IN February Tom was tried and triumphantly acquitted. There was almost a public demonstration of approval. Only the Indians were sullen and vindictive in manner. They left the Court House, got into their buckboards or onto their ponies and rode back to the Reservation, talking in low voices among themselves. To their long tale of injury by the whites they now added this one more.
Allison, standing by Tom's elbow at the window of his office, looked out on the public square and analyzed the Situation in a few pregnant words.
"They'll try to get you, Tom," he said. "This place is plumb unhealthy for you."
Tom only laughed.
Clare had been at the trial. She had dramatized herself and the situation by bringing her mother, and sitting in the front row holding her calloused hand all through the proceedings. Such demonstrations had been unknown between them, and the older woman was self-conscious and embarrassed. She would free herself now and then, to feel for her handkerchief, to straighten her hat, only a moment later to be caught again and to feel vaguely ridiculous.
Now Tom could see Clare, waiting patiently outside on the steps. He did not want to see her. He wanted to meet some of the fellows at the Martin House and satisfy his starved gregarious instinct, talk man-talk once again. But he knew there was no hope. He went down the stairs and out, shaking hands right and left, and with a fixed smile on his face confronted Clare.
If she had been effusive before the crowd he might have hardened himself to her, but she was not. Moreover, to his surprise, he saw she had been crying; her eyes were red, her handkerchief crumpled in her hand. And if there was method in her tears at least the noisy hearty group waiting for him outside respected them. They shook his hand, slapped him with mighty blows on the back, and then drifted cheerfully and delicately away.
"Drop in at the hotel if you can, Tom. Ray Masterson's got a room there."
"Maybe, later on."
He fairly ached to go, to meet the boys again, to sit in Ray Masterson's room on the bed, the floor, anywhere, and hear noisy commonplace talking going on around him. To talk himself; shop talk, of cattle and horses and riders; of how the Potters were making out with their new property; of the new oil field just opening up south near Easton. But there was Clare, making her silent demand on him; a proper demand too, he realized.
"Mom's expecting you to supper, Tom."
"I'll have to see Mrs. Mallory first."
"She might have come today, after all you've done for her."
"She's not well. Nellie was there. I saw her."
Clare sniffed.
"I'll tell the world she was!" she said. "If the whole court room doesn't know she's crazy about you it's not her fault."
"That's silly. She's only a kid."
He was irritable when she insisted on going with him to the Mallory house, a small two-story frame affair on a back street, and even on following him upstairs to where Mrs. Mallory, still broken by Jake's death, lay in bed propped up with pillows. But in spite of Clare's frozen silence and her downright rudeness to Nellie, he relaxed under their gratitude and their relief at his acquittal.
"God keeps some sort of a balance sheet, Tom. And the way you've acted this winter sure paid off a lot of scores."
"I only did what any white man would have done," he said, awkwardly.
But she had some news for him, too. Her nephew from Colorado was coming up. He had been a cow-hand, and he had agreed to work through the spring and summer, and up to shipping time in the fall. Then she could ship and have a little capital.
Clare listened intently, while she watched Nellie at the same time. Then she sprung her little trap. She got up and began to button her coat.
"Then I guess we can be married, soon as you get a job, Tom."
He could have killed her where she stood. He never saw that Nellie went pale, but he did see Mrs. Mallory's eyes narrow as she looked at Clare.
"If Tom takes my advice," she said coldly, "he won't marry for a considerable time. You hear that, Tom?"
"I don't know that we're asking any advice," Clare retorted, her voice sharpening. "That's our business."
"I haven't heard Tom say anything. And I'll thank you to go down those stairs and let me say a few words in private with him. I've got some business with him."
Clare had to go, and Nellie slipped out after her and closed the door.
"Is that little slut telling the truth?" Mrs. Mallory demanded.
"Well, yes and no. I'm under kind of an obligation to her, but she knows I'm not the marrying kind."
"What kind of an obligation?"
"Not what you think. It's just"
"Never mind what it is. You let her go; do you hear me, Tom? She's no good. She's lazy and vain and selfish. If she's got you in a corner be a man and get out." Then she altered her tone. "I've got something here to show you. Maybe when you see it."
She drew a letter from under her pillow and held it out to him. When he opened it a slip of paper fell to the floor. Mrs. Mallory was watching him from the bed.
"That's the check," she said. "Read the letter, Tom. It's from Kay Dowling."
He read it, his big hands shaking so that the paper rattled. Kay was sending on money, she said, because she felt it was not fair to Tom McNair to ask him to work all winter without pay. Indeed, she recognized fully her own responsibility in the whole matter. She would prefer not to be known as the sender, and she was apologetic for the small amount. She always had everything but money. The check was for two hundred and fifty dollars.
He put both letter and check carefully back on the bed.
"How did she know about me?"
"I wrote her, Tom. I wrote her about Jake, and I told her what you were doing. But that's all. I didn't ask for a cent."
"And I'm not taking a cent," he said roughly. "I aim to manage without the Dowling money, and you can tell her so for me."
In the small hall below Clare was waiting for him, tapping her absurd heels, and Nellie was not in sight. But either she had listened or Nellie had told her, for she asked at once to see the check.
"I didn't take it."
She stared at him, with two angry spots of color in her cheeks.
"Then you're a fool. Why shouldn't you have it? They'd have let you hang today if they could."
"That's my business, my girl," he told her, and stalked out.
Supper at the Hamels was a painful affair that night. Tom was still furiously angry over Kay's tender of money, and resentful at being where he was. Mrs. Hamel passed the food, making frequent trips to the kitchen; Mr. Hamel ate enormously and noisily, and under the impression that shootings would interest a man just acquitted of one, harked back into long reminiscences of the bad old days when he ran the Last Chance saloon.
"Yes, sir," he would say. "He shot from the doorway and got all three of them in a row as they stood there. Just like stringing fish, it was."
"Pop, for heaven's sake! Let's be cheerful."
It was Tom's first meal with Clare's family, and as it went on he realized that to all of them it had a particular significance. It amounted to what in more sophisticated circles would have been a formal recognition of the relationship between Clare and himself.
"When you two get married," Mrs. Hamel said once, "pa and I were thinking maybe you could use the parlor until you get on your feet. We don't need it much, and it's bigger than Clare's room."
"I haven't even got a job yet," he parried.
"Well, you're young and able-bodied. You'll get something."
The trap was closing. He glanced at Clare, but she gazed fixedly at her plate. Afterwards, in the parlor with the door closed and the newly painted stove sending a thick odor of burning blacking into the room, Clare put her face up to be kissed and he held her off, his hands on her shoulders.
"Kind of pushing things a bit, aren't you, Clare?"
"What else did you expect? I told them right off. Pop'd have killed me if I hadn't."
"A girl's a fool to marry a man when he—when he doesn't want to get married. It's all wrong, Clare. You've got a right to somebody who's ready to settle down. You've got a right to be happy."
"I'm taking that chance," she told him. And because there was something pathetic about her determination he kissed her. She clung to him feverishly, instinctively holding to him as if by sheer contact to inflame him into desire for her. But a thousand other things were milling in his mind. Resentment at the loss of his freedom; the depth to which Kay must think he had sunk to take money from her; and mixed in with that his desire to escape from the house, to see the boys at the Martin House, even after his long abstinence to get a drink of hot burning liquor, and wash away memory and the damned stench of that stove and Clare's cheap perfume.
He loosened her hold on him.
"We'll have to open a door or something, Clare. I can't breathe."
She opened the door without a word and went across to her room. He thought at first that she had left him, and was divided between relief and a sense of guilt, but she came back with an armful of linen and finery and demanded his attention. He tried his best to play up.
"What's that for?"
"It's for the dining room table."
"Better get one first. All I've got's a horse. Might look well on him."
But it was when she began on her personal wardrobe that he realized how firmly the trap had set. She held up little new undergarments of so private a nature that they made him uncomfortable and self-conscious. He passed them off with a joke.
"You mean to say you can get into anything that size?"
"I'm not very big, Tom."
And something in her tone, in the array of fragile feminine garments all around, in the fact that she herself was fragile, feminine and greatly in love with him, touched him profoundly. He put his arms around her.
"I'm not much," he said, "but if we do get married I'll try to be good to you. You know that, don't you?"
It was after eleven when he reached the Martin House, Ed told him that the crowd was in thirty-four and that they were expecting him, but with his hand on the door knob he turned away. If he was going to bury Kay Dowling forever, as now he must, he was going to do it decently, not with liquor.
The hired car dropped him at an outlying ranch, where he had left his horse, and without rousing the family he got the Miller and rode off. He found himself looking forward to the shack as a sort of sanctuary. He was done for, in spite of his acquittal that day. He would marry Clare; that was all he could do. But in the back of his mind he knew that Mrs. Mailory had been right. Clare was all that she had said; and more. She could be shrewish, too. He would find himself with a scolding nagging wife, and there would be no love on his side to help him to tolerance. He knew his own temper; he turned half sick with fear.
It was very dark as he rode along. The Miller picked his steps carefully, finding the track where Tom could see nothing. Once or twice, a mile or so from the ranch house, he half stopped and snorted, but Tom quieted him with a hand on his neck. Tom himself was on the alert now, and the Sheriff's warning recurred to him. But for another half mile nothing happened. Then a shot came from somewhere to the left, and was repeated.
He felt the big horse jump and quiver and knew that he was hit, but he lunged ahead in a sort of broken gallop. Tom slid out of the saddle on the right side and hung there, but the Miller was still running, and the shots were not repeated. But at the end of a mile the animal came down heavily. Tom, dropping behind him for safety, hatred and savage anger in his heart, felt him struggle once and lie still.
He remained where he was until dawn, crouched behind the dead animal, waiting and listening, but nothing more happened. At times he talked to the big horse. With the first daylight he walked back to the scene of the tragedy, morose and blindly revengeful, but although he searched the creek foot by foot he found no trace of the killer. He went on foot back to the ranch, borrowed a horse and got a spade. Then he went back. But he could not bury the Miller. The ground was frozen hard.
He roped the body and dragged it away from the road, and then piled snow and rocks over it. But he knew it was no use. By nightfall the coyotes would have scented it, and be making their wary circles about it; then they would close in.