Burn forever, p.9
Burn Forever, page 9
A sudden glint at the bottom of the ditch caught Ben’s eye. Something was shining under the stagnant blackened water. He reached down with a stick and worked it up out of the mud. Even before he had it in his hand he saw that it was a shield-shaped badge, on it engraved laconically “United States Treasury Department Agent” and a number.
Ben wiped it off with a faded stalk of the ironweed and held it in his hand looking at it. He looked back up the road to where the black coupé was half hidden in the leaves.
“So you were a revenuer,” he said to himself. “It wasn’t the girl you were after. You were just trying to give her a hand.”
He nodded and got to his feet, and stood there. Finally he looked back towards the black coupé again.
“All right, old boy,” he said aloud. “We’ll make ’em pay up for this.”
The blue eyes glinted like icy steel. He walked back up the road.
CHAPTER 13
The truck stopped in the cornfield road. Mike jumped out.
“Fairchild’s at court,” he said. “Loftus’s deputy. He’s comin’ down the hill now with a doctor. They was on my tail all the way over.”
The old blue Buick pulled up at the foot of the hill. Loftus got out, followed by a white-haired, tired-eyed old man in an old-fashioned frock coat and frayed starched linen.
Loftus nodded to Ben and looked curiously at the black coupé.
“I reckon you know my cousin, Dr. Corbin, Mr. Davidge,” he said. They shook hands, the doctor awkwardly, as if he had forgotten how, it was so long since he had shaken hands with anyone but death, out there in the hills.
“It’s Speer,” Ben said. “Shannon told you?”
Loftus nodded again.
“Whar is he?”
“In the car. He’s been dead for hours.”
The two men looked at him.
“Dead?” Loftus said.
“Dead. Shot in the back.”
Loftus shook his head.
“That feller said he was shot, didn’t say nothin’ about him bein’ dead. I reckon you come all this way fer nothin’, Will. If you’ll hold on a mite I’ll carry you back.”
He turned to Ben.
“A doctor ain’t much use if a feller’s already dead,” he said. His voice had a quiet tone of reproachfulness, as if Ben had allowed a foolish thing to be done.
Ben stifled a quick gust of anger, reminded himself that he had got to remember this was not in Philadelphia. It was out in the hills. People looked at things differently here.
“Since he’s here he might as well look at him,” he said. He tried to speak as calmly as he could.
“I reckon there ain’t no call for you to look, Will,” Loftus said imperturbably. “You better rest yerself. You was up all night with Preacher Lane. Ain’t no tellin’ whose goin’ t’ be took bad t’night.”
By an effort Ben kept himself from saying anything. There was nothing he could do. It was not the first time he had run into the maddening and invincible deliberateness of the mountaineers, their steady clinging to the old ways.
Loftus spat into the dust.
“We only got one doctor between here an’ Bradleyville,” he said. “We ain’t aimin’ t’ get him wore out ’fore his time.”
Ben nodded. “All right,” he said. “Come down here, will you?”
He led the way down the road and stopped at the broken stalks of ironweed.
“This is where he was shot,” he said. “He fell in the ditch. You can see the blood here. I found this in the mud at the bottom.”
He handed Loftus the badge. Loftus looked at it and nodded. “I’d figgered he was a revenuer,” he said.
“These two cartridges were across the road, below the oak there. He was shot from the foot of the tree, through the back. He fell in the ditch, or on the near bank here.”
He handed the shells over. Loftus turned them over in his hand.
“Law me, you sure been usin’ that there head of yourn, Mr. Davidge,” he said. He pushed his hat back off his forehead and ran his fingers through his thick iron gray hair, his eyes moving slowly from the white oak to the ditch. A look of bland amusement appeared for an instant in his eyes.
“I reckon some people’d think you was on hand when hit happened.”
He looked at the spent shells and tossed them down in the ditch. “I reckon they ain’t no further use fer them? You cain’t shoot with a used cartridge, now, can you, Mr. Davidge?”
Ben flushed at the drawling calculated irony. “I guess you can’t,” he said.
Loftus nodded.
“I reckon hit’s your idea they carried him along here, where the brown spots air, an’ stuck him in his car, an’ rolled the car down in the mud,” he said. A twinkle appeared again in his shrewd eyes.
Ben nodded. “I think so,” he said quietly.
“Maybe so,” Loftus said. “Reckon I’ll take a look at him.”
They went back to the coupé. Loftus stepped on the log, placed a large hand against the rounding top and looked through the window. He stepped back and stood looking at the mired car.
“Reckon you got some rope on that there truck we could pull hit out with?” he said. He shook his head. “Too bad Fairchild ain’t here. I’m the dep’ty, but hit ain’t a job I crave, gettin’ cars out ’a th’ mud.”
Mike backed the truck out of the cornfield. When the wheels of the coupé were clear of the clinging mud Loftus untied the rope and handed it back. He opened the car door.
“He was a nice feller,” he said soberly. “Revenuin’s a dangerous business. Alius was, I reckon, an’ hit ain’t improved none as long’s I can remember. Will, I reckon you’ll have to help a body out, after all.”
Ben turned away. He did not want to see the old doctor’s hands unloosening the stiffened joints. He was thinking of the picture in the dead man’s pocket.
“Thar he is,” Loftus said. “I reckon you could drive him to the mill at th’ Crossroads? Lem there’ll take care of him till Fairchild gets back, I reckon.”
Ben turned back. “I’ll drive him,” he said. “Look here. Aren’t you planning to do anything?”
Loftus ran his fingers through his hair. “Don’t reckon there is much I can do, Mr. Davidge.”
“What I mean is this. Aren’t you going to try to find out if anybody heard the shots, or saw the killing?”
Loftus spat thoughtfully at the coupé and nodded deliberately.
“I reckon I know what you’re talkin’ about,” he said. “Different folks have different ways a’ doin’ things, Mr. Davidge. Now you been doin’ a mite a’ detectin’ fer yerself. Jes’ like th’ fellers in th’ movin’ pictures. An’ I ain’t sayin’ hit ain’t a good plan.”
He took out the box of snuff.
“Hit’s your way, now. Up here folks is different. I reckon we don’t hold with all these here newfangled ideas. Reckon we don’t need to.”
He grinned at Ben.
“You could go on with the detectin’ fer a week,” he said, “an’ all you’d find out’s what every man an’ woman in th’ whole country’d know soon’s they hear’d about hit. I reckon, till you got through with hit, you’d be about th’ only feller in the county didn’t know the Curriers killed this here feller Speer.”
“Then why don’t you arrest them?” Loftus shook his head patiently.
“They ain’t no use in doin’ a fool thing like that,” he said. He spoke slowly, as if explaining an obvious thing to a little child. “They ain’t goin’ no place. Don’t see’s much’d be gained by havin’ ’em up in court. Ain’t no jury’s goin’ t’ convict a man fer shootin’ a feller that’s been hangin’ round his place fer a week or more. An’ I reckon if that there feller turns out t’ be a revenuer, hit ain’t goin’ t’ make a heap a’ difference to folks up here.”
Ben nodded helplessly. He knew it was true.
“What if he’d found a still?” he asked.
Loftus shook his head.
“If you went an’ told a jury that a revenuer had found a still in Currier Holler,” he said, “they’d sure know you was lyin’. The Curriers is strong temperance. Took the pledge way back, the time after the election, Nate an’ Old Doss did, an’ Young Doss foller’d ’em afterwards. A parcel of ’em drunk too much an’ cut th’ tails off’n all old Judge Miller’s pigs, an’ spent a week in th’ jail at Bradleyville. The Curriers is strong temperance. They ain’t no still inside miles a’ here, Mr. Davidge.”
“This man Speer must have been on the trail of something,” Ben said quietly.
Loftus spat and nodded. “I reckon hit wouldn’t take th’ jury five minutes t’ decide who hit was he was on th’ trail of . . . now you speak of hit.”
Ben kept himself from answering.
“Different folks got different ways, Mr. Davidge,” Loftus said. He was speaking with a kindly earnestness. “I done my level best t’ tell Mr. Speer t’ keep away from Currier Holler. I reckon you hear’d me. Anybody could a’ told him hit warn’t healthy. I told him Nate Currier warn’t aimin’ t’ lose Julie.”
“It wasn’t Nate Currier,” Ben said. “He wasn’t here when it happened. Nate Currier’s gone to Knoxville.”
The words were not out of his mouth when the memory of his leaving the Hollow that night came flashing into his mind. There were two dark figures coming up through the cornfield towards the cabin, not one. It was only because he thought Nate Currier was there that he had gone. Yet Julie had said he was not there.
He came out of a trance of bewilderment to find Loftus looking quizzically at him.
“Sure nuff?” he said slowly. “I reckon you must ’a been listenin’ t’ Mis’ Mincey. Reckon they ain’t so many people that knew Nate was goin’ t’ Knoxville.”
Ben flushed. “That was a mistake,” he thought. Loftus went on.
“Anyhow,” he said, “hit don’t make no difference where you hear’d hit. They ain’t no way a’ provin’ when Speer was killed, even if you could prove what time hit was Nate Currier lef’ th’ Holler.”
“Dr. Corbin could tell when he was killed, or pretty close to it.”
“Maybe he could an’ maybe he couldn’t. I don’t reckon th’ jury’d put much stock in that kind a’ nonsense. Anyhow, Mr. Davidge, I reckon hit don’t matter so much when a revenuer’s shot as why he was. An’ I reckon nobody’d put much stock in the idear that th’ Curriers was doin’ anythin’ wrong. Hit jes’ ain’t like th’ Curriers. Nary a soul round thisaway knows Mr. Speer. I reckon everybody knows Nate an’ Old Doss, an’ th’ trouble they’ve had keepin’ their women folks.”
He spat slowly with an air of complete finality.
“I reckon you’d jes’ as soon drive him over yonder to th’ Crossroads? Hit ain’t but a little piece.”
“Right,” Ben said. He opened the car door and turned back. “Just one thing more, Mr. Loftus. Have you got any objections to my notifying the United States Treasury Department about this?”
Loftus shook his head. “I was jes’ aimin’ to ask you if you’d send a telegram from Bradleyville when you was through this evenin’. I’d shore appreciate hit an’ thank you too.”
CHAPTER 14
It was after three when Ben drove Speer’s coupé into the Loftus yard and parked it under the pear tree at the end of the picket fence. He had deposited Speer’s body at the Crossroads mill and gone on to Bradleyville to telegraph the Bureau of Investigation, Treasury Department, in Washington. That was done, and there was nothing else he could do. In face of the slow-motion mountaineer indifference he was powerless.
He was tormented with an impotent rage that made him want to cut loose and force somebody to do something—anything, so it was action. If the revolver slung under the Treasury agent’s left arm had been drawn out Of its holster, if he had even been facing the ambush, there would have been some excuse for the killing. But to empty two charges of buckshot into a man’s back was indefensible, by any standards, mountain, plain or coast.
The one thing that he ought to do was perfectly clear to him. He ought to sit tight, keep his mouth shut, do his own work, wait for the arrival of a government agent. He should then put what information he had in his hands and pass out of the picture. It was equally clear to him that that was the one thing he could not possibly do. He was in it. Speer had given him the letter, even if he had changed his mind about it later. But it was not Speer as much as it was Julie Currier. If Speer had thought she was in trouble, and had been willing to compromise his own reputation as a government agent, even to risk his life, in helping the girl to get away from the Hollow, then there must be a reason for doing it that would apply just as well to him.
He got out of Speer’s car and into his own, and sat there, trying to figure out some answer to the questions that had kept coming into his mind all day.
What was Speer after? What was so important in Currier Hollow that a Federal agent should wait secretly there night after night? It certainly was not Julie Currier, even if in the end it turned out that the Curriers had thought it was, and if that idea cost Speer his life. Ben wondered suddenly if that explained why he was killed the night Nathan Currier left to go to Knoxville, and wondered again if Nathan Currier had gone to Knoxville, or at any rate had gone before Speer was shot.
In any case, the secret of Currier Hollow remained. Had Speer taken the letter back because he had solved it? Another question, grotesque and trivial, flashed into Ben’s mind. What was Old Doss gathering cat-tails for and carrying them by the armful into his workshop? There was still another queer thing: the marks of the truck tire that Mike Shannon had pointed out to him twice in the road. And finally, where was Julie Currier in all this?
The idea of her alone in the Hollow with the two Doss Curriers, young and old, and with her grandfather away, disturbed him. She was safe in one sense . . . in another cruelly and pitifully vulnerable.
He chewed the stem of his pipe and wondered what it was about her that seemed to make people who had work to do quietly give up minding their own business and start meddling in hers. Just a mountain girl who happened to speak English and who combed her hair and washed her face. If she hadn’t lived way out in the hills she would have been like every other girl in the world. Ben shook his head.
A big red oil truck lumbered by on the way north. Ben looked at it in the mirror over the windshield. He was staring after it absently when he sat up with a start. For the first time the significance of the empty manila envelope in Speer’s pocket occurred to him. The Curriers had taken the letter out of it, from the dead man’s pocket. They therefore must have known that Speer had left someone to carry on. Did they know who it was? What had the letter said? Had Speer put his name in it? If he had, could they read or write, for that matter? If they could, and if Speer had included his name in the letter, then that obviously complicated matters.
Ben put his foot on the clutch and hesitated. His detail, trimming the cedar, would be there till four o’clock. It was now twenty minutes past three. He backed into the road and headed towards the Hollow.
At the top of the ridge he edged the car off the road and walked down the hill. The detail was clearing up to lay off for the day. As he came out into the clear road the thin film of smoke from the fire burning forever, and the smoke coming from Old Doss’s workshop, were the only signs of life visible to him. The cabin was silent. Kilgore was asleep on the top step. The sun had gone down behind the ridge, early twilight was falling in the Hollow.
He walked down past the cabin and along the lower road until he came to the place where Speer had toppled backwards into the ditch. He got down on his hands and knees. The two red paper shells were still there. He fished them out, sodden with the discolored water, wiped them off on the grass and put them in his pocket. He went back up the road, up the hill through the undergrowth, until he came to a narrow opening in the leafy screen where a tree had fallen. Down below him he could see the gate and the cabin at one end of the Hollow, and the road leading down through the corn to the workshop at the other. He sat down to wait.
He had to assume that Julie had gone back to the loft and was safe there. Nothing would happen to her if the two Curriers were marrying her to Young Doss. Therefore it was the workshop that mattered. Speer’s interest had centered on it, it was there that the secret of the Hollow, whatever it was, was to be found. With the field glasses he could see Edrew hopping back and forth across the open door. He seemed to be carrying small pieces of plank. No one else was visible.
The detail left at four. At half-past, Edrew came out of the workshop, took his guitar from a nail on the wall and came hopping painfully up the road through the field, picking lightly at the strings. In the deep quiet of the Hollow Ben could faintly hear the notes. Then they were lost in the shadows of the trees. Doss Currier came out of the door. He stood there a few minutes, looking up at a plane so high above the Hollow that it seemed scarcely moving. Old Doss came out, the two of them moved slowly up behind the yellow corn towards the cabin.
Ben watched them through his glasses in the fading light. Hard, colorless, furrowed, scarcely human, Old Doss came slowly along, shuffling, looking straight ahead of him, until he came to the road. There he stopped and stood, staring down towards the place where they had found Speer. Doss Currier, tall and straight as a sapling oak, stood beside him. Neither seemed to speak. After a long time Doss turned and went on towards the cabin, his father following him.
CHAPTER 15
Julie sat in the back room of the cabin, waiting. The hours before her grandfather would come stretched ahead of her, endlessly dark and foreboding. Part of her brain was numb, the part that had tried to think what was in store for her when they found she was not in the loft. There was no use going back up there, they would find the cut ropes.
It was the dead man she was thinking of. He had come back for her . . . and they had been ready for him. She hadn’t even warned him that Doss knew a stranger was hanging around.
