CHAPTER XI

 

IT CAME TO him, standing in the cold bleak hallway, that his search was senseless. It was hardly likely he would find a buffalo gun here, and even if he did, he would have no proof of its ownership.

The corridor was dim and musty; the taste of the girl was still on his lips and the smell of her hair in his nostrils. He felt disorganized by what had just transpired; all his values, negative as they might have been, were shaken.

The man who had killed the deputy and ambushed him once might try again. But it now appeared that the only way of finding out that man’s identity would be to take the risk of waiting for him to make his next attempt. Still, Brand had a distaste for leaving any job uncompleted, and so in a glum uncertain mood he crossed the hah and opened the last door.

A match in his upraised hand revealed a furnished room. Probably the old man’s, he decided. He lit the table lamp; it cast unsteady shadows. Here there were a wood-frame cot, a fragile three-legged table, a washbasin and stand and water pitcher, a faded lithograph on the wall, a worn rug, a couple of sagging carpetbags and in one corner a littler of miscellaneous objects much like the accumulation of pack-rat junk on the floor below.

Brand shut the door and went across the room to paw through that pile. He found everything from chicken feathers to an old, yellowed map of Rifle Gap as it had been in its heyday. There were leather straps and buckles, an iron pot, a dented rusty canteen, assorted empty bottles, a full jar of horse liniment, rawhide piggin’ strings, and an old shell belt and holster.

And one other thing. A long-barreled, .50-70 caliber ’86 Winchester rifle.

He thought he had something with that discovery, until closer inspection proved that the rifle could not possibly have been fired in months. Dust coated the oil inside the bore and on the moving parts of the action. There was no sulphur smell to it, but only the musty odor of old oil. Disgustedly, he put down the rifle and stood up.

He was turning toward the door when his perceptive ears picked up the muffled tramp of feet ascending the stairs at the far end of the corridor. Alert but uncertain, he blew out the lamp and put his back flat against the front wall of the room beside the door, lifting his gun silently out of leather.

The footsteps, very heavy, came tramping down the hall, increasing in volume. Brand’s fist whitened on the gun butt. Then, close by, out in the corridor, the boots halted and he heard the sharp, peremptory rapping of knuckles on a door.

The girl’s voice answered. “Who’s that?”

“I want to talk to you.” It was Wayne Lutz’s rumbling voice. Jim Brand frowned in the dark, puzzled.

The door clicked open, squeaking a little on old hinges. Michaela said, with no warmth in her tone, “What do you want?”

“Where’s Brand?”

“How would I know?”

“He’s prowling around somewhere up here,” Lutz said. “Let me in a minute.”

“What for?”

“Jesus,” Lutz said. “You’re not scared of me, are you? I won’t bite.”

“How do I know that?”

“Trusting, ain’t you?”

“Show me a reason why I should trust you,” she said.

Jim Brand put his gun back into its holster and stayed put, on the chance something might come up in the conversation across the hall that might give him a clue to what he sought.

Lutz said, “You sure you ain’t seen Brand up here?”

“What if I have?” There was a brief stretch of silence, after which the girl said in a more apprehensive voice, “What do you want, anyway?”

“You,” Lutz said bluntly.

The girl laughed softly—Brand could barely make it out; then she said in an even tone of voice, “On what terms?”

“What the hell kind of a question is that? How does a man want a woman?”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

“Let me in, you goddamn spitfire, and I’ll show you what kind of terms I’ve got in mind.”

“You may be a big man to some, Wayne, but where do you think you get off talking to me that way?”

It took a moment; Brand imagined that Lutz was probably forcing himself to calm down; then the rumbling voice said, “Hell, girl, I can buy you whatever you want. I can take you out of this pack-rat’s nest and set you up in style. We’ve talked about this before, Michaela.”

“You mean you’ve talked. I just listen. So far I haven’t heard much. What’s really on your mind, Wayne?” There was an unmistakable bitter resignation in her tone.

“You are,” Lutz said. “You know that, damn it. Every time I find an excuse to come by here, you give me that sweet-mocking smile of yours and you laugh at me. You lead me along a ways and then you drop me, and laugh about it. I can see your eyes, Michaela—I see the way you flirt with every man that comes along. Hell, you don’t have to make calf eyes at scum like that McCasford kid or drifters with no bottom like Brand. I’ll take you out of all that—I’ll set you up. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” she said. “But it’s not enough.”

“Then,” Lutz said quietly, “what is enough?”

“If you can’t get it yet, Wayne, I’m not about to tell you.”

“I see,” Lutz said. “You want it all. You want my head on a silver tray, is that it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Marriage. That’s what you’ve got up your sleeve.” The girl answered him with a cold, brittle laugh.

Lutz said, “Damn it, you know how things are.”

“Sure,” she said, and once again Brand could detect the overlay of bleak and hopeless pride on her tone. “I know exactly how things are. You’ve got a code to live up to, don’t you? A virtuous, honorable, pious goddamned code.”

“Don’t laugh at me,” Lutz warned.

“Do I look like I’m laughing?”

“How do I know? I can never tell what you’re thinking.”

“Then I’ll tell you. You’d marry me quick enough if I was a white girl.”

Lutz’s voice rose, blustering. “I never said anything about that.”

“Of course not. Now get out of here, will you?”

“Wait a minute—”

“Do you think I want to be anybody’s half-breed mistress? Do you think that’s all I want out of life?”

“You won’t get a better offer, Michaela.” Lutz seemed to be trying to make his voice gentle.

“That’s a cruel thing to say.”

“Is it? I believe in facing reality. Maybe you ought to try it sometime.”

“No, thanks. I’ll hold out. There’s no place in your scheme of things for dreams, is there, Wayne?

“Sure,” he said. “If they’re the kind of dreams you can do something about. I started out with two hundred head of scrawny longhorns I snaked out of the East Texas brush country. That and a dream—and look where I am now. But I knew I could make it, see—and that’s the difference. You’re so goddamned proud you’re blind. It ain’t your fault you’re a half-breed, but it ain’t my fault either.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You brought it up. Damn it, open your eyes. Neither one of us can change the truth, Michaela.”

“You could do something about it—if you wanted to bad enough.”

“Aagh,” Lutz said in disgust. In the darkness of the old man’s silent room, Jim Brand stood frowning, head lowered, ashamed of his own eavesdropping and yet unwilling to disclose his presence.

“Get out,” the girl said quietly.

“All right. Just you think about it, hey?”

The heavy boot heels tramped back down the hallway to the head of the staircase. On the roof, hailstones rattled like falling gravel. The wind was a whisper-wail under the eaves, sweeping along the building, shaking it. Jim Brand stepped out of his hiding place into the direct stare of the girl.

She said, “You hear all that?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, I guess.”

“Answer me one question.”

She just looked at him. He watched her with guarded earnestness and said, “If he asked you to marry him, would you?”

Her eyes turned enigmatic. “I don’t know,” she said. “Would you care?”

He made no answer; he wasn’t sure of himself. He just stood watching her until after a moment she turned back into her room and shut the door. Thereupon he went down the hall, paused at the head of the stair, touched his gun butt and went downstairs.