The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 25
ALMA was alone at a late breakfast, having risen unrefreshed from a few hours' sleep after two nights' vigil at Nearing's side. It was near noonday now; Mrs. Nearing, to whom this crisis in a long suspense seemed less terrible than the waiting for it to fall, was with her husband.
A quiet was over the house and premises, as if death already had fallen upon the master of that princely domain. The corrals were empty; old Manuel was the only man about the place.
The pursuit of Findlay and his rustlers had drawn the far-scattered neighbors away. Save for the doctor from the post, nobody had visited the ranch in two days. Alma never had felt the isolation and loneliness of it so sharply as now, separated, as they seemed to be, by this tragedy from all the world.
She knew that Nearing, wounded and at death's door as he lay, was under a shadow of suspicion which would formulate into definite challenges should be ever walk forth in the sun again. She knew it would be far better for him to die, in the disgrace that was only partly known, partly guessed, than live to answer to something she shuddered to think upon.
The front door, never locked in her recollection, closed softly. Thinking it was the doctor come from the post, Alma rose to receive him. Dale Findlay confronted her in the hall, where he had hesitated as if to listen, pistol in his hand.
Alma started back, her very life seeming to sink out of her in a cold and devastating fear. Desperation was lined deep in Findlay's gaunt, dark face; fear of the fate that waited him stood in his harried eyes.
"Who's here?" he whispered, his pistol thrust almost against her bosom.
"You've come in your proper character, like a housebreaker and sneaking thief!" she said, scorning him above her fear.
"Who's here?" he asked again, coming nearer, bending to whisper close to her ear.
"Two women and a dying man—fit subjects for your noble wrath, Mr. Findlay."
"Don't talk so loud!" he cautioned her. "Where's Nearing?"
"In his room. Have you come to kill him?"
Her scorn of him grew as her fear dissolved, although man nor woman ever had reason to fear Dale Findlay more than in that hour.
"You must hide me here till night," said Findlay, sharply. "Tell Manuel to put my horse away and hide my saddle."
"Do it yourself!" said she.
"You've got to hide me"
"I'll yell from the door you're here if anybody passes!"
"They'll never get me!" he declared.
"Is that the doctor, Alma?"
Mrs. Nearing appeared in the sufferer's door, speaking eagerly. She leaned into the hall, unable for a moment to grasp what was going forward.
"It's Mr. Findlay come back, begging us to hide him," Alma said.
"Hush!" Findlay commanded harshly.
"Oh, Dale, Dale! are you here again?" Mrs. Nearing hastened forward, confronting him without a tremor. "After all the sorrow and trouble you've brought on this house, do you dare come back to it again?"
"I just want to stay here till night, then I'll go. I promise you I'll never come back."
"Till night—stay till night? You—after you—you murderer!"
"Hide me!" he ordered, roughly, desperate now over the delay. "They may come any minute! Put me in Nearing's room—they'll not search it. Hurry, I tell you—take me to Nearing's room!"
"No!" Mrs. Nearing answered him, coldly, placing herself before him as if to dispute his passage along the hall. "There's no place where you can hide in this house. The long-suffering walls themselves would shout murder."
Findlay was at far greater disadvantage in the presence of these two women, who scorned and despised him, and seemed to fear him not at all, than he would have been if confronted by three armed men. He hesitated, in spite of his desperate need, not knowing which foot to advance.
"I look like the big black devil now," he said bitterly, "but I've never done any more than Hal Nearing would have done, has done, many a time in his honorable career. I skinned a man when I had him down. He could do it and go to the senate; I do it, and I'm a thief!"
"You were merciless, you drove him out of himself," Alma said.
"I only went after what I wanted," Findlay defended, ready to argue his justification even in his peril.
"Go!" Mrs. Nearing faced him, imperious in her old manner of stateliness—"or even a defenseless old woman may strike you down!"
"All right, by God! I'll go. But they'll never get me—I tell you now they'll never get me!"
"Hope! Who's there? Hope!"
Nearing's voice sounded from his room, weakly, but recognizable. Findlay started at the sound of it, seeming to set his ears like a listening horse. Mrs. Nearing hastened away, answering her husband's call softly as she went.
"The honorable senator!" Findlay sneered. "He seems a long way from dead yet." He reached suddenly, caught Alma by the wrist, and bent to speak his hot, savage words into her ear. "Go on—go to his room!" he ordered her. "I'm not going to hurt you—go on, I say!"
He enforced his command by the thrust of his pistol against her neck, twisting her arm roughly. Looking up into his face one moment, Alma saw that any appeal to humanity or honor would be wasted against the armor of his vindictive heart. She went ahead of him to Nearing's door.
"You've not got even the decency to die, you woman-killer!" Findlay said, looking down on Nearing from the door.
Mrs. Nearing attempted to close the door against this invasion, so terrifying to the wounded man. Findlay put his free hand against it, advancing his foot into the room. Alma moved to stand in front of him, and shield if she could at least the sight of his persecutor from the eyes of the dying man.
Findlay hung in the door like a wary beast before a pitfall. Mrs. Nearing was at the bedside, bending over her husband, trying to assure and calm him, when no assurance could comfort nor human effort bring serenity. It was evident in the terror of Nearing's face that he believed Findlay had come to kill him. He tried to shrink into his pillows, his face gray in the agony of his tortured soul.
Findlay motioned Alma aside with his pistol. She stood defiantly facing him, refusing to move.
"What do you owe him, to stand between him and me?" Findlay asked. "I'm not here to hurt him—nothing would suit me better than to see him get well. Stand out of the way!"
Mrs. Nearing rose from bending over her husband, her white, haggard face heartbreaking in its pathetic appeal.
"Dale, for humanity's sake, if there's any humanity in you, go away and let us have these last few hours together in peace!" she implored.
There was no sound from Nearing, not a groan, not the laboring of his slow breath. He lay with fixed eyes staring at Findlay, who leaned now to look past Alma, whom he pushed aside with his pistol.
"I ought to kill you, for poor old Kate," Findlay said slowly, a peculiar dragging softness in his voice, "but the worst thing I can wish you is to live."
Findlay looked with quick turning of the head, like a watchful eagle, into Alma's face, holding her eyes a moment with his compelling glance so long accustomed to beating down the wills of men.
"For pity's sake, Dale, let him die in peace!" Mrs. Nearing pleaded, putting out her hands in supplication, no more tears, it seemed, left in the fount of her misery to soften his unfeeling heart.
"You women cussed me out for a thief and a murderer a little while ago," Findlay said, looking earnestly into Alma's face, "and you stand here begging a chance for this man to die in honor and peace. When I leave here I'll go with a pack of men after me, with a long chance against me of swingin' somewhere on a cow-rope, but before I go I want to tell you something, Alma, and leave you to judge between that man and me."
Nearing lay gazing with bulging eyes already glazing over with the misty film of death. His breath came panting in him like a lizard's; one hand clenched the covers as if he held there in his painful desperation upon the margin of life, and only waited Findlay's last word to loose his hold and plunge into the abyss which the soul must cleave like a meteor in its hour, and wake on mortal ears no sound of its passing.
"Whatever he says will be a lie, Alma, out of his black, murderous heart!" Mrs. Nearing declared in sudden passion, rising from the wreckage of her life to this one last defense.
"There's the man," said Findlay, pointing with his pistol, "that sent me out to steal my first unbranded calf."
"What a cruel lie!" said Mrs. Nearing, her pale face suddenly aflame.
"There is the man," Findlay went on with his arraignment unmoved, "who would have betrayed me and double-crossed me, years after my cattle rustlin' under his able direction had made him rich, if I hadn't got something on him that put a padlock on his jaw."
Nearing was lifting himself up in his bed, his arms behind him, weak props in the current fast cutting away the sands of his life. Terrible he leaned there, like a convicted man come before the bar to hear the sentence of his death. His wife, waiting Findlay's words, did not see him; Alma, in helpless anguish between the force of condemnation and the slow-moving, merciless stroke of death, stared with horror on the grisly man who rose slowly and leaned so, waiting, waiting, in the shadow of the disgrace he had stayed so long.
"I promised him then I'd make him pay for his treason, for his attempt to sacrifice me to make himself safe. I promised him I'd cut him to the bone, I'd take the best he had, and then I'd put my heel down on him and mash him like a centipede. I lost the one thing I wanted most—if that damn' monkey-legged sailor had been a minute later—but that's all off. It wasn't the young Englishman up in Eagle Rock Canyon, Alma, like you and that tar-heeled Barrett think. I'll put you right. It was"
A hand fell sharply on Findlay's shoulder. He started, wheeling like a hawk on the wing. Barrett caught his pistol-arm as it swung round, holding the weapon pointed to the floor.
"Drop it, Findlay!"
"Drop it!" said Fred Grubb, pushing his shotgun against the rustler's ribs.
"Shoot! By God! I'll never swing!" Findlay defied them, struggling with Barrett to free his hand.
"There's nobody else; it's the showdown between you and me, Findlay. Outside!"
"Outside!" Fred Grubb echoed, reaching to draw Findlay's other pistol from the holster.
Nearing sank slowly back to his pillow, a relief in his face as in that of a man whose pardon comes as he stands under the gallows tree.
Barrett took charge of the rustler's guns. Findlay was reluctant to proceed toward the front door, evidently distrustful of Barrett's word.
"Go on!" Barrett ordered. "You'll get a man's chance—more than you gave me, more than you ought to have, around here bluffing a dying man!"
Findlay hesitated no longer. With the muzzle of Grubb's gun in his back he walked beside Barrett to the door. There Barrett passed out ahead of him, going on to the gate.
Findlay's horse stood in the shade of the cedar hedge, for the day was hot and the animal was weary and Worn, sweat-caked and dust-coated from its long flight. Barrett took the animal and started away with it, leading it by the bridle, his intention unknown and unguessed by the rustler and Fred Grubb, who followed into the road.
"Stop!" Fred ordered his prisoner when they stood in the middle of the highway.
Findlay obeyed, turning around slowly, with what indifference he could assume, to look sharply at the man who held him under his gun. There was a glitter in Findlay's dark eyes, a calculative desperation in his thin face, as he marked the distance growing between his captors.
Barrett led the horse across the road, out fifty yards or more into the open range, where he dropped the reins to the ground. He hung Findlay's double holster to the saddle horn, put one of the rustler's guns in it, and turned to leave, carrying Findlay's other pistol in his hand. His action said as plainly as words: "If you can do it, you're free to mount and ride."
Findlay was standing in the middle of the road, looking keenly in the direction of the hay-ranch. Suddenly he lifted his hand and exclaimed:
"Here they come!"
Fred Grubb jumped, turned his head quickly, like a horse startled from its grazing. Findlay seized the gun-barrel as Fred gatheredhis surprised wits and cut loose with both charges. The buckshot spent their force impotently upon the air, and the next moment Findlay, lithe and strong as a panther, wrenched the gun out of the wrangler's hands.
"Give me the shells!' he demanded, menacing Fred's head with the clubbed gun.
"Go to hell and git 'em!" said Fred, jamping back as Findlay swung the gun.
Barrett came running, shouting something to Findlay that neither of them seemed to understand. Fred had his pistol out, and was holding Findlay off with it, that in his eyes which told the rustler the once-despised wrangler had grown to be a man.
"You ain't my meat, but I'll kill you if you turn a hair!" said Fred. "There's your man! Go and meet him if you've got the guts in you!"
Barrett had reached the road, coming back to it some twenty yards or more from the point where Grubb and Findlay were playing their little preliminary scene in the greater tragedy to come. He tossed Findlay's gun that he had carried back with him into the road, and backed away, plainly laying down the terms of his challenge by his act.
"Look at that, you woman-bluffer!" said Fred. "He told you he'd give you a man's chance! If you're a man, go and take him up!"
Findlay threw down the shotgun and started on the run for his pistol in the road. Barrett backed off as he came, hand on his own gun. He did not draw it, it being his determination to take no advantage that might be charged to his discredit, should chance favor him in that fight. Not more than fifty feet lay between the two men when Findlay stopped to pick up his gun.
As Findlay stooped to pick up the gun, he scraped his left hand violently through the dust which padded the road thickly, raising a sudden and confusing cloud. Through this he fired, crouching low, his outline blurred to Barrett's sight. As he fired he scraped his hand through the dust again, adding to the obscuration of his Position.
While this impalpable barrier answered for the moment the purpose for which Findlay designed it in his crafty mind, it confused his own vision and aim as well. Barrett's first shots missed Findlay, and Findlay's shots went wildly down the road. Now Findlay, breaking from his cover of dust, dashed for his horse, firing back as he ran.
The man's admirable audacity and cunning moved in Barrett a feeling almost of admiration, but he did not spare his shots. Findlay fell within ten yards of his horse, his pistol whirling far out of his hand.
He lay a moment, face downward, as if dead. Barrett paused to reload, his last cartridge having been the one that told. As he was slipping a fresh charge into his cylinder, Findlay rose to his hands and knees and struggled on.
Barrett raised his pistol, held his aim for a moment, lowered it. He could not bring himself to slay a wounded, unarmed man, no matter how vicious, vengeful and unprincipled he might be.
Findlay crawled on, slower, slower; he weaved and staggered as if wounded in a vital spot. Barrett followed slowly. A little way from the horse Findlay sank down, his breast against the ground, his dark head lifted weakly, half turned, as if he expected the shot that would put a period to his pain. When he saw it did not come, he gathered his last strength, lifted himself again to his knees, and staggered: on.
When he reached the horse, which had not moved farther than to lift its ears at the sound of the firing, Findlay tried to reach up and grasp a stirrup. He felt for it weakly, his efforts failing; rose to his knees, groping as if his sight failed him, and reached for it again.
Watching him from a distance, Barrett felt a compassion for the man that swept away all further thought of vengeance or requital for the indignities and perils he had suffered at his hands. As for himself, the balance between them had been struck; Findlay was free to go his way. With this thought, which brightened over him like a burst of sunlight, Barrett put away his weapon, picked up Findlay's hat and pistol, and went on to where he struggled weakly, one hand grasping the stirrup, the other steadying him on the ground.
As Barrett approached him, Findlay's hold on the stirrup broke. His head drooped, his arms fell limply at his sides. He stood in that posture, upright on his knees. Barrett laid a hand on his shoulder to support him. Findlay rallied a moment, and looked up with failing eyes.
"His own brother, damn him!" he said, as if completing something a moment before unfinished on his tongue.
Barrett eased him to the ground, where, in his last agony, he turned his face to the noonday sky.
Fred Grubb came up, a hushed manner over him, walking on his toes, his pistol in his hand.
"He died game, he went his way like a man!" he said.
"You said the word," Barrett solemnly assented, bending to cover Findlay's face from the glare of heaven with his hat.
Barrett turned away, feeling that the past few minutes had aged him by twenty years. The day was bright around him, yet there seemed a mistiness in it, a gloom and solemn hush.
Alma was speeding toward him across the road. She was as hope and life coming where death had trampled but a few moments past. And she came straight to him, unfalteringly as a dove homing to its refuge out of the storm, and bent her head upon his breast, and clung to him and cried.
He led her away from that scene of desolation—for death is desolate, always, its atmosphere despairing and dark—to the gate beside the cedars, where he consoled and assured her and calmed her fears away. It was revealed to him then that he had not failed; that a strong man must wait for his hour, and strike; that it is the fool who hurls himself against the barbican of fate, to perish in the evil of his day.
"He's askin' for you, Ed," Fred Grubb said, coming softly to the porch, the awe of death still over him.
Nearing was propped against his pillows; the sweat of death was on his brow. He tried to lift his hand, as if to offer it to Barrett, as the young man came into the room. Barrett stopped just inside the door, and the trembling hand fell to the cover, where it lay opening and closing weakly, as if it struggled faintly to grasp again the slipping cable of life.
A moment Nearing fixed Barrett with his harassed eyes, in which the concentrated spark of his failing life seemed centered.
"Barrett, did he speak?" he asked, his voice hoarse and unfamiliar.
"No, Senator Nearing," Barrett answered, bowing his head as if he stood at prayer.