat.

Early Saturday morning the girls drove out of the yard again, Cellie in dusty rose mull with dark blue, Annette in russet brown with an elbow-length taffeta cape of canary color and a little brown hat that dropped its plume, shiny as a blackbird’s wing, to her shoulder. And under the brim of her hat her hair and brows shone against the smooth white of her powder.

Dodie held the gate back and looked after the girls, rubbing a hairy hand over his bare chin.

 

Late Sunday afternoon Tad Green brought Annette back to Slogum House, openly, as though he did n’t have a wife at all, or a public office at Dumur. With his hat on the back of his head, his loose jowls dark as a badly scalded pig’s, he moved his cigar from side to side and laughed deep in his fat as he helped Annette out of his buggy.

In the kitchen Libby’s hands were extra swift and light in the crust, her movements certain under the scrutiny of Gulla’s sharp little eyes, for here was a man whose girth always indicated an appreciation of good food and a capacity for it And from his laughter all of Slogum House took assurance that Annette had found it worth her while to permit his thick hand on her slim waist.

For supper the Slogum table gleamed with a new cut-glass caster flanked by a matching cake stand on one side and a footed fruit dish on the other, all on wild-rose doilies and fringed linen under the crystal icicles of the hanging lamp. While the sheriff, at the far end and out of sight of the few Sunday-night stoppers, ate slow-fry chicken, new lettuce, and apple pie with cream baked in it, Libby climbed up the stairs to the crow’s nest with a tray for the man still hiding there. He cowered away from the lantern more than ever before, his gun steady in his desperation. Evidently Gulla had been up to tell him of the sheriff in the house.

And after supper Annette took Tad Green toward the girls’ end of the hall while Libby and Ward did what they could with the hymns for the ranch hands who knew no Sunday. Between songs Gulla lamented that her boys had to be away from home over the Sabbath.

“Been awful warm to be hurrying our new gentlemen cows—” she said, and the men grinned a little, knowingly, among themselves, scraping a heel or two on the floor, not answering. Libby started playing again, softly, with the picture of Saint Cecilia and the statuette with the china silk skirt and bertha there beside her, and behind her a row of books, the same as those the Slogum sisters read in Ohio.

After a while Cellie came in alone, because Judge Puddley was a cautious man, and finally Ruedy, too, slipping to his chair, dropping his hands to the crochet tidies on its arms, to fidget there, lost in their emptiness.

“Why don’t you smoke a little—even if it is Sunday?” Gulla asked, making words for the men to hear instead of the talk rising in the girls’ parlor. Libby played louder, too, knowing that Tad Green must be telling Annette again about the time he caught the rustlers when he was a bad man down in Abilene, along with Wild Bill and Bat Masterson.

The ranch hands went up to their bunk room early, and quietly enough, but they did n’t peel off their leather pants immediately. Montana fished a mouth harp from his vest pocket and, palming it to his mouth, blew speculatively, pounded the sand from it and tried it again. A little talking started, moving easily, lightly, like a tumbleweed in the sun.

“Gentleman cow!” one laughed, his teeth white and far apart.

“Yeah,” Montana nodded, and began to sing:—

“The man who drinks the red, red wine

Can never be a beau of mine,

The man who is a whiskey sop

Shall never hear my corset pop…”

ending each verse with a flurry from the mouth harp, but softly, so Gulla would not come pounding on the door.

“Gentleman cow!—By God—!” Old Bill Billings snorted, after all had seemed darkness and sleep for an hour.

 

And when the house was finally quiet, the sheriff gone, and Ruedy outside trying to smoke his pipe, with Libby’s black tom only two bright eyes in the darkness, Gulla slipped along the secret passageway and stopped a long time outside of Annette’s bedroom. Once she thought she heard a horse trotting away on the grass somewhere. But by the time she could get outside there was only silence, the far bark of a settler’s dog, then silence again, and the window light reflected in the steady green eyes of the big tom.

“Scoot!” Gulla cried. “Scoot!” clapping her thick hands at the cat, without effect.

“A horsebacker out pretty late,” she said to Ruedy, still hunched down on the doorstep over his knee, but his pipe casting no red glow on his face.

“Yes—” he said slowly; then dared farther in his need to disarm her. “Probably some Sunday sparker going home.”

Gulla mumbled something and went back to the door in her felt-soled shoes, her body blending into the duskiness of the hall. When she was safely gone Ruedy looked away into the night, thinking about many things. Hab and Cash in jail for stealing colts, Annette sleeping with the sheriff to get them out when she should be marrying that nice boy, René Dumur, who must come in the darkness to look upon Slogum House, even when he knew she was with another man.

A long time the father sat with his hands limp between his knees. These things going on here: land and property stolen at any cost to satisfy one woman’s ambition. Just so she could go back to Ohio some day and buy a place higher up the slope than the Slogums there.

Ruedy saw it going on all over the new country, with dollars big as cartwheels, the land so dry any sprinkling of rain would seem like a gullywasher. And in the East armies of unemployed marched to Washington with a man who seemed to hope for their relief through the unheard-of expedient of a good-roads programme, financed by the issuance of millions of dollars in legal-tender notes. But that would mean taxing the rich and so Coxey got arrested for his trouble and the unemployed a scattering, to eat, to live anyhow until they could underbid another man’s job. Wage cuts, lowered purchasing power, more unemployment—endless cycles. Strikes and unrest everywhere. Millions homeless and a few building ugly piles of stone and glass on high places so they could look down upon some hated one.

But Ruedy had learned some things not in Watson or George or Bellamy. While the first good rain would bring a new wave of homeseekers, the dispossessed of the world, to the free-land country, most of them would be unfitted for the plough and the hoe. They would see nothing: no meadow lark calling from a post, no swift blooming of spiderwort running like blue fire along the upper meadows of June. They would see only the wind and the sun and the long need to live with themselves.

But here and there a sturdy tree of a man like Leo Platt or Pastor Zug would strike root, deep, to solid rock, and hold others about him. Already the ranchers had seen this coming and carried men on their payroll to keep the range clear, men who never endangered their professional standing or the limberness of their trigger fingers with work. But there was desperation among the dispossessed, desperation and the courage it engenders, with settler-cattleman fights breaking out all over the range country, from a rancher-chartered train of armed men in Wyoming, to the lone snake killer who dropped in on the newcomers in the sandhills and talked of the unhealthy country as he played with his gun.

And Gulla, dug in between the invading homeseekers and the cowmen, was ready to profit from the coming struggle, would spread her holdings by every trick known to a Haber, would have it all if the double trees held.

Wearily Ruedy stretched himself and started toward his shack beyond the hogback. Then he remembered that Slogum House was unprotected, with a murderer in the attic, and so he slipped back to his cot in Gulla’s room, apologetically, making scarcely any noise at all.

 

By Monday night the two Slogum sons were out on ban. Hab came home coldly furious, his cheekbones sharp-ridged above the dark stubbles of his face, his black mustache lifting away from his two long teeth. The broader-faced, reddish-bearded Cash was only a step behind his brother in everything, and talking much more.

It was that damned Bullard that got them; must ’ve followed them all the way. When they smelled him they beat it into the hills with the colts and shot them in a blowout. But that bastard from the Willow had seen them with the stuff. He’d kill the son of a bitch, Cash would. And that pot-gut Green—he’d been mighty sure to locate them from the directions Bullard sent up town by his brother-in-law. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to miss them than it was to sneak them into that damned empty jail in the night, so ’s nobody ’d know. What was that high-farkin’ Annette going around thundered up like a saloon keeper’s flossie for if she could n’t keep a knot-head like the sheriff off a them?

“I’ll have respect for your sisters from you, you yellow-gut Slogum!” Gulla roared, and Cash was silenced, but resentfully, his eyes sullen under their thick Haber lids.

And all the time Hab sat across the room from his brother, saying nothing at all, a sly grin of calculation sleeping under his dark mustache. When the anger in Cash had died down the mother led him to talk again. His yellow-gray eyes glowed as he planned, and not badly, Gulla let him know, for she needed him too.

Yes. Cash admitted, there were witnesses, three of them, one a greenhorn from Omaha who could be scared out of the country—just happened to be with that damned Tex Bullard and his pants-holding brother-in-law. If they got Bullard they got the rest too. Otherwise it was the pen for them. “Unless you think you can control the jury—” Gulla shook her head. Not with the settlers against her and the ranchers too, only not letting on, while they could use her against the homeseekers.

“Maybe Cellie can do something with her horse-racing, whiskey-soaking judge.”

But there was no telling for certain who would sit on the case and no telling either just how Cellie would take it when she found out that it was Tex Bullard they had against them. No, they better manage it themselves, get rid of the witnesses.

 

Tex Bullard had a little place over on the Willow, ran horses, mostly, that he broke and sold to the incoming settlers. Because ranch hands were n’t good enough for the twins he had pretended to shine around Libby, with Gulla’s encouragement, while he freighted for the Diamond B. Finally the girl chased him out of the kitchen, calling. “Ask her yourself and then you’ll know!” after him. So he watched his chance and after a lot of coaxing he got Cellie to sneak out with him so he could explain that it was n’t Libby he was after. That was the time Gulla caught them sitting on a cut bank in the night talking in friendly, planning voices. In the face of the mother’s abuse Tex was cool. Hell, he was n’t one a them fellows that go through a family of girls like shotgun salts. All he’d wanted with Libby was a word put in for him with her sister here. He wanted to marry Cellie. And Gulla need n’t go to thinking it was him that had been collecting in advance, either. No, ma’am. Not that it was past him, but he’d knowed how it was with her, and he did n’t give a damn. He’d rattled his spurs on many a blanket, from Texas to Montana. And now that he had his eye on a good place and ready to marry, why, he would n’t ask for anything nicer than a cute little chunk like Cellie here.

But he did n’t get her. Instead Gulla had marched her daughter to the Slogum house and the next week she set out for Deadwood with the two girls, well veiled. They drove into Dumur just as the night train came through.

Annette had been quiet enough, and a little romantic about her condition, but Cellie cried into her lace handkerchief all the way up. Dolly Haber took the bawling out of her fast enough. She’d found early that she had n’t much taste or talent for the trade herself, but she sure could run a house and manage girls, as her sister readily admitted.

So Gulla left the twins with her and two weeks later they had come back, a little pale, but pretty as ever. When Tex Bullard found out about Cellie he hitched up his tired horses again and drove down to the Niobrara in the rain to camp out for the night. Soon after that he had quit the Diamond B, bought up a relinquishment to a place in the Willow, and began growing horses, saying he’d see the cattlemen and the hog ranches all in hell.

He’d show Cash and that black bastard Hab he was n’t afraid of the both of them. Several times he talked of tar-and-feather parties for the Slogums, and lately he was joining Leo Platt in his locating. When he was warned he just laughed.

“The whole damn Slogum outfit ’s yeller ’n calf scours and as worthless. All but the old woman and that Libby’s afraid to go to the backhouse alone.”

 

For all of Cash’s big talk, neither he nor Hab did anything about disposing of the witnesses against them, and while Gulla despised her sons for their caution, she saw the wisdom of it. They could n’t afford to take risks just now. So once more she went up to see Dolly.

“You mind me of a girl I had once. Would n’t any more than be up from one mishap than she’d get herself caught again. No ’count half the time ’till I had to marry her off—” Dolly told Gulla as she flicked cigarette ashes from her high yellow silk bosom. But she promised to see what she could do, and with that the sister had to return to Slogum House.

For days there was nothing from Dolly, and on the Saturday street of Dumur, at the post offices, at literaries and at dances—all over the county, wherever two men met on the road—there was talk of the Slogums, caught at last. Maybe the bastards would get what was coming to them this time. Others scratched the backs of their heads and wondered. Several rode over to warn Tex Bullard. “You ought to demand protection—”

“Maybe ask Sheriff Green to bring his nightshirt and come sleep with me—?” he asked, spitting into the sand.

The long, rough canyon trail around the oxbow bend of the Niobrara was used even more now, and the few settlers who had to drive through the Slogum yard pushed their plough horses on without seeming to, their women with lean faces set straight ahead, but with their eyes turned curiously out the side of their slat sunbonnets as far as they could, the children in the wagon beds sitting close together, whispering.

 

Early June brought wind, hot as the breath of a prairie fire, to crack the last black mud of the water holes, and dry the creeks to sleazy threads. But in the Willow, Tex Bullard still broke his colts to the saddle and the collar, or rode the range with Leo Platt. And at Slogum House Hab stalked through the hallways into the yard and back to his room, his spurs clicking. Although Ward and his dog had learned to keep out of his way as much as possible when things went bad, the last week the boy’s arms were black with pinch bruises and several times out in the shed he had to back against the manger to protect himself from the pointed toe of his brother’s boot.

Cash was growing uneasy too, and sullen. Mealtimes he pushed his food into his mouth without a word, making no contribution to the table talk that Gulla insisted must be maintained, particularly now that the freighters looked so baldly over their loaded knives toward the archway and the Slogums beyond. Although he did not dare skip the evening singing in the parlor, Cash avoided Gulla and the rest as much as he could and began to hang around the bam. Then the mother discovered that four of the cartridge boxes in the sons’ room were empty, one hundred shells gone. Slowly, like an old woman, she sat on the bed, tears running down the furrows of her squat nose unhindered.

When Hab came in she showed him the empty containers.

“Running away—like a scairt coyote—” she said, too beat out for violent words.

 

That evening, when the yard was noisy with the complaint of heavy wheels, the rattle of chain harness, and the bunched beat of galloping cow ponies, Hab slipped into the dusky back stall of the barn and caught his brother putting his saddle on one of the unbranded horses kept for the hideouts. At the shying of the young bay, Cash whirled from his cinch tightening and his hand dropped to his gun. A long time the brothers stood against each other, with no word or sound, the horse quivering nervously, the ammonia smell of the bam strong in the close, still air.

At last Cash fell back, just one step, straight into the flank of the frightened bay. He reared and, breaking the bridle rein, bolted between the brothers and out over the half door into the corral, kicking and plunging, the loose saddle hanging under his belly. Then a hoof caught in a flopping stirrup, the horse went over, the cinch gave, and the saddle flew through the air, the saddlebags spraying plug tobacco and revolver shells from the pockets over the tom earth of the corral.

That night Cash lay on the farthest edge of the bed board, with the wide sheet between him and his brother. And after that Slogum House was tense and still as a herd of longhorns before a thunderstorm, with Cash and even Gulla slipping away before the rattle of Hab’s spurs. Annette was pale and quiet, Cellie putting her handkerchief to her mouth and running to her room. Only Libby seemed as always, Libby and her cat.

Because Ruedy could not bear to see these things he stayed close to his canyon, working all the daylight hours with his fish ponds or his gardens, and not even stopping to smell the fading roses of the slopes any more. But sometimes he could n’t bear even these things, because they were puttery. Then he went after the rye grass creeping in at the upper edges of his garden, chopping with his hoe at the roots that were like wet string, shaking them out to dry in piles of gray matting. Times like these he worked until he had to pull his sticking shirt over his head and throw it to hang over a rosebush while the dust furred his chest and then was gullied in sweat. But there were things he could not hang away so. And sometimes at night he stretched his work-wooden body on a blanket at his doorstep and lay awake until the frogs in his pond and the thunderpump in the marsh below were silenced by the dawn.

For once the Gulla Slogum who had put out many a rowdy freighter, even pushed Bill Billings down the stairs when he got drunk, was helpless. After a week of waiting she still sat late on the doorstep of Slogum House. Deep within the shapeless hump of herself, her hands on her blocky knees, she looked into the night, starless and black, but without the smell of rain—a dry, dreary blackness, like her thoughts. Something would happen soon, and if Dolly did n’t hurry there would never be a place for the little Fanny—no place at all.

Once the woman started to go in to lay the cards once more, but she was afraid. Ever since that last time the sons rode away the black ace kept coming up, the black ace pursuing her like a gray wolf on the trail of a rabbit, or bedeviling a weary old cow ready to lay down.

It was after midnight when a soft whistle came from out toward the cowshed. Instantly Gulla was up. Peering into the empty hall, she shut the screen door, hooked it carefully on the outside, and went across the yard, a soft padding shadow that moved swiftly for all her heaviness, the stiffness of her waiting.

The whistle came again—and as she recognized it she turned back toward Slogum House, where her two sons lay, their guns heavy between them. She hesitated, and deliberately, with her fingers steady against her teeth, she answered the whistle.

The vague stockiness of a man separated itself from the shadows. “Sis?” he whispered, cautiously.

“Yes, Butch, it’s me,” she admitted. “What are they after you for this time?”

“Nothing, Sis—not a thing,” he said; then, confidentially, “Dolly sent me down this way—”

Gulla grunted. “We don’t need your help, Butch Haber, you and Dolly both know that. I can get all kinds of help like you can give, without the risk.”

“Sure, I know, but ain’t it natural to want to see your sister now and then?”

Gulla faced him in the darkness, knowing how he would look, with the gray, robbery lips that she never admitted were like hers, and outlined by very little more mustache, not plucked but coaxed to grow into long trailing ends, like a catfish’s. His hair would be long, too, covering the holes that were once his ears, cut off by a man up in Wyoming because he did n’t like a way Butch had of tying the ears of street dogs full of gunpowder and touching them off with burning string. The man had slashed at one side of Butch’s head and then the other, carelessly, and not cleanly, leaving a piece of one lobe. Tit-Ear he was called since then, but behind his back, because he had a mean disposition and a steady gun hand.

To-night Gulla was n’t interested in her brother’s difficulties. Twice in the penitentiary and no telling what it was this time. Anything up to murder with a price on his head, and it would n’t look good for Slogum House if the U. S. marshal caught a criminal hiding out there just now. As if she had n’t enough on her mind, with the trial coming on and Annette spoiling her eyes crying herself to sleep every night over the no-good young Frenchman from the river. Then there was that bad run of spades with the death card, and Libby going around with her shaming face, shaming her own mother for everything.

“You ain’t goin’ a sick the dogs on me?” Butch Haber asked finally, uneasy in his waiting.

But Gulla had made her decision. “Not to-night, anyhow—” she said briskly. “Come in and I’ll get you a mess of something to eat.”

Now it was Butch who hung back in the darkness. “Nothing smokin’, Sis, not yet awhile. Anything else I’ll do for you, you know that, but no hot lead—”

Gulla stopped to peer at the dark form as she pulled at her lip calculatingly. Maybe the U. S. marshal had already caught up with him, and now Butch had reason to be scared, or maybe he was just getting soft. She laughed. A Haber soft I

“Oh, you can stand this,” she told him. “Besides, was there any asking about that other time, and the hundred dollars dead easy in it for you—?”

“But I was n’t hiding out then, like now—” the man still argued. “Not like now—” Then, suspiciously, “If ’t ain’t nothing much what you want done, why don’t them boys a yourn do it?”

She snorted. “They’re Slogums, or as bad, when it comes to that, and no Haber. But they’ll be Haber for you, just this once, and then you get.”

Butch laughed a little down deep in his thick chest somewhere, pleased by the compliment. His heavy boots stomped cockily on the hard earth of the yard. “Hell, yes of course I’ll get”—reaching into his pocket for a handful of peanuts, breaking them, crunching the kernels. “But how about this job-anything in it?”

“Money—? Always money with you.”

Butch began to lag again, knowing he had his sister where the hair was short. She came to time. “There might be a little something in it—enough to get you to Mexico.”

“But maybe there won’t be nothing to do.”

So they bargained in the darkness of the yard, with Slogum House looming black against the sky.

 

Gulla did n’t take Butch to the crow’s nest. No use doubling up the murderers. Instead she took him to her room, pulled the blinds, and went out to rustle him something to eat. And when she brought the tray, she turned the key on him, quick, before he saw her plan, and left him to test his shoulder against the heavy plank door.

After a While she slipped through the unused closet that opened from the freighters’ dining room into the wall passage and tiptoed in her felt slippers as far as her own room. There was no noise of eating inside, not even the smell of a cigarette or the crack of a peanut, only a stealthy movement at the windows, half open, but covered with the heavy hail screen used all over the house. When the screen did n’t give before his weight, Butch pried at the fastening with the big stag-handle knife he always carried. At last he gave it up and, apparently satisfied that no one could get either in or out, he stretched himself on the bed and in five minutes he was snoring. Her brother was afraid, Gulla could see that, scared as a hound dog that’d been shot at, but still he slept. He was a Haber.

The next morning after the freighters were gone Gulla set her door ajar and her brother came out. Fed, his clothes cleaned, his hair curling like drake tails on his shoulder, his stringy moustache outlining his long slit of mouth, Butch moved with stocky importance through Slogum House, dropping peanut shells everywhere, greeting them all as a favorite uncle returned for a long visit From Hab he got a “You loose again, Butch?” and from Libby a barring at the kitchen door.

“No loafers here,” she said bluntly, the black tom blinking from his shelf behind the girl. The twins, by nature and of necessity agreeable, did better by the man. And before the day was gone Annette had to lock her door in old Tit-Ear’s face.

Gulla, her arms folded over her high apron, saw these things and held her silence because she must, planning as well as she could, now that her sister seemed to have failed her. But late that night Dun Calley, a taffy-haired, downy-faced boy, rode into the yard with a button from Dolly’s yellow satin dress for identification. When he was settled in the crow’s nest with Blackie Daw, Gulla ran the cards once more, saw success for her undertaking—the ace of spades, the death card, still coming up, but flanked by diamonds. She laid the pack away and called Hab to her room. At last it would be settled.

The next evening, when Slogum House was a dark, still block at the foot of the hogback, three men rode away from the corrals down into Spring Slough on unbranded horses. Butch, his pockets bulging with peanuts, was in the middle, with the boyish Dun Calley on one side and Blackie Daw, who had been hidden away in the crow’s nest for over six weeks, on the other. In the murky blackness relieved only by pale lightning and an occasional spattering run of rain on the dry grass, they headed toward Tex Bullard’s place over in the Willow. Far behind them came Hab and Cash, keeping their horses to the sod, their rifles across their saddles. And in the girls’ parlor Annette and the sheriff were playing dominoes and drinking lemonade that Tad was diluting from the bottle on his hip. Blackie Daw knew that the sheriff was there, for Gulla had carried his coat, with the badge inside, up to the crow’s nest for the hide-out to see when he started swearing, and crying too, saying he did n’t want to do anything, only get away.

“What you s’pose I been keeping you in grub and hid here all this time for? I hain’t no Salvation Nell.”

So he went with Dun and Butch, the Slogum sons riding behind, and Gulla waiting in her room with the one small light burning under the map of Dumur County.

 

Toward morning Butch came back, and soon afterward Hab and Cash. From her dark doorway the woman watched as the sons slipped into the dim hall, up the stairs to Libby’s room and through that to their own, so that no freighter could say he had seen them this night. Not a word had passed between Gulla and her sons, but she knew that the job was done and so she got up and erased the name of Tex Bullard from the valley of the Willow, one less name within the red circle that bounded the ambitions of Gulla Slogum. And still she did n’t sleep until the dawn was gray.