“Did you know that Jim Kettleman was once a prize fighter?” Epperman asked abruptly.
“A prize fighter? Jim Kettleman? You must be crazy.”
Epperman leaned his thick forearms on the desk and pushed his derby to the back of his head. “He was a fighter, all right, and a good one. Did he ever talk about the West? Or about cattle?”
“No, not that I can remember. He talked, but it was usually about the theater, books, politics, sometimes about horse racing.”
Lottie was nettled. It was more and more obvious that she had not learned the simplest things about the man she had married. A prize fighter? Kettleman with his perfect manners? It was impossible. She must seem like a fool, not to know more about him. Now she recalled how handsome he was, and how much respected, and not only because of his money.
Facing it, she had to admit she was a fool. She should have done everything to make her marriage work, but she had been so concerned with getting information from him, trying to make a killing from knowledge gleaned from him that she had missed her chance. Why try to make money for herself when Kettleman had the key to the mint?
She also confessed to herself that her respect for him had increased tenfold since he had gone away.
Chivington came in and sat down beside his daughter. He repeated the story, which Epperman knew, of finding the Navy Colt in the safe. The room began to smell of stale cigar smoke and Lottie felt her irritation mounting. Kettleman was making fools of them all.
“If I learn anything,” Epperman said at last, “I’ll let you know. I think,” he added, “that I may have something.”
Just what he had he did not know, except for a hunch that whatever it was might turn into money for them all. The first thing he must do now was to contact Porter Baldwin.
Still, if he himself could find Kettleman, maybe Kettleman would pay to stay lost. It was a thought.
All the way home he cherished the thought and developed it, at the same time a cool rational wind blew through the dark places of his brain. Kettleman had been quick to use that pistol at Saratoga, and by all accounts he was a man of decisive mind. He just might decide to use the pistol instead of paying blackmail. The more Epperman considered that possibility the more uncomfortable he became.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed rubbing his feet when he remembered the man on the train.
Chapter 10
Dusk came slowly to Kaybar. From the far bills, a coyote called. A nighthawk swooped and dived in the air just overhead, and the bats were coming out. Otero loitered on his way to the stable as if to feed stock, and saddled their horses.
Thomas assured them he would be no trouble, and Flint went to Flynn’s room. The foreman was barely conscious and it was foolish to move him, yet he could not be left behind.
“You don’t know me,” Flint said, standing over Flynn, “but I found you on the trail after you’d been shot.”
“Thanks.” The word was barely whispered.
“What I want to say is, we’ve got to move you. Shortly after dark the ranch will be attacked and they will fire the house. We have to be far from here. We’re going to the Hole-in-the-Wall.”
“Leave me — with a rifle. Or move me.” Flynn paused to breathe deeply, and then whispered, “Stand by her … like my own daughter.”
He closed his eyes for several minutes. “Gladys. Nobody else knew I was going. She told them.”
Big Julius Bent, strangely gentle for such a big man, assisted by Juana, dressed Flynn for the ride.
Nancy planned quickly and surely. Flint passed in and out of the kitchen but made no suggestion because none was needed. Food, medicines, material for bandages, blankets, canteens, matches. Only when the horses were packed and dusk was down around them did she pause to look about. “It is the only home I have ever known.”
“You can build again.”
“Of course.” She looked at him quickly. “One does not surrender, Jim. One has to go on.”
He considered that. Had he surrendered? But his death was inevitable. Or so they said. There was no cure. But people had recovered despite all the medical prophecies. Was it mental? Was it faith? Or was it some chemical within the body that could be summoned by faith or by the will?
The West held many stories of men critically wounded who had survived when thought beyond all hope.
The will to live … it was there, and with it perhaps any disease, any illness might be defeated.
Nancy and the men moved out into greater darkness, going slowly because of the wounded. Flint remained behind with Pete Gaddis to fire a few shots and give an appearance of defense. They did not plan to remain more than a few minutes.
Lying on the veranda at a corner of the house, Flint thought how quickly a man takes on the qualities of darkness! Men who live by night, the soldier, the thief, the traveler by night, the vagabond … theirs is a different way of thinking, and they do not fear the dark nor what may come upon them by night because they themselves are of the night, a part of it.
He had been like this long ago, and then had lost it while living in lighted places, and in comfortable surroundings. Now it was creeping into him again, becoming a part of him. He was no longer a stranger to the night, he was himself a shadow, a creeper by night, a thing to which the darkness was a comfort and a surrounding defense.
There came, off to the left, an inquiring shot. Lifting his heavy rifle, he drew a careful bead on the source of the shot, knowing if the man was an Indian fighter he would have moved by now, and he squeezed off the shot, then instantly fired to right and left. He heard a startled cry, more of alarm than pain.
Gaddis stirred. “What do you think?” he asked.
“Give them one. Then we’ll go.”
They moved out, walking their horses where dust lay, Gaddis using his memory of the ranch to choose the route.
Gaddis was quiet, the coyote out on the ridge was still, the bats and nighthawks were invisible now in the cloaking darkness. They were accompanied only by the hoof falls of their horses and the creak of saddle leather.
“You hunting somebody?” Gaddis asked suddenly.
Now what did that mean? Flint waited a moment before replying and then said, “No … there’s nothing I want that anyone can give me.”
They climbed a little, and when they were on a level again, working among the trees with only the stars listening, Flint said, “I’d like to help that girl. Believe me, I would.”
They came up on the others suddenly. Far behind they heard another questioning shot. Then they saw the shadows of the bunched horses, and Flint was beside Nancy. They moved off at once.
“It is good of you to help. It isn’t your fight.”
“I no longer know whose fight it is. Maybe injustice is everyone’s fight, now and forever.”
“Who are you, Jim?”
He considered the question with wry humor. Who was he? A fair question, but a difficult one. He was nobody. He was a man without a name of his own, born of parents somewhere, somehow, but with no heritage of reputation, or love.
“I am nobody,” he said, “I am nobody at all.”
And soon he would be less than that. He would be dust — a skeleton lying in a stone house in a secret place behind the dead lava.
“You have a family?”
“I never had a family.” Only a wife that wanted him dead. “There is nobody,” he added, “there never has been.”
“You must have friends?”
Well, the original Flint was a friend. Or was he? He did not know how Flint himself would have answered that.
“Maybe. I think I did. I believe I had one friend.”
“Had?”
“He was killed. But that was long ago, and almost in another world than this.”
Nancy was mystified. There was an isolation about him, an aloofness, something she could not touch. Nor was there any reaching out in him, any grasping for love. Only this strange withdrawing. She had the feeling that he shrank from getting too close to people.
Flint. Even the name had a lonely sound.
Where had he come from? What did he want? Where was he going? Why was he here? And where was “here”?
He glanced back and saw the glow on the sky. Her eyes followed his. She drew up and watched it. “My father and uncle built that ranch with their own hands. I wonder if hope and ambition and memories and dreams catch fire, too?”