and the heavy, pulpwood smoke forced Grant to cut the fire down to a small finger of flame. Dagget didn't seem to mind the cold. Nothing seemed to disturb him; discomfort, or pain, or hunger. Hour after hour his eyes stared flatly at Grant, his face cast in a yellowish mold of clay.
Those eyes and the monotony of the silence began to work on Grant's nerves. At last he walked to the door, punched a bit of snow and ice from a crack, and peered outside.
“The storm seems to be slacking off,” he said to himself.
Dagget grunted. “Northers like this don't last long.”
Grant remained at the door for a long time studying the blue-white landscape through the crack. The sun had set hours ago, but it was almost as light as day outside. The savagery of the wind was now tamed, and the swirling snow fell softly. By morning the storm would be completely over. The Creek Nation would begin digging itself out, and search parties would be formed in Sabo and Kiefer to look for Dagget.
I'm lost, Grant thought to himself. Everything is lost. From the minute I walked into that Joplin bank and threw down on Ortway, the world started coming apart at the seams.
Strangely he did not feel angry. Perhaps there had been too much anger all at once and it had blown itself out, like the storm. Then, from the far side of the dugout, Dagget asked, “Why?”
Frowning, faintly surprised, Grant turned away from the door.
“It's my professional curiosity,” the marshal said dryly. “I'd like to know why you robbed that banker. Why you took exactly twenty-five hundred dollars, not a penny more or less. Why you didn't spend the money after you got it, except to buy a horse and make the payment to Battle.”
Grant returned slowly to his place beside the fire. “What difference does it make?”
“None, more than likely. As I said, it's my professional curiosity.”
And Grant thought back to that day in Joplin which now seemed so long ago, and he tried to recall the anger that he had felt for Ortway at the time. But that anger, too, was strangely missing, and Ortway was a shadowy figure in the past. He said thoughtfully, almost to himself:
“It's a funny thing. It seemed so important then, but now I can hardly remember anything about it.”
The marshal shifted his position with great care. “You were a farmer, weren't you?”
“I had a farm. There's a difference. Most of my life was spent tramping from one place to the other; I was fifteen when I rode drag on my first cattle drive.” At that moment, glad that the silence had been broken, he could almost forget that Dagget was his enemy. “It's a funny thing,” he said again. “All those years I spent on the trail I thought of just one thing. Owning my own land and being my own boss. And I thought I never wanted to see another beef steer again, so I saved my trail money to buy a farm.”
He shook his head. “But I was no farmer. I guess I would have lost the place anyway, even if Ortway hadn't tricked me out of it, but I didn't think of that in Joplin that day. All I could think about was getting my money back —the twenty-five hundred dollars that Ortway had tricked me out of....”
Dagget sat stolidly, like some squat stone idol, but his eyes were slitted, thoughtful. “There's one more thing I'd like to know. Why did you drag me out of the storm?”
“I wish I knew!”
Dagget surprised him by grinning—that same savage expression, completely devoid of humor, that Grant had come to know so well. “I'll tell you why you did it! You figured you could make a deal, didn't you? You knew your string had run out, and getting me in your debt was the only chance you had!”
To Grant's own surprise he failed to respond to the marshal's prodding. “You always see the bad side of a man, don't you?”
“It's the business I'm in.”
“And in your business a man never saves a life without selfish reason?”
“That's about it.” Dagget still held his grin, but only with his mouth. His eyes were slitted and cautious, and he shifted again, grimacing. He rested against the wall, sweat beading his forehead, but he never took his eyes from Grant's face.
“Tell me about Rhea Muller,” he said at last.
Grant looked at him flatly, not with anger but with quiet hatred, then turned back to the door.
Dagget could not let him alone. In the back of his searching mind all was not exactly as it should have been, the pattern did not fit the material. The marshal was a blunt, calculating man and did not like subtleties. And there were shadings and overtones to this man who called himself Joe Grant that he could not fully understand, and this angered him.
“I guess,” he said harshly, “you must be pretty stuck on the Muller girl. Well, you're not the first one. Turk Valois had himself a bad case up in Bartlesville, but she threw him over, they say, when Turk lost his money.”
He fixed his eyes on Grant's back and saw it go rigid. Dagget grinned again and went on with his probing. “Rhea's got kind of a reputation with the wildcatters; she's got a good head and plenty of gumption. Why did she hire a hard case like you, Grant?”
“She hired Kirk Lloyd, didn't she?”
“That's different. Kirk's a gun shark, but he's not wanted by the law. Not in this country, anyway.” He shook his head. “But why would she hire a wanted man—it was a fool move:, and Rhea Muller's no fool.”
Abruptly Grant wheeled away from the door. “What are you trying to say?”
“I was just thinking maybe you've got the girl figured wrong. Maybe she really liked you from the first; maybe she still does. It's funny, isn't it, you not trusting her, and her with too much pride to do anything about it?”
Dagget's eyes almost flamed with intensity, then suddenly he sank back against the wall, breathing heavily. “That was hitting below the belt, wasn't it? Well, I fight that way when I have to.”
Grant's anger returned, a cold, compressed thing, and his words were as brittle as the ice that crackled in the trees outside the dugout. “You must enjoy your work, Marshal! Catching a man isn't enough for you, is it? You've got to build him up in his mind, show him a picture of everything he's ever wanted, and then grab it away!”
Exhaustion and pain were beginning to show on the marshal's face; the mask of clay was beginning to melt and sag at the corners of his hard mouth. “You won't believe it—but I don't hate you, Grant. But I had to see your face naked, unmasked. I had to see what you looked like after having the ground cut out from under you.” He sighed, and years of fatigue were behind the gesture. “I had to be sure in my own mind that you didn't kill Zack Muller.”
Words would not form in Grant's mouth; he could only stare.
Dagget seemed vaguely amused. “Did you think I'd forgotten how the girl's father was killed?”
“You thought I did it?”
“Had it done, maybe. A hard case arriving from nowhere, going to work for the Mullers, getting mixed up with the old man's daughter. Rhea was the old man's legal heir; she'll get all the money if the well comes in. Your money, if you'd married her.”
“You're crazy!” Grant hissed. “Rhea wouldn't marry me if I was the last man in the Territory!” Dagget shrugged. “Did you ask her?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GRANT LAY RIGIDLY on his thin blanket before the fireplace. Outside, a shifting wind slithered over the dugout roof and trees clashed their icy branches. A coyote ventured forth into the night and barked forlornly. But inside the dugout the silence was almost a tangible thing, with only the crackling of a small bark fire to break it.
Dagget, wrapped in his dark shadows against the wall, had not moved for a long time, and Grant listened intently to the marshal's measured breathing. He could not see whether Dagget was asleep; he could only guess at that. And hope.
Grant lifted himself quietly to his elbow, then to his knees, peering steadily into the darkness. Without a horse there was no hope of escape, but there might be a chance of bargaining with the search party when it came—providing he could get the revolvers away from the marshal now.
An inch at a time, hardly breathing, he made his way across the dirt floor until at last he could see Dagget's shapeless hulk slouched forward at the corner, the broken leg stretching straight out. Now he paused, taking one last deep breath before reaching across the marshal's body to where the pistols lay. Then, as he started the movement...
“That's far enough, Grant!”
