“Please, Miss Dodge, I’m sorry about yesterday. It won’t happen again.”
“Is that what you rode all the way out here to say?”
He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I heard about your father an’ I came out to offer my help in any way you want to use it.” He said it exactly as he had rehearsed it. It was better to be diplomatic than to come right out and say he was a lethal killer and would gladly gun down the murderers of her father. This way she might let him help.
There was a flash of anger through the anguish in her face. She tossed her small, taffy-colored head in that mannerism he remembered so well and the words cut deeply. “Thank you, Mister Vermilion Kid, but I think one encounter with renegades, in the past twenty-four hours, has proven disastrous enough for my family. I don’t think I want to chance another accident.” The way she said “accident” made the Kid squirm inwardly. He stood in silent anger for a long moment, just looking down into the wide violet eyes. Then the anger dropped away and he nodded twice, curtly and softly.
“I knew it was foolish to come out here and offer my services. I knew you’d say something like that.” He put his dusty black Stetson on with an unconscious gesture. “Well, Miss Dodge, I hope someday you learn to judge people better.”
He turned abruptly and started across the verandah toward his horse. He knew she was watching him, because he didn’t hear the door close. A man’s gruff voice came to him as he untied the horse, and, despite his resolve not to look up, he did anyway.
A blunt-jawed individual was standing next to the wisp of a girl in the doorway, glowering down at him. The Kid flipped his reins, turned his horse a little, and had one foot in the stirrup when he heard the man’s spurs ringing across the verandah, coming toward him.
He was about to swing aboard when a surly voice spoke behind him: “Don’t let me catch you trespassin’ on the D-Back-To-Back again, mister.”
The Kid’s foot slid easily out of the stirrup and he turned slowly. His eyes were level with the angry brown eyes when he spoke softly: “I don’t believe I know you, hombre.”
“Jeff Beale, foreman of the D-Back-To-Back. I’m the one who gives the orders hereabouts, hombre, an’ I’m tellin’ you not to set foot on this here range again.”
Normally the Kid might have overlooked the man’s big talk, but now there were two reasons why he didn’t. One was the girl still standing in the shadowy doorway, and two was the discomfort and hurt of her words. In short, the Vermilion Kid had absorbed about all the unpleasantness a man could accommodate in so short a space of time. He didn’t answer at all, but his gloved fist dropped behind the slope of his shoulder in a flashing fraction of a quick second, then arose with the mauling, bruising weight of his whipcord body behind it. If the foreman saw it coming, he made no move to get away. The fist chopped and popped like a bullwhip when it connected with his square jaw. Jeff Beale went over backward like a poleaxed steer.
The Kid swung back toward the girl. “I don’t know why, Miss Dodge, but every time I try to talk to you there’s trouble.” His voice was calm and his smokegray eyes were mildly puzzled. “I’m sorry about this”—he jutted his chin toward the inert form of Beale—“but you’re a witness that I didn’t start it.” Seeing that the girl was listening and looking at him in silence, he took another plunge. “I wish you’d let me help you. I’ve been around things like this before an’ maybe I could do some good. At any rate, I’d sure like to try.”
For the first time since he’d known her, her voice wasn’t ringing with pure contempt when she spoke. “And if I agreed, what would your pay be?”
He admired her common sense and couldn’t help but smile a little lopsidedly. “Nothin’, ma’am. I don’t want your money. Just agree to let me sleep in the bunkhouse an’ eat with the other D-Back-To-Back men, that’s all.”
Her eyes went to the gently stirring form of Jeff Beale. “Help him up and we’ll talk about it.”
Beale stood on wobbly legs and ran an exploratory hand over his bruised jaw. He was listening to Toma Dodge, but his squinted eyes were thoughtfully on the blank, unsmiling face of the Vermilion Kid. Finally he nodded. “All right, Toma, if that’s what you want, we’ll try it, but…” The brown eyes were perplexed and Beale shook his head. “Hell, I don’t know. I guess we can try him out, anyway.”
The Kid rode back to Holbrook, stuffed his scanty gear into his saddlebags, paid his bill at the Royal House, and returned to the D-Back-To-Back. When he was putting up his horse, three cowboys sauntered over to the corral and watched him in impassive silence. He nodded, and the riders nodded back. The Kid had been a cowboy once and he knew what the men were doing. They were appraising him—evaluating his appearance, his tack and his horse; from these things they would deduce his status among them.
Apparently the silent judgment was favorable because he was gradually included in the men’s jokes and hazing until, after two days on the ranch, the Vermilion Kid was more at home than he had been in many years. Jeff Beale introduced him to the men. At the sound of his name, there was a startled, awkward silence that, strangely enough, Beale himself filled in with casual talk until the riders got over their furtive stares and sudden silence.
For two days the Kid worked the cattle with the men. He saw neither Toma Dodge nor Beale, except in the early morning when the foreman would line out the work. The Kid was anxious to work on the murder, and the evening of the third day he went up to the house. Toma admitted him to a huge old parlor with a roaring fire in a massive, smoked-over old stone fireplace. He recognized the ancient trappings of the old frontier on the walls. Indian trophies hung droopily among old tintype pictures and the comfortable old leather furniture was typical of an earlier day on the frontier. The Kid held his hat selfconsciously in his hand and turned it by the brim in slow, nervous convolutions as he spoke. “Miss Dodge, it sort of seems to me like we’re wastin’ a lot of good time.”
The girl nodded, her eyes on the colorful Navajo rugs. “I know, it seems like that to me, too, but Jeff is nosing around in Holbrook and doesn’t want you to do anything until he’s chased down some ideas he has about Dad’s murder.”
The Kid frowned. His answer was dryly matter-of-fact. “Well, while Beale’s lookin’ around, a lot of water can pass under the bridge.”
The beautiful eyes came up with a decisive upsweep of the head. “I know it, Kid. You can start out on your own tomorrow, only…”
“Only…what?”
“Only don’t let Jeff know what you’re doing. He’ll be angry if he knows I let you start your investigation.”
The Kid’s eyebrows came together over his steady gray eyes. “Miss Dodge, this here’s likely to be a long drawn-out an’ dangerous little chore. Don’t you think we ought to start out by trustin’ each other?”
“What do you mean?” Her face colored a little.
“Well, if Beale doesn’t know what I’m up to, it’ll make a lot of unnecessary hard feelings, won’t it?”
Toma Dodge stood up and looked at the fireplace. The Kid felt a sudden little tug at his heartstrings as he studied her profile. She was so small and helplesslooking, yet so much a woman, the kind of a woman a man needed. “I don’t know what to say.”
The Kid guessed, correctly, that her father’s sudden demise had projected her into a role of responsibility that was altogether foreign, and a little frightening, to her. He got up and went over beside her, his hat gripped tightly in his hands. There was a half-wistful, half-truculent look on his face.