The Man From Laramie Page 8

  Inside room eleven Frank Darrah had slept soundly, and had awakened with an odd, heady sense of elation and triumph. He lay slackly, considering again the good fortune which ranked Barbara Kirby directly after Dave Waggoman as heir to Barb.

  In two short weeks now, after the wedding, Frank Darrah, too, would be heir to everything Alec Waggoman owned. The thought was heady wine.

  Frank idly listened to floor boards in the hall outside creak quietly under approaching footsteps. After a moment the footsteps turned back.

  Lazily Frank got up and lighted a cigar. He opened the door to the front gallery outside and stared contentedly at the bare baked plaza. A tall striding figure caught his eye. The blue shirt, denim pants, and black hat worn with a slight rake were vaguely familiar. That was the tramp teamster Lockhart, just emerged from this hotel.

  Frank recalled the footsteps halting near his door. That could have been Lockhart. Probably had been Lockhart. Which meant Lockhart’s interest a few minutes ago had been directly on Frank Darrah.

  Fear again belted Frank. Here was a stranger watching him. Frank turned back into the room and caught his white cambric shirt off the bedpost. Short minutes later he hurried downstairs, driven by the suspicious, undermining fear.

  Chapter Eleven

  At the lobby desk, Frank almost fearfully scanned the register. Will Lockhart’s boldly scrawled name seemed to dominate the smudged page. Lockhart had room three. That was in the rear corridor upstairs. So Lockhart had had no excuse to be in the front corridor.

  Frank’s lifted glance met the clerk’s curious stare. He wondered irritably if the man suspected his agitation. “What brings Lockhart to town?” he bluntly queried.

  He got a knowing smile. “A man in trouble with Barb’d sleep better here than in Coronado, wouldn’t he?” The clerk remembered, “Lockhart asked who might have mules for sale. I told him Gil Caxton.”

  “Lockhart does need mules,” Frank admitted grudgingly. Somewhat relieved he stepped from the lobby into the bar and put down a small whisky. But when he walked a block from the plaza and turned the corner there, the sight of freight wagons ahead brought back the uneasy foreboding.

  Two massive, dust-whitened freight wagons were backed against the loading-platform of the thick-walled adobe ware house Frank had under lease. Here freight for the Coronado store accumulated. Hides, grains, beans, wool, and other products bought outright or taken on account were often delivered to this more convenient ware house.

  Frank hurried up wooden steps to the end of the loading-platform. Stout wooden boxes were being unloaded. In the cool dim interior he found a growing pile of the boxes, each stenciled: Bolt Goods, I. Perdoux, New Orleans.

  The ware house clerk, a moonfaced, stolid, unimaginative man named Luther Hill, came over with a fistful of freight lists.

  “This lot, Mr. Darrah, is fifty cases bolt goods. Want all of it sent on to Coronado?”

  Frank said curtly, “Put the cases over there in the corner out of the way. Pile that sacked wool on top.”

  “Pepper,” Hill droned from his lists. “Sugar—hardware—couple cases shoes—”

  “Send all of that.”

  Frank eyed the New Orleans shipment with aversion as he turned away. Fifty cases. Each holding four new repeating rifles in factory grease. Only yesterday those battered, innocuous wooden boxes had represented immense profit with little risk. Now they threatened all the future.

  Then Frank saw Chris Boldt slouched lazily in a wired wood armchair by the office door, smoking a stogie, watching the unloading, watching Frank’s movements in narrow silence.

  Anger boiled in Frank as he went to the man and demanded under his breath, “What the devil are you doing here?”

  Chris Boldt got up effortlessly, a lithe man with a narrow mouth pinched at the corners and amber eyes bright with reckless slyness. His pants were slick-worn buckskin. Over his soiled calico shirt hung loosely a buckskin vest with hammered silver buttons. Boldt’s grin had thin meaning as he pulled the dark twisted Pittsburg stogie from his mouth.

  “Hill said you were in town. Saved me a trip to Coronado. Ain’t that the stuff being unloaded?”

  “Quiet!” Frank ordered savagely under his breath.

  Insolence Frank had suspected other times became a resentful gleam in Chris Boldt’s stare. A purple strawberry mark ran from the underside of Boldt’s lean jaw to the leathery neck. Now the purple deepened angrily. But Boldt spoke coolly.

  “You got the money in advance, like always. Climb off your high horse. Ain’t that the stuff?”

  Frank swallowed a groan. “We may be watched! Meet me in front of the hotel after dark!”

  Boldt eyed him curiously. “Man, you’re frightened. Who’d be watching?”

  Frank tasted bitterness now, and a quick hot hatred of the unmistakable contempt in Boldt’s tone. The man had been useful. This business of selling guns quietly had been Boldt’s furtive suggestion in the first place. But now Boldt had nothing much to lose. Frank Darrah could be ruined.

  “A man in New Orleans tried to trace this shipment,” Frank warned malignantly under his breath. “It could be happening here, too!”

  Boldt’s thin smile doubted that. He pulled on the stogie and asked through the smoke, “You know a man named Charley Yuill?”

  “No!”

  Boldt spat a shred of tobacco off his lip and gave Frank a sardonic look. “Yuill’s a breed. I stopped at his camp last night. Charley’d had moccasin visitors. I seen the sign when we pulled out this morning. Charley don’t say much, but he pried about what I been doin’ lately.”

  Frank said impatiently, “A half-breed you camped with last night, isn’t likely to have close connections with New Orleans. Now get out. I’ll see you after dark.”

  Charley Yuill was a patient man. From a distance Charley had watched Chris Bolt’s movements, not certain himself why he watched. Boldt was a rascal in a stretch of country where rascals were selling the tribesmen guns, was the way Charley instinctively summed it up.

  When Chris Boldt had finally walked with lazy purpose to Darrah’s ware house, Charley’s nostrils had twitched with satisfaction. Boldt’s second trip to the ware house had found freight wagons unloading.

  Watching from a distance, Charley saw Frank Darrah enter the ware house. When Chris Boldt emerged a few minutes later, Charley faded toward the plaza, wishing Will Lockhart were not so far away in Coronado. Starting now on his bare-back mule, Charley calculated he might reach Coronado around midnight.

  Will Lockhart suspected none of that. He guessed Charley Yuill now to be far out in the reservation country, and he leisurely walked the two blocks to Caxton’s Corrals, unkinking saddle-stiff muscles and validating his excuse for being here in Roxton Springs.

  He found a big, circular mule corral at Caxton’s holding some twenty head. Mostly castoff packers from the fort stables, Will’s practiced glance judged. He strolled to the adjoining feed corral and quickly noticed there a powerful, mouse-colored mule haltered at one of the feed boxes.

  Effortlessly Will climbed to a seat on the top corral pole and gazed thoughtfully at the mule Charley Yuill had ridden from the salt lagoons, and not toward Roxton Springs.

  A hostler in bib overalls was working inside the corral. Will called, “When did this mule come in?”

  The answer he got was from someone else outside the corral, coming up behind him. “Mon, the beastie dinna been there long.”

  Only Charley Yuill, quarter-Zuni, quarter-Apache, and the rest of Charley’s bizarre potpourri of bloods full Scot, could so blandly imitate his Scot father’s burr.

  Will swung around on the pole, grinning widely down at Charley’s dark-skinned face and flaming red whisker stubble.

  “You ran out of haggis,” Will guessed.

  Charley paused directly below Will, grinning, too, as he considered haggis, the Scottish dish of sheep’s liver and heart, onions, and fat, mixed with oatmeal and boiled in the sheep’s stomach.

 
“Mon, doff yer hat when ye speak of the noble haggis,” Charley reproved. “Only me now,” Charley confessed sheepishly, “I can’t stand the oatmeal in it.”

  Will’s shout of laughter followed as Charley climbed up beside him and hauled out tobacco sack and papers. “I met a cousin of my mother’s aunt on her mother’s side,” Charley said. “The Apach’ side.”

  “I won’t try to unravel that one,” Will decided.

  Charley smiled faintly and flared a match on the rail under his hip. He drew smoke deep and spoke thoughtfully. “Wasn’t no use going on. I heard enough. Apach’ talk says any broncho who wants a new gun can pay old Taite, the medicine man in Eagle Canyon, three hundred dollars Mex or American money, or melted-down gold or silver.”

  Will’s astounded whistle was barely audible. “That’s a fortune for a gun. A fortune for any wick-iup broncho to have.”

  “They don’t raid for buttons,” observed Charley. “A good man can accumulate. He pays old Taite an’ waits. Finally Taite sends word his medicine says go to some spot an’ the gun’ll be hidden there. Many have paid and are angry now because the guns haven’t come.” Charley spat reflectively. “Cap’n, I’ll guess a big raid is waitin’ on them new guns.”

  Will nodded. “Who has their money now?”

  Charley shrugged. “Old Taite is foxy. Never handles the guns. Everyone knows his big medicine is white men. But Taite won’t admit it.”

  “What if the guns aren’t delivered and Taite can’t return the money?” Will wondered.

  The thought made Charley chuckle. “Cap’n, there ain’t enough medicine from the Chiricahuas to the Jicarillas to uncork old Taite from a mess like that. He’d get drunk on tulapai an’ start his death song.” Then Charley added, “I was startin’ to Coronado to tell you about a man named Chris Boldt I sort of sided to town here.”

  Will listened closely as Charley outlined what he knew of Chris Boldt and the man’s two visits to Darrah’s ware house.

  “Darrah’s clerk in Coronado sent a message,” Will remembered. “It’ll do for an excuse to visit the ware house. See you at the hotel, Charley.”

  The freight wagons had departed. The heavy loading-doors were closed when Will reached the ware house. He entered the small corner office and Hill, the paunchy round-faced clerk turned from a wall desk and recognized him from the stop Will’s wagons had made here on the way to Coronado.

  “I’m looking for Darrah,” Will said casually, moving to the inner door.

  Hill moved more nimbly. His paunchy bulk blocked the door. “Darrah ain’t in there. No visitors. You, especially, Lockhart.”

  Will grinned at the man. “Why me, especially?”

  Neither friendly nor unfriendly, Hill said stolidly, “Darrah said you were in town but not workin’ for him now. Another fellow lookin’ for him sat around in there. Darrah raised hell. I ain’t askin’ for more.”

  “Where,” Will asked, “is Darrah?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “Tell Darrah I’ve a message from McGuire for him.”

  Hill shrugged, not really interested. “Where’ll you be?”

  Past the man’s bulky shoulder, through the door glass, Will could see that the wide loading-doors of the ware house were secured inside by heavy wooden bars dropped into strap-iron brackets. The back wall of the ware house, he recalled, had no door at all. At night a man would have to come through the office here. Then the shielded light of a small candle would do to examine the ware house contents. Will’s grin covered thoughts which would have jolted Luther Hill out of his stolid disinterest and driven Frank Darrah to sweating apprehension.

  “If Darrah wants the message,” Will decided blandly, “he can look for me.”

  Frank Darrah was not thinking of Will Lockhart as Frank drove a single horse livery buggy toward Fort Roxton on the yellow bluff west of town. Chris Boldt had left Frank raging and worried. The guns had been paid for, Boldt had bluntly warned, and Boldt wanted them for delivery quickly. Frank licked dry lips and cut the buggy whip hard across the horse’s flank. His business affairs were nicely solvent, Frank thought blackly, but always his expanding moves demanded more cash. It was impossible now to return the money quickly to Boldt.

  Frank relieved helpless frustration by slashing the trotting horse into a sweating gallop. The sun was a molten ball beyond the high streaming flag of the fort when the blowing horse reached the sentry gate. Frank stated his business and was waved on in.

  Roxton parade ground was a sweep of pounded dusty earth around which the low adobe structures of the fort ranged in drab simplicity.

  A handful of troopers in blue garrison caps loafed in front of the long barracks line and stared silently as the sweating livery horse trotted clumsily past. Frank skirted the north end of the parade ground and eyed with critical interest several enlisted men’s wives taking in wash from the festooned clotheslines behind tub row. He noted that the sutler’s was filling up with end-of-the-day business, and decided to check such of the sutler’s needs as he could supply.

  Then, ahead, he saw a square-shouldered, solid figure emerge from the adjutant’s building and start toward officer’s row. “Captain Wyman!” Frank called.

  Wyman swung about at the edge of the duck-boards, frowning at this prospect of more business at the fag end of a blistering day. Frank pulled up abreast and got out quickly, drawing on his best business cordiality for Wyman, the post quartermaster.

  “Is it too late, Captain, to trouble you for some New York exchange?”

  “How much, Mr. Darrah?”

  “I’ve three thousand in greenbacks.”

  “I can use it,” Captain Wyman admitted reluctantly.

  Frank cynically reflected that Wyman would probably pursue him to the sentry gate for that much currency. The army always needed paper money for payrolls and local use. Merchants like himself, on the other hand, wished to avoid shipping cash money to the east in settlement of supply accounts. Quartermasters like Wyman were usually pleased to take the cash and issue mailable drafts against eastern points.

  Wyman waved Frank ahead of him into the large front office of the adjutant’s building where non-commissioned men still bent over paper work at tables and desks. In his office opening off the back of the room, Wyman unlocked his roll-top desk, indicated an adjoining chair, and turned to the iron safe.

  Wyman’s face was red and solid. His wheat-colored mustache was short and crisp with a hint of carefully tended vanity. Now that he was in for it, Wyman was cordial enough as he turned back to his desk with a pad of blank drafts.

  He took up the thick wad of greenbacks Frank had placed on the desk. Rapidly, efficiently, Wyman ran through the count. “Three thousand,” Wyman agreed. He reached for a pen and rapidly filled out the draft. He signed with a flourish, inspected the draft critically, and handed it to Frank.

  “Thanks, Captain.” Frank waved the slip of paper gently to dry the ink. “Isn’t it about time for the army to invite bids on salt for the various forts?”

  “Can’t say. Handled from Santa Fe, you know.”

  “You frequently contact Santa Fe,” Frank ventured pleasantly. “Could you mention I’ve leased the salt lagoons and now control about all the salt in this part of the Territory?”

  Captain Wyman produced a plain white handkerchief and dried the ends of his mustache. His straw-colored eyebrows had lifted slightly. For a moment as he sat, handkerchief in hand, Wyman’s slight smile had a disillusioned knowledge.

  “The price of salt, I take it, Mr. Darrah, will advance somewhat,” was Wyman’s mildly ironic guess.

  “Slightly. I’ll be put to considerable expense.”

  Wyman’s squint stopped the ghost of an admiring smile. “Not everyone would have thought of it,” Wyman murmured. “Ordinary salt. But everyone must have it. The cattle and sheep men, miners, cooks—everyone. Even the Indians. And freighting it in is expensive. How high can a man squeeze the price?”

  Frank’s own slight smile was a
lmost smug. Wyman, in his way, was a business man, too, appreciating a clever move. Inserting the draft into his black leather wallet, Frank suggested casually, “A sheep or cattle man trading with one of my competitors, might be glad to turn his trade to me when assured of plentiful salt at a reasonable price.”

  Softly Wyman said, “I’ll be damned! Hadn’t occurred to me. For nothing or an average profit, you club business your way.”

  Frank’s correction was completely, smugly righteous. “Call it an inducement to trade with me.”

  Wyman’s grim humor was not diverted. “You’ll have your little joke, I see. But—try inducing too much trade, or what ever you call your salt squeeze, and I foresee ill will and perhaps violence. Which, no doubt, you are prepared to meet.”

  “I am,” Frank said calmly.

  Captain Wyman studied him with an odd, intent look and said thoughtfully, “Since you’re leasing the salt lakes, what d’you know about a man named Lockhart who was digging salt there several days ago?”

  Frank was startled. “Lockhart hauled some freight for me. Took his wagons to the lagoons and met trouble. Barb men, who controlled the lagoons until yesterday, shot Lockhart’s mules and burned his wagons.”

  “But who is this Lockhart? Where’s he from?” Wyman rubbed a stubby forefinger, under his crisp mustache, frowning over the finger at Frank. “Lieutenant Evans took a small patrol that way and saw the trouble. And Evans rode in today with an outlandish idea this man Lockhart is a Captain Lockhart, supposedly on duty on the upper Missouri.”

  Frank realized he had gone rigid against the straight back of the chair. The hot office had become unbearably oppressive. He tried to relax. It took an effort to force questions through the thickness in his throat.

  “Why should an army captain from one of the northern forts be running his own tramp freight wagons around here? And be fighting on the street in Coronado like a saloon roughneck!”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Can’t think of a reason,” Captain Wyman agreed. “Someone in the bachelor’s mess remembered this Captain Lockhart had a brother killed last year in the Dutch Canyon ambush. Evans has a fantastic idea this Lockhart at the salt lakes must be the surviving brother.”