Ride the Man Down Read Free

waitin’ for you up at the house. Danfelser too.”
    â€œAll right, Ike,” Will said and turned again toward the house.
    As he approached the near wing of the dark building he saw the door open and Sam Danfelser move into its frame. The shape of him was big and blocky in the doorway, and a quick disappointment that Will could not analyze came over him and was gone immediately. This was the man Celia Evarts was going to marry, the man that dead Phil Evarts had approved for his daughter. Hatchet would be his someday, and he had every right to be here, and it occurred to Will now that his own weariness had made him impatient. As he came up he said, “How are you, Sam?”
    Danfelser did not answer. He stepped aside, and Will got a brief glimpse of his square face, of the troubled, surly alertness there. He was a young man with a full-jawed, wind-ruddied face topped by short-cut hair as bleached as new rope. Not so tall as Will, he was heavier, thicker across the chest, and when he stepped back out of the door there was a hint of tremendous stubborn strength in his movements.
    Will stepped into the office now, pulling off his Stetson, and nodded to Hatchet’s owner, John Evarts, who was sitting on the worn leather sofa. Will moved across the room, hearing Sam close the door behind him, and pitched his hat on the rickety roll-top desk in the corner. He heard Celia Evarts coming down the corridor that led onto the rest of the house and he glanced up, his back still to Evarts and Danfelser.
    Celia Evarts came in, then, tying the belt of her maroon wrapper, and when she saw Will she smiled. Will’s answering grin was easy, friendly, and it came fleetingly to him again that in this girl he was seeing a pleasant and lovely joke of nature. For she had been sired by a man who was big and black and ugly and whose eyes windowed the tough, reckless spirit of him, a spirit without mercy and with only meager friendliness. Yet in this girl Phil Evarts’ bony ugliness had been refined into a thin-faced, slim loveliness with hair like her father’s falling thick and curling to her shoulders. She was small, and her eyes were Phil’s—as gray and reckless, but with an open friendliness in them. She was Phil Evarts, blood and soul, but with the dross gone.
    She stepped just into the room and put her shoulders against the wall, and Will turned and said mildly, “Ike told me,” and sat on the desk.
    John Evarts said diffidently, “Well, it may not mean anything, you know.”
    Sam moved away from the door and said heavily, without looking at Will, “That was a simple trick to fall for, Will.”
    â€œWasn’t it?” Will agreed.
    He was watching Evarts now, noting that he had pulled on trousers and coat over his nightshirt. He was a kindly-seeming man with a mussed ruff of gray hair over a face mellowed by small triumphs in small ambitions. He was the owner of Hatchet now, named so by his brother who had so little faith in the shrewdness of women that he had put his ranch in the hands of a man without any shrewdness at all. The irony of it was never more apparent than now, Will thought, and he did not speak.
    Evarts said sleepily, “I think Ike is being spooked. Bide’s roundup boss. He can order the wagon wherever he wants.”
    He looked at Will and Will was stubbornly silent, and Evarts crossed his legs with a kind of irritability in the movement.
    â€œYou can’t keep a roundup crew off your range,” he went on, almost pleading. “It probably doesn’t mean a thing.”
    Will murmured softly, flatly, “He’ll stay there,” and saw the distress mount in John Evart’s eyes. He had seen it there before, when John Evarts had to make a decision and refused to. He would refuse this one, just as he had refused to face each crisis since Phil Evarts’ death. And the long list of these was graven in Will’s memory as irrevocably as