Jeremy Six had wide shoulders and lean hips. His hair was brown, and his face was shaped like a shield, with a long, hard jaw. He was no longer a young man—he was near forty, now—but he had the quickness and vigor of youth and his muscles were hard and trim. He had big bones and large, ungainly hands. Going on four years now, he had been chief town marshal of Spanish Flat. Most of the time the job was routine and drab: each night, with a schedule that changed constantly to prevent ambush, he made the rounds of the town several times. He cruised Cat Town, checking on the saloons and bawdy houses. Fat Annie always had a kind word for him, a bubbling laugh and a hoarse obscene remark or two. He had friends in all the quarters of town. He liked the job: it kept him busy, it kept him alert, now and then it challenged his wits or his strength, and in that manner it kept him finely tuned so that he was always alive to the smallest pleasures and the warm subtleties of each day’s quiet adventures. Once in a long while there was a bad time, a time of regret: last summer he had lost a deputy and a friend in a drawn-out chase and series of gun battles with the Madden gang. That had been summertime, and hot on the rim of the desert. Now it was the dead of winter, and Jack Lime had come with his three toughs to take the place of the Madden gang in the mountains.
Spanish Flat was a thriving crossroads town. The railroad came through; three stagecoach lines served various points.
The Mexican border was no great distance away and the town was enriched by its mixture of Spaniard, Indian, and Anglo. There were silver and lead and zinc mines in the hills; there were sheep and horse outfits in the mountains; and along the fertile strip of land along the river, between the Mogul Rim and the mountains on one side and the flat lifeless flow of the desert on the other—along this narrow belt were the cattle ranches. The town was a sturdy one, no short-lived boom camp or passing railhead settlement. It had its portion of substantial citizens: storekeepers, bankers, innkeepers, businessmen of various roles. It was Jeremy Six’s job to keep it tame—for even a settled community on the frontier was subject to the dangers of the wild country in which it sat. If the Indians were no longer a threat, there were still those who kept life from becoming dull.
The afternoon after his brush with Jack Lime’s bunch, Six was on the porch of his office, studying the sky. The air was still dry but the clouds covered the whole surface of the sky now: a solid gray mass. Sometimes, when there was a lull in the wagon and horse traffic along the street, Six could hear a faint distant moan, and in time he came to be certain it was an advancing wind. He remembered Dominguez’ worried remark, last night: I figure a blizzard, pretty quick now. The clouds were marching down from the north, growing darker all the time, and Spanish Flat lay exposed to them. The temperature was cruelly cold: there had been a surface of strong ice on the water barrel behind the jail this morning.
Bad weather worried Six. For it meant that all the toughs hiding out in the mountains would crawl out from under their rocks and come down to lower altitude, and very likely seek shelter in Six’s town.
Between that and the discomfort of the weather itself, it didn’t promise to be an especially happy time.
Will January reached a fork in the coach road and stopped to consider the sky. His glance was hooded. He wore a bottle-green frock coat against the chill, and a scarf of Scottish wool about his throat. His hat was flat-crowned, narrow-brimmed, of gray beaver. Will January was a small boned man, gaunt of cheek with skeletal fingers and eyes half-closed by habit, so that no one could make out the expression behind them.
A careful observer might have noticed that the bottle-green coat was cut away at both hips to expose the handles of two polished revolvers, and that even in the intense cold weather, Will January wore no gloves. For a glove, no matter how thin and supple, could slow a man’s draw. Will January always kept one hand inside his pocket, where the fingers never stopped moving, squeezing a wadded scrap of cloth. There was an interior opening to that coat pocket, through which if necessary he could reach his revolver without withdrawing the hand from the coat. From Will January’s point of view it was better to risk a powder-burn in his coat than a bullet hole in his heart.
This Will January was a rider of the Circuit, that nebulously defined trail that connected the great money camps of the West. All the important gamblers followed the Circuit, and word of new strikes and quick fights traveled its length with amazing speed. Will January had been in Silver City three days ago when word had reached him of a high-stakes game in a back room in Washington Camp. When a game like that got started, it sometimes ran for weeks without breaking up. Will January had been on the hard end of a losing streak and his instincts had told him that his luck wasn’t going to change in Silver City. He had saddled his horse and set out for Washington Camp.
He sat his horse at the road forks now, hooked the reins over the saddlehorn and sat with both hands in his pockets for warmth while he frowned down one fork and then the other. The right-hand fork would take him southwest to Washington Camp, but that was still a day and a half distant. The nearest town along that road, he knew, lay forty miles across the desert.
The left-hand fork led down the west flank of the Yellows to Spanish Flat, only an hour’s ride to the south. Will January had no particular reason to go to Spanish Flat. But foul weather was brewing and he wondered what the odds were of his beating the storm to Washington Camp. If he got caught on the high desert in a norther, they could pick up his bones after the spring thaw: you didn’t ride out a blizzard in open country.
He was tempted by the big game on the one hand and survival on the other. In the end he followed his instincts: he let fate decide. He tossed a coin.
The coin told him to head south to safety, and Will January turned his horse down the coach road to Spanish Flat.
The Yellows stood sharp and jagged, thrusting up into the clouds. On a green-brown slope littered with trailings and slag heaps, men moved ant-like in and out of the lateral shafts of the Pyramid Mine. Smoke curled heavily from stacks in the reduction mill. Steam-driven donkey engines chugged at the mouths of the tunnels, pulling ore-car cables. A cart heaped with ore-laden rock chunks rattled out of the Number One Tunnel, made a turn along the track and stopped against the dead-end buffer; two muckers in dust-coated overalls turned levers on the cart and its bed upturned, spilling the ore through the swinging metal end-gate down a chute. The heavy rocks clattered and bounced down the wood-sided chute into a bin inside the reduction mill, where great engines made a deafening roar as they pummeled and crushed the rock. The mine’s superintendent stood by a wooden bucket-derrick that towered thirty feet over his head; the superintendent had his hands on his hips and he was bawling at a crew of miners moving into the Number Three Tunnel. They were Welshmen, Prussians, Slavs, Chinese, Mexicans: hard-working men, hard-fighting men, hard men.
Inside the control shack, on the slope above the reduction mill and a hundred yards south of it, Sammy Preston stood by the littered old roll-top desk and looked out through the cracked pane of the small window. He could see the new shift of muckers moving into the tunnel, the old shift coming out, men moving in streams; and the superintendent bawling at them from his lofty perch beside the derrick, arms akimbo. Sammy watched them for a moment and then lifted his eyes, ducking his head to see up through the window. The sky was turning murderous dark. Even with the stove going full-flame in the corner, smoke trickling from a broken seam in its black metal chimney-pipe, Sammy Preston felt chilled.
The superintendent came in and shut the door. Sammy was half afraid of the big man, but he never dared let it show. The superintendent said, “Gonna blow pretty quick. Looks like a bad storm coming. If we don’t batten down the mill and close up the chute, we’ll have the reduction bins full of snow.”
Sammy curled a fist into his palm and cracked his knuckles. He said, “All right. Shut down. Tell the new shift to go home.”
The superintendent growled, “I wish you’d made up your mind ten minutes ago. I just sent that shift into the mine. You’d of saved me a trip inside. Going to take awhile to round them all up—you got two dozen cross tunnels to comb.”
“God damn it,” Sammy said, “quit picking at me. Who owns this mine, anyway?”
“You do,” the superintendent said softly, but Sammy was sure it was quiet contempt he saw in the big man’s eyes. The superintendent turned up his collar and went out.
Sammy Preston spoke a nervous oath. He wheeled outside and walked down the hill trail at an angle. The path took him around a rock outcrop and into a stand of live oak. Beyond the trees he came to the wagon road, and walked up its rocky ruts to the crest of the hill. For a moment he stopped and threw his head back to look up at the big house.
It was a monument—the great pillared Georgian mansion on a rocky Arizona hilltop. Like Wuthering Heights, Sammy Preston thought sourly. It had the look of a ghost-haunted castle, with the boiling gray-black clouds behind it. He walked up the circular drive, remembering the great ballroom parties that had been held in this magnificent house, the hearty mine-owners and their bejeweled wives who had talked and laughed in the parlors, the cigar-smoke and talk of big-shouldered men in the billiard room drinking brandy after a great ceremonial dinner. All that was gone, now. The mine-owners never came to Pyramid House anymore. They had their parties and drank their brandy and told their jokes at other houses, at other mines.
It was a lonely house now. The old man, Grat Preston, had kept it alive. Now it stood almost empty, a hollow monument to Grat Preston, Sammy’s father. Old Grat was dead. Dead, Sammy thought fiercely; but Grat’s shadow still lay across the land, Grat’s boots still tramped the Pyramid Mine, and Sammy knew privately—although he would never admit it aloud—that he could never fill his father’s boots.
He covered his weakness with bravado and flash. He wore loud clothes and fancy gloves and carried a riding crop like a military officer’s swagger-stick. He owned the mine now and he tried to boss it, but he always made the wrong decisions, or made decisions too late, or had to let someone else make the decisions. Because he had never bothered to learn his father’s business. He had spent his years playing. He didn’t know how to do anything else except play.
He had thought of selling the mine—it would bring him a small fortune. But two things stopped him. One was the thought of his sister. Amy would have nowhere to go, nowhere to live, nothing to live for if they sold Pyramid House and the mine. And the other thought was a rare spark of realism: Sammy knew that if he sold the mine and got his hands on a huge mass of money, he would lose it. Invest it badly or spend it foolishly or gamble it away. He had no ability to make money work for him, and he was afraid: he was terrified that if he sold the mine and then lost the money, he would have nothing left. He had just sense enough to know that if he ever went broke he would not be able to survive.
And so he kept the mine, and made a pitiful effort to act as though he ran it. The mine was a solid one: it made money; it let him buy fancy clothes and fancy horses; it enabled him to carry on with flirtatious girls who wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he’d been poor. It enabled him to gamble, to drink more than he should, to smoke dollar cigars, to walk down the street with his back straight and his lip corners turned down contemptuously as if he were a better man than those he passed on the sidewalk. It allowed him to hold up his head as if he were a man.
Sammy Preston was twenty-three years old; he looked eighteen. His upper lip wore a sorry attempt at a mustache, sandy in color and thin, almost tentative, in texture. He had pale blue eyes that tended to water. His chin was slightly underslung and he had a prominent Adam’s apple. He was around average height but his shoulders, which sloped roundly, made him look taller and skinnier than he was.
Physically he very much resembled his mother. Certainly he had little in common with his father. Grat Preston had been a rock of a man, heavy-shouldered and spade-bearded, with piercing gray eyes that had had a way of pinning a man to a wall like a spear through the throat. Grat had died in his prime—at the age of forty-six in a shale-slide. It had taken them three days to dig the body out. Sammy had gone on a drunk that had lasted ten days, and he might have stayed drunk forever if his sister Amy hadn’t found him at Fat Annie’s and dragged him out of the place with the help of the mine superintendent. From then on, Sammy had had trouble looking the superintendent in the eye.
Fear was a cage: Sammy threw himself against its bars with increasing panic, day by day. He shook himself now and walked up the circular drive, climbed the porch and went inside the great house. He turned into the billiard room and walked past the massive mahogany-and-felt table. Something about the dark wood paneling of the room and the great billiard table gave him strength and comfort. It was in the heavy dark masculinity of the room: he could almost smell his father’s cigar smoke and hear the hearty bellowing voice. He sat down in his father’s immense leather chair and tugged off his gloves.
After a moment’s brooding he reached behind the chair and tugged the bell-pull. In a few minutes Angelina appeared in the door—fat, dark-skinned, impassive, silent. She wore an apron and a scarf around her head. Sammy said, “Bring me some coffee. No, make it a hot toddy. And hurry up.”
Angelina turned and went, not speaking. She hadn’t closed the door, and that made Sammy furious. In his father’s day none of them would ever have dared to forget to close a door when they left a room.
Sammy sank down, shrinking in the big brown chair. He frowned and his lips pouted. He dragged a cigar out of his pocket and licked it and put a match to it. When Angelina came into the room with a tray he shouted at her: “Broke both legs getting back here, didn’t you?”
She put the tray down beside him on the table and turned to go. Sammy cried, “You seem to be taking your own sweet time around here these days. I’ll tell you something, woman—you’re going to speed up those fat legs around here or I’ll send you looking for another job. You understand me? Damn you, answer me when I talk to you!”
His sister Amy turned into the doorway just then and said quietly, “Leave her alone, Sammy. Angelina, don’t pay any attention to him. Go on about your work.”
Angelina dipped her head toward Amy and went out of the room silently. Amy waited till she was gone; then Amy shut the door and came forward. She cocked her hip on the edge of the billiard table and let one foot swing free. She was a compact girl with a pretty, practical face: her bones were small, like her brother’s, but her features were better arranged than Sammy’s. Her hair was the same sandy color as his but hers had luster; and her eyes were a darker blue.
Sammy said angrily, “You’ve got to keep a tight rein on them or they’ll be laughing at us.”
“They’re just people, Sammy.”
He picked up the cup and scalded his tongue on the hot toddy, and cursed. Amy said, “There’s a storm coming up.”
“I know, I know, dammit. We’ve closed down the mine until it blows over.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ve made sure we have enough food in the house in case the storm lasts several days.”
He said with sudden sarcasm, “I don’t suppose you checked the whisky supply.”
“No,” she said flatly, “I didn’t.”
“Well, then,” he said, “I will.” He got up and walked across the room to the liquor cabinet. It ran from floor to ceiling. He opened the wide double doors and looked at the shelves. “Christ, look at that.”
“There’s a bottle.”
“One bottle? For God’s sake. Why doesn’t somebody check on these things once in a while?”
“It won’t kill you not to have whisky for a few days,” she said.
Sammy walked back to his father’s chair but did not sit. He stood beside it and emptied the toddy in a gulp. He coughed and wiped his mouth, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at his mustache. He put the handkerchief away and began to button up his coat.
Amy said with sudden anxiety, “Where are you going?”
“Down to Spanish Flat to get some booze.”
“You can’t!”
“Why the hell not?”
“You might get caught in the storm.”
“It’ll be a couple of hours before it hits. I’ve got plenty of time. I’ll be back in an hour at the most.”
She moved toward him but he evaded her touch, going around her. She said quickly, “Don’t go, Sammy. You know what a blizzard can be like.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Pure misery, if you haven’t got enough liquor to ride it out.” He kept on going toward the door. Amy’s voice followed him but he paid no attention to it; he rammed out into the corridor and went through to the back of the house. He slammed the door going out and trotted across the flat to the stables, and found the Mexican wrangler there. “Saddle up the pinto for me, Cruz. Pronto.”