The Quirt by B. M. Bower (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📕

close together, and that the lines around his mouth were cruel lines and gave the lie to his smile, which was pleasant enough if you just looked at the[Pg 96] smile and paid no attention to anything else in his face.

"You had quite an experience getting out here, they tell me," he observed carelessly; too carelessly, thought Lorraine, who was well schooled in the circumlocutions of delinquent tenants, agents of various sorts and those who crave small gossip of their neighbors. "Heard you were lost up in Rock City all night."

Lorraine looked up at him, startled. "I caught a terrible cold," she said, laughing nervously. "I'm not used to the climate," she added guardedly.

The man fumbled in his pocket and produced smoking material. "Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked perfunctorily.

"Why, no. It doesn't concern me in the slightest degree." Why, she thought confusedly, must she always be reminded of that horrible place of rocks? What was it to this man where she had been lost?

"You must of got there about the time the storm broke," the man hazarded after a silence. "It's sure a bad place in a thunderstorm. Them rocks draw lightning. Pretty bad, wasn't it?"

[Pg 97]"Lightning is always bad, isn't it?" Lorraine tried to hold her voice steady. "I don't know much about it. We don't have thunderstorms to amount to anything, in Los Angeles. It sometimes does thunder there in the winter, but it is very mild."

With hands that trembled she picked the cat off the rail and started toward the house. "I'll tell dad what you said," she told him, glancing back over her shoulder. When she saw that he had turned his horse and was frankly following her to the house, her heart jumped wildly into her throat,—judging by the feel of it.

"I'm plumb out of matches. I wonder if you can let me have some," he said, still speaking too carelessly to reassure her. "So you stuck it out in Rock City all through that storm! That's more than what I'd want to do."

She did not answer that, but once on the doorstep Lorraine turned and faced him. Quite suddenly it came to her—the knowledge of why she did not like this man. She stared at him, her eyes wide and bright.

"Your hat's brown!" she exclaimed unguardedly. "I—I saw a man with a brown hat——"

He laughed suddenly. "If you stay around[Pg 98] here long you'll see a good many," he said, taking off his hat and turning it on his hand before her. "This here hat I traded for yesterday. I had a gray one, but it didn't suit me. Too narrow in the brim. Brown hats are getting to be the style. If I can borrow half a dozen matches, Miss Hunter, I'll be going."

Lorraine looked at him again doubtfully and went after the matches. He thanked her, smiling down at her quizzically. "A man can get along without lots of things, but he's plumb lost without matches. You've maybe saved my life, Miss Hunter, if you only knew it."

She watched him as he rode away, opening the gate and letting himself through without dismounting. He disappeared finally around a small spur of the hill, and Lorraine found her knees trembling under her.

"Ket, you're an awful fool," she exclaimed fiercely. "Why did you let me give myself away to that man? I—I believe he was the man. And if I really did see him, it wasn't my imagination at all. He saw me there, perhaps. Ket, I'm scared! I'm not going to stay on this ranch all alone. I'm going to saddle the family skeleton, and I'm going to ride till dark. There's some[Pg 99]thing queer about that man from Whisper. I'm afraid of him."

After awhile, when she had finished her breakfast and was putting up a lunch, Lorraine picked up the nameless gray cat and holding its head between her slim fingers, looked at it steadily. "Ket, you're the humanest thing I've seen since I left home," she said wistfully. "I hate a country where horrible things happen under the surface and the top is just gray and quiet and so dull it makes you want to scream. Lone Morgan lied to me. He lied—he lied!" She hugged the cat impulsively and rubbed her cheek absently against it, so that it began purring immediately.

"Ket—I'm afraid of that man at Whisper!" she breathed miserably against its fur.

[Pg 100]

CHAPTER EIGHT "IT TAKES NERVE JUST TO HANG ON"

Brit was smoking his pipe after supper and staring at nothing, though his face was turned toward the closed door. Lorraine had washed the dishes and was tidying the room and looking at her father now and then in a troubled, questioning way of which Brit was quite oblivious.

"Dad," she said abruptly, "who is the man at Whisper?"

Brit turned his eyes slowly to her face as if he had not grasped her meaning and was waiting for her to repeat the question. It was evident that his thoughts had pulled away from something that meant a good deal to him.

"Why?"

"A man came this morning, and said he was the man at Whisper, and that he would come again to see you."

Brit took his pipe from his mouth, looked at it[Pg 101] and crowded down the tobacco with a forefinger. "He seen me ride away from the ranch, this morning," he said. "He was coming down the Whisper trail as I was taking the fork over to Sugar Spring, Frank and me. What did he say he wanted to see me about?"

"He didn't say. He asked for you and Frank." Lorraine sat down and folded her arms on the oilcloth-covered table. "Dad, what is Whisper?"

"Whisper's a camp up against a cliff, over west of here. It belongs to the Sawtooth. Is that all he said? Just that he wanted to see me?"

"He—talked a little," Lorraine admitted, her eyebrows pulled down. "If he saw you leave, I shouldn't think he'd come here and ask for you."

"He knowed I was gone," Brit stated briefly.

With a finger nail Lorraine traced the ugly, brown pattern on the oilcloth. It was not easy to talk to this silent man who was her father, but she had done a great deal of thinking during that long, empty day, and she had reached the point where she was afraid not to speak.

"Dad!"

"What do you want, Raine?"

[Pg 102]"Dad, was—has any one around here died, lately?"

"Died? Nobody but Fred Thurman, over here on Granite. He was drug with a horse and killed."

Lorraine caught her breath, saw Brit looking at her curiously and moved closer to him. She wanted to be near somebody just then, and after all, Brit was her father, and his silence was not the inertia of a dull mind, she knew. He seemed bottled-up, somehow, and bitter. She caught his hand and held it, feeling its roughness between her two soft palms.

"Dad, I've got to tell you. I feel trapped, somehow. Did his horse have a white face, dad?"

"Yes, he's a blaze-faced roan. Why?" Brit moved uncomfortably, but he did not take his hand away from her. "What do you know about it, Raine?"

"I saw a man shoot Fred Thurman and push his foot through the stirrup. And, dad, I believe it was that man at Whisper. The one I saw had on a brown hat, and this man wears a brown hat—and I was advised not to tell any one I had been at that place they call Rock City, when the[Pg 103] storm came. Dad, would an innocent man—one that didn't have anything to do with a crime—would he try to cover it up afterwards?"

Brit's hand shook when he removed the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the table. His face had turned gray while Lorraine watched him fearfully. He laid his hand on her shoulder, pressing down hard—and at last his eyes met her big, searching ones.

"If he wanted to live—in this country—he'd have to. Leastways, he'd have to keep his mouth shut," he said grimly.

"And he'd try to shut the mouths of others——"

"If he cared anything about them, he would. You ain't told anybody what you saw, have yuh?"

Lorraine hid her face against his arm. "Just Lone Morgan, and he thought I was crazy and imagined it. That was in the morning, when he found me. And he—he wanted me to go on thinking it was just a nightmare—that I'd imagined the whole thing. And I did, for awhile. But this man at Whisper tried to find out where I was that night——"

Brit pulled abruptly away from her, got up[Pg 104] and opened the door. He stood there for a time, looking out into the gloom of early nightfall. He seemed to be listening, Lorraine thought. When he came back to her his voice was lower, his manner intangibly furtive.

"You didn't tell him anything, did you?" he asked, as if there had been no pause in their talk.

"No—I made him believe I wasn't there. Or I tried to. And dad! As I was going to cross that creek just before you come to Rock City, two men came along on horseback, and I hid before they saw me. They stopped to water their horses, and they were talking. They said something about the TJ had been here a long time, but they would get theirs, and it was like sitting into a poker game with a nickel. They said the little ones aren't big enough to fight the Sawtooth, and they'd carry lead under their hides if they didn't leave. Dad, isn't your brand the TJ? That's what it looks like on Yellowjacket."

Brit did not answer, and when Lorraine was sure that he did not mean to do so, she asked another question. "Dad, why didn't you want me to leave the ranch to-day? I was nervous after that man was here, and I did go."

"I didn't want you riding around the country[Pg 105] unless I knew where you went," Brit said. "My brand is the TJ up-and-down. We never call it just the TJ."

"Oh," said Lorraine, relieved. "They weren't talking about you, then. But dad—it's horrible! We simply can't let that murder go and not do anything. Because I know that man was shot. I heard the shot fired, and I saw him start to fall off his horse. And the next flash of lightning I saw——"

"Look here, Raine. I don't want you talking about what you saw. I don't want you thinkin' about it. What's the use? Thurman's dead and buried. The cor'ner come and held an inquest, and the jury agreed it was an accident. I was on the jury. The sheriff's took charge of his property. You couldn't prove what you saw, even if you was to try." He looked at her very much as Lone Morgan had looked at her. His next words were very nearly what Lone Morgan had said, Lorraine remembered. "You don't know this country like I know it. Folks live in it mainly because they don't go around blatting everything they see and hear and think."

"You have laws, don't you, dad? You spoke about the sheriff——"

[Pg 106]"The sheriff!" Brit laughed harshly. "Yes, we got a sheriff, and we got a jail, and a judge—all the makin's of law. But we ain't got one thing that goes with it, and that's justice. You'd best make up your mind like the cor'ner's jury done, that Fred Thurman was drug to death by his horse. That's all that'll ever be proved, and if you can't prove nothing else you better keep your mouth shut."

Lorraine sprang up and stood facing her father, every nerve taut with protest. "You don't mean to tell me, dad, that you and Frank Johnson and Lone Morgan and—everybody in the country are cowards, do you?"

Brit looked at her patiently. "No," he said in the tone of acknowledged defeat, "we ain't cowards, Raine. A man ain't a coward when he stands with his hands over his head. Most generally it's because some one's got the drop on 'im."

Lorraine would not accept that. "You think so, because you don't fight," she cried hotly. "No one is holding a gun at your head. Dad! I thought Westerners never quit. It's fight to the finish, always. Why, I've seen one man fight a whole outfit and win. He couldn't be beaten because he wouldn't give up. Why——"

[Pg 107]Brit gave her a tolerant glance. "Where'd you see all that, Raine?" He moved to the table picked up his pipe and knocked out the ashes on the stove hearth. His movements were those of an aging man,—yet Brit Hunter was