Saddle and Ride: Western Classics - Boxed Set - Ernest Haycox

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left her. "I have heard the word before, always unpleasantly. Mack, do you know what I'd do if I were you? I believe I'd propose to the Melotte girl—the one who always brings you chocolate at night. So long." She was gone from the room, leaving Moran somehow dissatisfied with her departure. The touch of her hand had been cool, reassuring, with a brisk friendliness to it. Mack had never known a woman, who without trying to play the part of a good fellow among men, was as little self-conscious of her sex. She made a brave, contained figure; with always a reserve in her eyes that held others away. Only once had that reserve dropped to give another some sight of the wistful and lonely hunger of her heart.

      She returned to town and stopped a moment at the stable. A little later she came out of the hotel with her traveling bag and stepped into a waiting rig. The driver whipped away through the graying afternoon. Fifteen miles to the south she got off at a lonely flag stop surrounded by the immensity of the desert night and spoke to the agent drowsing over his keys. Perhaps an hour later the agent built a bonfire of paper in the middle of the track and stopped an east-bound train. The girl got aboard and sat very quietly in one end of a day coach while the wheels made their swift tat-a-tat-tat rhythm along the rails. Presently they were climbing through a gorge with the trucks howling to the curves; and around midnight or a little later she left the train at another junction point, beyond the lowering outline of the Roaring Horse range. A six-horse stage waited beside the tracks with some long-faced gilded lettering hinting at the name of a hostelry. She was the only passenger, and the driver, peering through the gloom, saw nothing but the blur of her face.

      "It's Gay Thatcher, John," said she, closing the coach door.

      "Howdy, ma'am! Lordamighty, glad to see yuh again! Say, it's cold. You better take my laprobe."

      "No, thanks."

      The coach rolled off, team stretching to an even gait. She drowsed and woke, and drowsed again while the clumsy vehicle pitched along the uneven road. And always there was in her mind the memory of something fine and pleasant; once she repeated a name very softly to herself. "Jim Chaffee." And added: "Gentleman." Before dawn the coach brought her down the main street of Bannock City. She ate breakfast by the smoky kerosene lamp of an all-night restaurant and went directly to the stable. It was a misty daylight before she left town, bundled up in another rig. In the interval she talked to the clerk of the hotel and to the night marshal, asking only one question of each. And then she was away, leaving behind her the news of her passage. The men who had seen her said nothing at all. But there was one woman in the hotel—the wife of the clerk—who had risen early and who had caught a moment's glimpse of the girl. And this woman spoke with a bitter acid in her words.

      "So that Thatcher girl is back again. But she ain't got courage enough to wait until folks can see her brazen face by plain day."

      The clerk was sleepy and therefore he made a tactical error. "Oh, she's all right."

      "You hush! She always could pull the wool over the eyes of menfolk. Don't start that argument again. It's been dead five years. It's better left that way. She ought to have the decency to keep wide of this valley."

      XV. TURBULENCE

       Table of Contents

      Thirty-four Pass lay hard locked in the grip of the storm. For almost a week daylight had been little more than a gray and weaving half light. Sight of the distant valley was blotted out; even the timber line was lost somewhere down the driving mists. Twenty feet below the drifts lay the trail, and the wind, booming across these drifts, ripped high sprays of snow upward and sent them sheeting against the summit cabin, like tall waves smashing across a stormy sea. A bitter and bleak world it was, with the peaks obscured and enshrouded, and sending earthward the errie scream of the gale as it sheered the sharp points; a world of torturing cold and uneasy loneliness. Even the cabin, perched on a ledge above the trail, was banked to the eaves. Inside, a fire burned, and the heat formed layers of thawed ice against the panes, adding to the interior darkness. Water dripped through the roof; wind and snow sifted between every minute interstice. Jim Chaffee sat hugging the stove and studied the dwindling pile of wood.

      "I always figured Purgatory was a hot place," he muttered. "But I reckon I must have been mistaken. If this ain't hell's back door then I'm a monkey's lineal cousin."

      One foot was bare and soaking in a pan of hot snow water. He lifted the member with patient care and ran a thumb around a swollen ankle bone. "No use tryin' to walk on that for another week. It won't hold me up none before. Then what? In a week I won't have energy enough to open that door. Fact is, I'm awful gant right now. Chaffee, old horse, if you got a brain, now is the time to use it. If I stay I starve. If I try to crawl out I freeze. From these simple facts let us proceed somewhere."

      A fat and sedentary man could have lived on the strength stored in his surplus tissues these five monotonous days. Jim Chaffee was not fat, nor never had been anything else than muscularly thin. And he always had lived the kind of a life that absorbed the energy of each meal and left none for storing away. He was feeding on his life's vitality, slowly breaking down the fine machinery of his body. After the horse had thrown him he had crawled better than one mile along the gathering darkness to the cabin. The place was just as some itinerant trapper had left it—a pile of wood by the stove, a half-dozen battered utensils hung along the wall. But excepting a rind of bacon as hard as a rock and an empty flour sack there was nothing left to eat in the cupboard. During the first two days he considered himself absolutely destitute of food. After that an empty stomach jogged his wits and he experimented. He filled a lard pail with water. Turning the flour sack inside out he took his pocket knife and scraped away the gray film of flour left in the seams. This went into the pail of water. After it went the bacon rind. He stoked the stove and let the mixture boil of an hour.

      The lard can smelled bad to begin with, the bacon rind was not easy to look at. "However, it's nourishment, ain't it?" he consoled himself, and poured out a small portion of the brew. He had always heard that a starving man could eat anything and say that it was as good as a king's dish. The first drink of this rancid, anemic soup convinced him that was gross error. Nothing in all his mature experience tasted half as horrible. He choked down the revolt of his stomach and optimistically took his pulse. Maybe it was the last jog of nourishment in the bacon rind and flour that made him feel a kind of glow. Maybe it was just the hot water, maybe it was only the excitement of hope. All in all, it was a poor experiment. In fact, it seemed to make matters worse, for the hot water further aggravated the sensation of being as hollow as a drum. He drank a little more on the third day. But on the fourth day disgust took him and he threw can and contents across the room. "I'd as lief eat dead rats."

      Meanwhile, the snowdrift piled higher around the cabin, and he knew that unless he kept some sort of an alley cleared from the door the time would come when he couldn't get out, as weak as he was becoming. On hands and knees he crawled across the room and opened the door, to face a solid wall of snow. Very patiently he burrowed a tunnel upward through it, working in the manner of a mole. He reached daylight and looked into a dim, bleak world blasted by the bitter wind; he heard the shrill and weird wailing of the peaks lost above the pall. A minute or two of this was ample. He slid back into the cabin and built a stronger fire to thaw the frozen marrow of his bones.

      By the fifth day he had used all of the wood. The next fuel was the bunk. The posts and the lodgepole stringers went into the stove. All that was then left was the cupboard, and he was afraid that once the cupboard came down more rifts of the cabin wall would be uncovered there. Debating over this, the fire died and the snow water in the pan cooled. He pulled on his sock and shoe and rose to his one good foot.

      "Got to keep the fire burnin'," said he with a spry cheerfulness. "While I'm warm I might as well be good an' warm. When I'm cold it won't make no difference, anyhow. Mister Cupboard, come to your uncle."

      The cupboard was only a dry-goods box nailed to the wall. He hopped over to it and gripped the edges, hauling downward with his weight. The cupboard gave slightly and resisted. Jim Chaffee let his arm fall; and an expression of shocked surprise flickered across his slim face. Two ten penny nails—nothing more—anchored that box.

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