We stood there looking at ourselves. A tall, dark young man with wide shoulders in a dark blue shirt, a black silk handkerchief, black jeans, and tied down holsters with their walnut-stocked guns; and Moira in a sea-green gown, filmy and summery-looking, a girl with a lovely throat and shoulders, with soft lips.
“Matt! You shouldn’t have come! Father will be—”
“He’ll have to get over it sometime, and it might as well be now.”
“That’s foolish talk!”
She said it, but her eyes didn’t seem to say it was foolish. Yet right at that minute, looking as lovely as she did, and surrounded everywhere by evidences of wealth and comfort, it may have sounded foolish even to me.
“You’d better start buying your trousseau. I won’t have much money for a year or two, and—”
“Matt”—her eyes were anxious—”you’d better go. I’m expecting Morgan.”
I took her hands. “Don’t worry, Moira. I promised Canaval there’d be no trouble, and there will be none.”
She was unconvinced and tried to argue, but I could only keep thinking how lovely she was. Poised, a little angry, her lovely throat bare, she was enough to set any man’s pulse to pounding.
“Matt!” She was really angry, and a little frightened by the thought of Morgan Park coming. “You’re not even listening! And don’t look at me like that!”
“How else would a man look at a woman?” She gave up then and we walked inside. The living room was comfortable, not in the ornate, overdecorated manner of the eastern cities, but with a simplicity bred by the frontier. Rud Maclaren was obviously a man who loved comfort, and he had a daughter who scould shape a house to beauty even in this harsh land.
“Matt … how do you feel? Those wounds, I mean. Are you all right?”
“No … but much better.”
We sat down, and for the first time she looked a little uncomfortable, and would not let her eyes meet mine.
“Where were you before you came here, Matt? Canaval said you were marshal of Mobeetie once.”
“Only a short time.” So I told her about that, and then somehow about the rest of it, about the long nights of riding, the trail herds, the buffalo, the border cantinas. About the days in Sonora when I rode for a Mexican hacienda, and about prospecting in Baja California, the ruins of the old missions, and much more.
And somehow we forgot where we were and I talked of the long wind in the vast ocean of prairie east of the Rockies, how the grass waved in long ripples. About the shrill yells of the Comanches attacking … and about nights under the stars lonely nights when I lay long awake, yearning into the darkness for someone to love, someone to whom I belonged and who belonged to me.
We were meeting then as a man and woman must always meet, when the world and time stand aside and there is only this, a meeting of minds and of pulsing blood, and a joining of hands in the quiet hours.
And then we heard hoofs in the yard, the coming of horses.
Two horses … two riders.
THIRTEEN
Moira got up quickly, tendrils of dark hair curled against her neck, and there were tiny beads of perspiration on her upper lip, for the day was very hot.
“Matt, that’s father. You’d better go.”
She had stepped toward me and I took her elbows and drew her to me. She started to draw away, but I took her chin and turned her face toward me. She was frightened and tried to draw back, but not very hard. Her eyes were suddenly wide and dark … and then I kissed her.
For an instant we clung together, and then she pulled violently away from me. She stood like that, not saying anything, and then moved quickly to kiss me again. We were like that when we heard footsteps outside.
We stepped apart just as Rud Maclaren and Morgan Park came through the door.
Park saw us, and something in Moira’s manner must have given him an idea of what had taken place. His face went dark with anger and he started toward me, his voice hoarse with fury. “Get out! Get out, I say!”
My eyes went past him to Maclaren. “Is this your home, Maclaren, or his?”
“That’ll do, Morgan!” Maclaren did not like my being there, but he liked Morgan Park’s usurping of authority even less. “I’ll order people from my own home.”
Morgan Park’s face was ugly. He wanted trouble, but before he could speak Canaval appeared in the door behind them.
“Boss, Brennan said he was just visitin’, not huntin’, trouble. He said he would go when I asked him and that he would make no trouble for Park.
Moira interrupted quickly. “Father, Mr. Brennan is my guest. When the time comes he will leave. Until then, I wish him to stay.”
“I won’t have him in my house!” Maclaren declared angrily. “Damn you, Brennan! You’ve got a gall to come here after shootin’ my men, stealin’ range that rightly belongs to me, and runnin’ my cows out of Cottonwood!”
“We’ve no differences we can’t settle peaceably,” I told him quietly. “I never wanted trouble with you, and I think we can reach an agreement.”
It took the fire out of him. He was still truculent, still ready to throw his weight around, but mollified. Right then I sensed the truth about Rud Maclaren. It was not land and property he wanted so much as to be known as the biggest man in the country. He simply knew of no way of winning respect and admiration other than through wealth and power.
Realizing that gave me the opening I wanted. Peace I had to have, but peace with Maclaren especially. And here it was, if I made the right moves.
“Today I had a talk with Chapin. This fighting can only be stopped through the leadership of the right man. I think you are that man, Maclaren.”
He was listening, and he liked what he heard. He could see himself acting in the role of peacemaker. And he was a shrewd man who could not but realize that every day of this war was costing him men, cattle, and money. While his men were fighting or riding the country they could not attend to ranch business.
“You’re the big man around here. If you make a move, the others will follow.”
“Not the Finders. You killed Rollie, and they’ll not rest until you’re dead. And he hates me and all I stand for.”
Morgan Park was listening, suddenly hard and watchful. This was something he had never expected, that Maclaren and I would actually get together and talk peace. If we reached an agreement, any plans he had would be wasted, finished.
“If the CP try to continue the fight,” I suggested, “they would outlaw themselves. In the eyes of everyone they would have no standing.
“Moreover, if this fight continues all the rustlers in the country will come in here to take advantage of the situation and steal cattle.”
Moira was listening with some surprise and, I thought, with respect. My own instinct had always been toward fighting, yet I had always appreciated the futility of it. If we could settle our difficulties, the CP would be forced to restrain themselves. The joker in the deck was Morgan Park. If, as I now believed, he had reason to want to continue the fight in order to complete his plans, then an end to hostilities would be a death blow for his arrangements with Booker.
Rud was impressed, that was obvious to Morgan Park as well as to me. Maclaren rubbed his chin thoughtfully, seeing the logic of the situation as I expressed it.
Rud Maclaren was a careful man who had come early, worked hard, and planned well. It was only now in these later years that he had become acquisitive of power. But he could not help but realize that he was looked upon without affection by many of his neighbors. While he affected no interest, it was obvious that my suggestion offered an opportunity for that.
Park interrupted suddenly. “Don’t trust this talk, Rud. Brennan makes it sound all right, but he has some trick in mind. What’s he planning? What’s he covering up?”
“Morgan!” Moira protested. Tm surprised at you! Matt is sincere, and you know it.”
“I know nothing of the kind. Yet you defend this—this killer.”
He was staring right at me when he said it, as if daring me to object. That he wanted trouble, I knew. A fight now would ruin all I had been saying.
It came to me then, and I said it, not without doubt.
“At least, I’ve never killed a man who had no gun. A man who would have been helpless against me in any case.”
When I said it I was looking right at him and something changed in his eyes, and into his face there came something I had not seen there before. And I knew now that I was marked for death. That Morgan Park would no longer wait.