Trouble Shooter (Musaicum Vintage Western) - Ernest Haycox

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the grade and found a harder footing. The way was gently downward toward a creek that hit them on their boots when they forded. Laralnie River, directly on the left, sent its swollen racket through the black. Beyond, the high, rolling ridges ran westward toward Fort Steele on the Platte; still beyond lay the flatness of the Red Desert, bleak by winter and summer. Far over was the Green River crossing and farther still the Wasatch range waited. It was five hundred miles to Salt Lake. Somewhere out on the Nevada desert this same brawling night the bonfires of the Central were burning their crimson holes through the night, beside an end of track pointed east.

      Overmile said: "What in hell is she doin' with Campeaux?"

      Peace bowed his head against the drive of the rain. The wind's chilliness isolated him, it sharpened his thinking. Eileen's dress had been a soft gray and tight around her waist. She brought tranquility with her, whatever she was. The softness and the calm of that room remained with him, not to soothe him now but to bring vividly back the heavy emotion of touching something that he could not hold, of possessing something that he would lose. Her voice, he thought, had been uncertain in the hallway's darkness. She had relented, to kiss him; it was as near surrender as she could ever come. His life ran a different way, his days were full of heat and trouble. He could not order them otherwise and he would not order them otherwise; yet the controlling desire of his life lay back in Cheyenne. He saw no solution, he could think of none, and his mind grew weary with the struggle.

      They turned into the Fort Sanders road. A low line of buildings sat in scattered shape, marked only by faint lights hurning. A sentry wheeled from the darkness, palms slapping curtly on his gun. "Halt! Who's there?"

      "Frank Peace—and party."

      "Halt, Frank Peace and party. Sergeant of the guard—post number one!"

      A lantern bobbed out of the guardhouse hard by, drawing the slanted rain against it. The sergeant came on and lifted the lantern above his head, revealing his own long, heavy-boned jaw. Above a still mustache a pair of old soldier's eyes showed a sad, surly gleam.

      "Hello, Malloy. We're putting up."

      "Come right ahead, Mr. Peace. You'll want Lieutenant Millard."

      "Not till morning, Malloy."

      They splashed beyond the guardhouse and got down, Malloy called back: "Egan, take the hawrrses. You'll go to the same house, Mister Peace. That one to left of General Gibbon's."

      Egan came. But Overmile was restless and he had changed his mind. He got into the saddle again. He said to Peace, "I'll be back after a while."

      "Laramie?"

      "Yeah," said Overmile, and turned away.

      The others walked down the dark line of buildings, skirted a picket fence and entered a house beyond, Sergeant Malloy had followed them; he lighted a lamp and went out again. Phil Morgan said: "Overmile's a fool."

      "He's twenty-four years old," grunted Peace.

      Within five minutes they were bunked down, Rain drummed along the house. A sentry called from a distant corner of the post, and that echo came in relays all the way to the guard post. Peace dragged a hand across his face. He stared toward a ceiling he couldn't see, remembering Eileen as she held to him on the dark stairway, landing.

      Overmile's voice woke him, Overmile was standing beside the bed, vague in the chilly pitch-dark. "Frank. She's at the hotel in Laramie. Damn Morgan for thinkin' different."

      IV

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      Peace left Fort Sanders early the next morning with Lieutenant Archie Millard and six troopers, bound south for the old Virginia Dale stage station, Overmile went along, but Morgan decided to wait for Peace in Laramie.

      There was a sun shining and a soft wind running out of the west. All the Laramie plain was wet and fresh, with its occasional patches of forage grass turned brilliantly green. Northward and eastward the land rose into the rolling, broken contours of the Black Hills; off to the south lay the heavy peaks of the Medicine Bow range. Less than a mile ahead of them the stacks of the Union's construction engines funneled up a black smoke.

      "Mormon Charley will be there all right," said Millard. "But I doubt if you'll get any help out of him. He doesn't like to see the road cross this country."

      "Talked with him recently?" asked Peace.

      Millard said: "I was down that way last week."

      Overmile cast Peace a glance of amused understanding.

      Millard caught that and flushed a little. He was an ideal figure, hale and robust and ruddy with the typical cavalryman's flair for the picturesque. Beneath a rakish hat the edges of his hair showed a tawny color and his long mustache was of the same shade, It was easy for him to blush, his complexion being as fair as a woman's; but he had a strong, sweeping chin. "Damn you, Leach," he muttered.

      "Well," drawled Overmile, "how is the mountain beauty?"

      "We're not discussing that," said Millard briefly.

      They trotted brisklyalong the open plain, passing a solid stream of six-mule freighters lumbering from end of track toward Laramie and toward Salt Lake. The yellow embankment of the right of way was directly beside them, on which Casement's Irishmen were dropping ties methodically, They came to a small rise and stopped at Peace's command near the end of steel, For the space of a quarter mile here Casement's ambulating construction town littered the plain—his enormous portable warehouse, his collapsible shops, his great horse-and-mule compounds. The boarding train lay on a siding, the drying clothes of the Irish Paddies hanging out from bunk cars like so much festival bunting. A solid string of supply trains stood on the main line, waiting their turn to feed the endless line of freighting wagons bound away for the grading camps and bridge crews flung like a thin skirmish line fifty and a hundred miles ahead.

      A thousand men worked at this immediate spot, the interplay of all that human traffic setting up a restless, ant-like scene of confusion under the sun. In the foreground end of track surged forward thirty feet at a time, like a dull brown inchworm.

      Peace watched that operation with a full, satisfying interest. An engine pushed a load of rails forward, dumping them in an avalanche of sound. Men lifted these rails to a small iron truck pulled by a single white horse. The horse, disciplined in this business all the way from Fremont, heaved forward and came on at a dead gallop to the exact end of track. What followed was smooth and fast. The steel gang trotted to the truck, four men to each rail—lifted two rails and ran them forward. A foreman yelled, "Down!" and the steel clanged on the waiting ties. The gauger knelt, and jumped aside; the spikers swung their sledges with a battering rhythm and withdrew; the bolters bent over and bent back, and the white horse lunged on to the new end of track. In the interval the Union Pacific moved toward Laramie as fast as a man might comfortably walk.

      "Pretty," said Lieutenant Millard.

      The little column of men pushed forward, leaving behind the crack of all those sledges, the groaning of the freighters, the lash of men's strident voices, and the nervous chuffing of the engines. A trail led up the gentle grade in the direction of Sherman Summit, soon turning aside to enter a narrow pass pointing toward the peaks of the Medicine Bow. The last echo of the engines died behind and then there was only a long, riding calm, with the soft squeal of leather breaking the drone of a warming day. Millard's men sat relaxed in their saddles, all old troopers whose skins were as weathered as the leather gear beneath them. Their Spencer carbines lay tucked in saddle boots; their revolvers hung at their hips, and they kept watching the higher ground around them with a taciturn attention. Later in the morning they stopped to roll their coats and went on again in shirt sleeves.

      Millard said: "We got a wire from Sidney this morning. A band of Dog soldiers of the Sioux tribe raided Elm Creek Station and killed five section hands."

      "Bad year coming up," said Peace.

      "How's Eileen?" asked

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