Free Winds Blow West Read online

  He saw that reaction had gripped her. She was trembling and gnawing at her lips, which were bloodless. Just a slip of a girl, but she had been magnificent. Martell told her so.

  “In my time I’ve seen some exhibitions of cold nerve. I never saw anything to equal yours. I don’t know yet how you took the rig through, ma’am.”

  Perhaps his words or the fervor of his tone did it. Or maybe it was the quick recovery of sturdy youth and courage. At any rate, color swept back to her softly suntanned cheeks, and the strain about her lips softened. She turned her head and the full, direct clarity of her eyes searched him.

  “What was the trouble about?”

  “I happen to be a saddle man,” said Martell quietly, only partially covering the bitterness in his voice. “As such, every ham-footed settler I’ve run across seems to feel that I’m a pin game, to be cursed and snarled at and pushed around. I went into that place quietly, minding my own business, wanting only to ask a couple of questions about some people I’m trying to locate. Some settlers started whipsawing me and just wouldn’t let me out without a fight. It was pretty rough in there.” He scrubbed the back of his hand across his crimsoned lips and unconsciously lifted his left arm to look at it. Seeping blood was sliming all down across the back of his left hand.

  The girl cried out softly.

  “Yeah,” said Martell. “I’m spilling a little blood. Not of much account. One of that settler crowd had a knife. He got a little of me, but not too deep. So now I’ll thank you again and quit bothering you, ma’am. I got a horse back in town I’ve got to get.”

  He started to get out of the wagon, but the girl would have none of it. “You’ll not go back! That crowd … they’d … they’d …!”

  Martell smiled bleakly. “With a little room to move around in and a chance to watch my back, I’m not afraid of that gang. And I can’t leave my bronc’. I think a lot of him. And a saddle man afoot is a poor specimen.”

  “A saddle man thinking like an idiot is worse!” exploded the girl. “What sense was there in getting you out of town if you intend to go right back? So, you’ll not go. You’ll come right along to camp with me, where Aunt Lucy can fix up that wound of yours. I’d never forgive myself if I allowed you to go back now.”

  “But my bronc’?” argued Martell. “Old Inky will be missing me. I’ve got to get him.”

  “Your horse will be taken care of, too,” the girl declared. “We’re getting out of here!”

  She let the fretting broncos go again, and the rolling prairie swept to meet them, while all the time the long, jagged shadow of team and wagon raced out ahead of them, lengthening steadily as the sun dropped lower and lower behind them.

  The sun lost itself in an exploding bomb of splendor beyond the far rim of the world, and the anxiously waiting tide of shadow took over, laying banners of blue haze to cool the earth. North, the Lodestone Mountains laid a wide, darkening circle against the sky. In the incredibly far southern distances, seeming with little more substance than a line of cloud, the Selkirks lifted, lonely. And Bruce Martell, looking at it all and at the girl beside him, pondered the strangeness of one of the fullest days of his life.

  Dusk had become dark when the spring wagon spun to a stop beside a settler wagon and a settler fire, from the radiance of which a gaunt figure stepped warily. The girl’s call rang, clear and confident.

  “Ezra, this is Tracy Carling. Would you do me a big favor?”

  The gaunt figure came plodding out to the spring wagon. “Why, youngster,” came a deep voice, “you know I will. What is it? Who’s that ridin’ with you? You were alone, goin’ into town.”

  The settler stopped beside the wagon, peered up at Martell and the girl. “Can’t be your Uncle Brink. He’s away, back to War Lance Creek. That hat … why this feller is a saddle man!”

  “That’s right,” said Martell gravely. “The name is Bruce Martell.”

  He sensed the swift bristling of this gaunt settler, but the girl, speaking swiftly, began to explain. “So the only way I could get him to come along with me was to promise his horse would be taken care of. You told me this morning you were going into town tonight, Ezra. You could get Mister Martell’s horse and bring it back with you.”

  “I could,” admitted the settler, “though I ain’t anxious to favor no saddle man, not with things goin’ the way they are. Jason Spelle was by about sundown, givin’ me the news. That Rockin’ A crowd are gettin’ rougher all the time with us settler folks.” Ezra Banks shot a hard, abrupt question at Martell. “You ridin’ for Asbell?”

  “No. I’m on my own. Trying to locate my kid brother and the settler outfit he’s with.”

  “A ridin’ man’s a ridin’ man,” grumbled Ezra Banks. “Still and all, long as Miss Tracy is askin’ it of me … where’s this horse of yours and what’s it look like?”

  “A black gelding,” said Martell. “A big horse. Tied to the corral fence in back of the general store. Saddle cantle is stamped with three stars, and there’s a Winchester rifle slung to the rig.”

  “A’right,” said Ezra Banks. “If the horse is still there, I’ll bring it along. Girl, you better skedaddle. Your Aunt Lucy will be worryin’ about you, though she’s got company. Jason Spelle said he probably would be takin’ the evenin’ meal with you folks. And if you want my advice, young lady, you won’t be pickin’ up and totin’ home every stray critter you run across. ’Specially ridin’ men.”

  Ezra Banks turned and plodded back to his fire.

  The wagon rolled on. Martell heard the girl’s soft laughter. “Ezra is as crusty as an overdone loaf of bread,” she said. “But his heart is pure gold and in the right place.”

  Within another half mile they topped still another roll of the prairie and dropped down into a wide swale that lay beyond. Here was another camp, its fire spiking the dark with ruddy cheer. The girl brought the spring wagon to a scudding stop.

  “All safe and accounted for, Aunt Lucy!” she called cheerily. “Sorry I was late, but it couldn’t be helped.”

  A man and woman stood beside the flames. The woman’s hair had begun to whiten, but the remnants of what had been a vivid girlhood beauty still touched her with graciousness. Her eyes were very fine and now they softened with relief.

  “Child,” she answered, “I’d begun to worry. Who is that with you?”

  Martell was abruptly uncomfortable. It had been growing on him in the past few minutes. Always a self-sufficient sort, to come trailing thus into a strange camp—just to get a skimpy knife wound tended—struck him as an embarrassing weakness. He wished now that he’d stuck to his first intention and gone back after his horse and taken care of his own troubles in his own way. But somehow, at the time, the girl’s ideas had seemed to make sense.

  He stepped down from the spring wagon and followed the girl over to the fire.

  “This is Mister Martell, Aunt Lucy,” the girl explained. “It’s quite a story and I’ll tell you all about it later. The main thing just now is a wound that must be tended. There was a ruckus in town and some stupid animal used a knife.”

  “Well, my goodness gracious sakes alive!” exclaimed Aunt Lucy. “You’re nothing if not abrupt, child.” But her fine eyes swung with quick sympathy, searching Martell’s face. The firelight touched his left arm and hand, and she saw the dark sogginess of his jumper and the still-seeping scarlet on his hand. “Why,” she cried, “you are wounded!”

  “Ma’am,” said Martell gravely, “I’m afraid there’s a lot of fuss being made about little. It’s only a scratch. I don’t want to bother—”

  But Aunt Lucy, her first astonishment over, was already in action.

  “You sit right by this fire, sir. Tracy girl, my medicine kit and my big scissors. Jason, push that water pot deeper into the fire. My gracious. Just a scratch, the man says. And here’s his sleeve all soggy with blood.”

 
Aunt Lucy helped Martell out of his jumper. With her scissors she cut away his soggy shirt sleeve and clucked to herself at sight of the ugly cut across his upper arm. She washed it carefully, smeared on some kind of healing ointment, and set a clean white bandage into place.

  Martell crouched stoically by the fire, motionless while she worked. He was conscious of the fixed scrutiny of the man across the fire and lifted his eyes once to meet the fellow’s glance. What he saw was not exactly enmity, but it was a hard and searching suspicion.

  The girl had gone over to the big settler wagon that stood nearby, dark and gaunt against the first stars. Now she returned with a man’s shirt, and Aunt Lucy nodded her approval. Finished with her bandage, she handed the shirt to Martell.

  “One of my husband’s,” she said. “I had to ruin yours. Put this one on, then come back to the fire, and we’ll have some supper.”

  Martell rose to his feet. “Ma’am,” he said, with a slow, quaint courtesy, “you have true gentleness in your heart.”

  He stepped off beyond the big wagon, donned the clean shirt. When he returned to the fire, there was a tin basin and warm water and a towel. He washed away the marks of his rough day and felt a new man.

  Aunt Lucy, busy and deft, was setting out food and utensils on a square of tarpaulin, spread by the fire. Yonder, just at the far edge of the firelight, the girl and the man stood, talking in low tones. It seemed to Martell that there was a faint touch of censure in the man’s tone, while the girl’s brightness had become subdued.

  Aunt Lucy announced supper, and the girl and her companion moved up. The girl said, “Mister Martell, this is Jason Spelle.”

  Now, erect and more at ease, Martell was able to get a full measure of Jason Spelle. Spelle’s height was equal to his own, with shoulders heavier but not as broad. And the man was thicker through the body, without Martell’s lean suppleness of waist and hip. His hand grip told nothing, a brief touch, nothing more.

  “Rocking A?” asked Spelle curtly.

  “No,” said Martell, matching Spelle’s brusqueness of tone. “Just a man riding his own saddle into a new country.”

  This Jason Spelle had heavy, but handsome features, with a bold, arched nose that told of forcefulness, his age somewhere around Martell’s own thirty years. He was dressed in a corduroy coat and trousers, flannel shirt with a dark string tie. His boots were flat-heeled—a man of the soil, not the saddle. In the flicker of firelight his eyes looked brown, and told nothing.

  Food was plain but ample, and Bruce Martell ate with honest hunger. He looked at the girl, but her eyes were on her plate. Even Aunt Lucy was silent, seeming to be waiting for an explanation of all this. Martell directed his quiet drawl at her.

  “Just so you’ll know you’re not wasting kindness and hospitality on an out-and-out rascal, ma’am … here’s how it happened.” He went on, giving the story briefly. “I can see now,” he ended, “where I didn’t show the best of judgment in going off the edge like I did. Still and all, a man can take just so much pushing around.”

  Aunt Lucy’s response warmed his heart. “In your place I’d have done the same,” she declared. “Those three you speak of—who started the trouble—I wonder could they have been the Thorpes? Do you think it likely, Jason?”

  Jason Spelle shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I’d have no way of knowing, Missus Carling. Only one thing I’m sure of. Our settler people can’t be rightly blamed for their animosity toward saddle men … not after the kind of rough treatment Hack Asbell and his crowd have been throwing at them. You haven’t heard of the latest piece of deviltry Asbell has cooked up. His men have been barging into some of the settler camps, bullying the folks around, and going through their wagons. That sort of high-handed business isn’t making our people love saddle men more.”

  “Going through the wagons? You mean, robbing them?”

  “Well, not exactly robbing, perhaps,” conceded Spelle. “Though that could be the next step. The excuse they have cooked up is the claim that settlers are slow-elking Rocking A beef and that, in going through settler wagons, they’re searching for some of that meat. There’s no truth to it, of course … the slow-elking talk, I mean. It’s just another of Hack Asbell’s lies. The man is full of them.”

  Bruce Martell had no wish to start an argument in this camp. But there was a dominant assertiveness of certainty in Jason Spelle’s manner and words that stirred a vague irritation in him. He said, “You could be wrong, Spelle, about the slow-elking angle. For there is some of it going on.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I saw the evidence of it. This morning, on my way in across the Lodestone foothills. Four Rocking A critters. Definitely slow-elked.”

  “What makes you so sure?” There was a thread of sharpness in Spelle’s words.

  Martell’s irritation with the man grew. He didn’t like the tone; he didn’t like the manner. It came to him abruptly that he plain didn’t like Jason Spelle, didn’t like any part of him at all. But he managed to keep any hint of his feeling out of his own voice.

  “A slow-elker,” he drawled, “always leaves his trademark. He butchers wastefully. In this case, only the choice parts of the carcasses had been taken, the loins and haunches. The rest was left to the coyotes and buzzards.”

  Aunt Lucy spoke impulsively. “What a shame. I can’t abide wastefulness. You can’t blame Hack Asbell for being angry over that sort of thing, Jason.”

  “Perhaps not … if it was slow-elking. But Asbell could have done the butchering himself, just as an excuse to carry on some of his high-handed business, like this searching of settler camps and bullying people around.”

  “That,” said Martell bluntly, “doesn’t even make good sense, Spelle. If Asbell felt that way, he could have just made talk that way, without wasting four critters back in a lonely little creek meadow, where nobody would see the actual evidence, nobody but the coyotes and buzzards. It was just chance that I stumbled on that meadow myself.”

  “You talk as though Asbell was a friend of yours,” charged Spelle.

  “Not a friend … not an enemy,” retorted Martell. “I met the man for the first time in my life this morning at the scene of the slow-elking. He was pretty worked up, and he had a right to be. In his boots I’d have come to a boil myself.”

  It was the girl, Tracy, who saw how this thing was heading and spoke now to head it off. Even so, she was on Jason Spelle’s side.

  “What you saw with your own eyes, you saw, Mister Martell. But that doesn’t excuse the Rocking A for going through settler camps and wagons as though everybody in Indio Basin were guilty.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Martell nodded. Then he added, with gentle censure, “No more than it entitles settlers to curse and threaten me, just because I’m a saddle man. I’ve found there’s nearly always two sides to every question.” He turned to Aunt Lucy. “For all your kindness, ma’am … if there’s any chores needing doing, I’ll be happy to oblige.”

  The older woman met his glance, gravely intent. Now she smiled. “There is strong independence in you, isn’t there? I know you’ll feel better, so, if you’ll be careful of that arm, you can unharness the spring wagon team and care for them and the other horses. There’s a pool at the head of the swale where you can water them.”

  Martell built a cigarette and went willingly about these chores. He wanted to get away from that fire while Jason Spelle was there. The man’s personality dragged roughly across his own, and further contact would be sure to strike sparks. And Martell wanted to be no cause of even the slightest unpleasantness about this camp that had shown him so much kindness and hospitality. Aside from a slight ache and some growing stiffness, his arm did not bother him, and the increasing brilliance of the starlight aided him in his chores.

  Off to one side of the camp stood still another team of broncos, harnessed to a buckboard, which Martell assumed belonged to
Jason Spelle. As he came back from the spring pool, leading a pair of big, staunch heavy-wagon horses, he saw Spelle and the girl move out toward the buckboard. They stood there for some time, their figures blending with the shadow bulk of the buckboard. And then, as Martell, finished with what he was doing, came back to the fire, the buckboard whirled away into the night. Presently the girl slipped back to the fire.

  Supper things had been washed and put away. Aunt Lucy, of the type who found happiness in eternal busyness, had a bit of sewing in her lap, at which she worked in the firelight. She nipped off a bit of thread with her teeth, looked at Martell.

  “My husband should be back tomorrow. He went out to War Lance Creek again after some gear he left there—plows and such. He wants to fallow our land before the first rains come. I imagine you’ve had little experience with a plow, Mister Martell?

  Martell met her brief smile with one of his own. “None at all, ma’am. That kind of rigging just isn’t my line. Cattle are what I savvy best. And humans.” He glanced around. “Pretty lonely camp for just a couple of women.”

  Aunt Lucy laughed. “Daytimes there’s nothing to worry about. And at night Tracy and I fort up in the big wagon. We can both shoot a gun. And Jason Spelle drops by regularly to see that we’re all right. Then there’s Ezra Banks, our nearest neighbor. Ezra says for us just to yell, day or night, and, as he puts it, he’d come a-runnin’.” She laughed again merrily.

  Martell’s slow smile broke up the dark gravity of his face. “Have to be quite a yell, ma’am … to reach to Ezra.”

  Martell built another cigarette, and the pale smoke curled up about his lean head and lost itself in the night. Now the darkness brought a new sound, the mutter of running hooves, coming in from the north. The girl, Tracy Carling—sitting cross-legged beside her aunt, staring at the fire flames—lifted her head and listened.

  “The Rocking A,” she said. “I sometimes wish, Aunt Lucy, that Uncle Brink hadn’t settled so close to the trail that the Rocking A uses, going and coming from town.”