Blasingame wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve.
“Sounds like the one, all right. Which direction was he headed?”
“East,” Jeff said casually. “Due east.”
As he said it, he shot a glance at Amy, stopping the words that were on her lips.
“Thanks, Blaine,” the marshal said, and the riders began pulling their horses around. “He won't get away from us now.”
“Wait!” Amy called. But she was too late. The marshal and his posse were pounding back to the east and her voice was lost in the thunder of hoofs. She fixed Jeff with her flashing eyes. “The man we saw was headed west! You know he was!”
She hardly recognized the man beside her as the Jeff Blaine she had ridden with from Plainsville. “There are a lot of gray horses in Texas,” he said coldly. “Maybe he was the wrong man.”
“But what if he was the right man? What if he's a killer?”
Jeff took her arm and tried to make his voice gentle. “Amy, I'm not the law; that's Elec's job. But remember that I saw them catch the wrong man once and try to bang him. I'm not going to help them catch another one.”
Amy felt futility well up inside her, knowing that nothing she could say would erase his bitterness. An uneasy wall built up between them as the buggy rolled again toward Plainsville. “Jeff,” she said at last, “my father talked to me today. He asked me not to see you again.”
Jeff shot her a glance, waiting for her to go on.
“Maybe he was right,” she said, and he held his silence.
Chapter Thirteen
THE NAME THE STRANGER gave was Bill Somerson; he had arrived in Plainsville on the noon mail train the day before. Very little was know about him except that he had come well heeled, and was looking for action at Bert Surratt's poker tables. With the wisdom of hindsight, Surratt confessed later that Somerson had a mean look to him and he wasn't surprised when Phil Costain caught him with a holdout up his sleeve. After the holdout discovery, the stranger shot Costain in the groin, stole the gray from the hitch rack outside the saloon and fogged it out of town. The most surprising thing, the saloonkeeper claimed, was that Costain was still alive to tell it.
Jeff heard the story when he returned from Stone Ridge shortly before sundown. The loafers around the livery barn were full of it when he turned in his hired rig.
To Jeff, it was just another shooting. They were not rare in Plainsville these days. He was still mad at himself for not patching up the fight with Amy before letting her out at her house. But like mules, both of them had refused to give, and they had parted in anger.
If she can't understand the reasons I have for hating this town, he told himself, maybe it's just as well I find it out now.
But he didn't believe it. As he walked toward town from the livery barn, he felt his anger leaving him, the ache of loneliness pulling at his nerves. He tramped the plank walk to the Paradise eating house and made his supper on stew and sourdough bread. He had the thought to go back to the Wintworth house and make it up with her, but he didn't know what to say. Anyway, Ford would probably want to put in his own word and make him madder than he already was.
Well, he told himself, she'll get over it.
But this time he wondered. He had not liked the look of hurt in her eyes, the coldness with which she had drawn away from him. He dropped some silver on the counter and walked out of the restaurant.
The sun had died behind the lip of the prairie; lamps and lanterns were being lighted, and there was the familiar smell of woodsmoke in the air. Jeff's lonesomeness and discontent thrived in the gathering dusk.
He stood in front of the Paradise for a while, watching a group of Snake hands ride whooping in from the north. Jeff envied them their gaiety, the sense of freedom that was always with them. When he first left the Sewell house he had thought to get on as a cowhand with one of the big outfits, as Nathan had done so long ago. But the common hand's pay of six bits a day and chuck did not appeal to him—he had learned quickly that he could do much better at Surratt's gambling tables,.
But his boyhood notion of the cowhand's life was strong within him, and he could still smile at their loud talk, their vanity and swagger. He noted that some of the hands were no older than himself, eighteen or nineteen at the most. In this country they were not looked upon as boys.
The cowhands disappeared into the new Green House saloon, and Jeff lingered for a few minutes longer in front of the Paradise. The pungent smell of woodsmoke brought back memories. On the slope to the east of town he could see the straggling barefoot “cowboys” bringing in the family cows. Not long ago he had been one of them, a tow-headed kid with hardly a care in the world. “The sight of Wirt Sewell on the other side of the street brought his bitterness into sharp focus. Coming out of Baxter's store, Wirt looked old and somehow shrunken, but he wrung no pity from Jeff Blaine. The very sight of Wirt could send him into a rage, and now Jeff turned stiffly and faced in the other direction so he wouldn't have to look at him.
Jeff had heard with bitter pleasure how Wirt's tin shop was going to ruin. That was the town's way of punishing Beulah for making a fool of it. Even the grangers were canceling their orders, sending all the way to Landow for their windmills and water tanks and tin piping. They said it was only a matter of time before he went broke and would be forced to leave Plainsville; they said he spent his days piddling with buckets and tubs which nobody would buy.
Not until it was too late to escape did Jeff realize that Wirt had crossed the street and was coming toward him. He felt something inside him go cold and hard as Wirt said, “Jeff, won't you talk to me?”
Jeff turned angrily and faced a sagging, defeated shadow of a man. He said tightly, “We have nothing to talk about.”
“Jeff, can't you ever forgive us?”
He said shortly, “No!”
Wirt's face was flabby and blank. “I didn't think you would. But I had to ask. I'm not standing up for what Beulah did—it was a terrible thing. It was wrong—she knows it now—but at the time she thought it was the best thing for you. That's why she did it, Jeff.”
Jeff laughed harshly. “Is that what she's telling people?”
Wirt shrugged wearily. “She tells them nothing. She hasn't seen anybody since you left us. She won't talk—not even to me.” Nervously, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Your Aunt Beulah's sick, Jeff. She's shut herself up as if she was dead and that house was her tomb. If you'd just go over and see her—”
“But I won't,” Jeff said cruelly. “One day my pa will come back to Plainsville, and if he wants to forgive her, that's his business. But I never will!”
Wirt shrunk before the hate in Jeff's eyes. His head dropped, and after a moment he shuffled back across the street.
Jeff felt his nerves quiver. He turned on his heel and walked stiffly toward Bert Surratt's.