Clifford Simak - The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

“A murderer?” he asked. “Kathryn, your father might not like that. Think of it, a murderer eating with the banker and his charming daughter.”

Kathryn Delavan looked squarely at him. “I’ll have Daddy come over when he’s through work and walk home with you. Probably he’ll have something to talk with you about.”

“If you do that,” Carson said, “I’ll come.”

They stood for a minute, silent in the room. A fly buzzed against a windowpane and the noise was loud.

“You understand, don’t you, Kathryn?” asked Carson. “You understand why I have to fight Fennimore – fight for decent government? Fennimore came in here ten years ago. He had money, cattle and men. He settled down and took over the country – free range, he calls it now, but that’s just a term that he and men like him invented to keep for themselves things that were never theirs in the first place. It’s not democracy, Kathryn, it’s not American. It isn’t building the sort of country or the sort of town that common, everyday, ordinary folks want to live in.”

He hesitated, almost stammering. “It’s sometimes a dirty business, I know, but if gunsmoke’s the only answer, then it has to be gunsmoke.”

She reached out a hand and touched his arm. “I think I do understand,” she said.

She turned away then, walked toward the door.

“Daddy,” she told him, “will be over around six o’clock to bring you home.”

Carson moved to the window, watched her cross the street and enter Robinson’s store. He stood there for a long time, listening to the buzzing of the fly. Then he went back to the desk and settled down to work.

It was almost seven o’clock when Roger Delavan came, profuse with apology.

“Kathryn will be angry with me,” he said, fidgeting with his hat, “but I had some work to do, forgot all about the time.”

Outside, dusk had fallen on the street and the windows of the business places glowed with yellow light. There was a sharp nip in the rising wind, and Delavan turned up the collar of his coat. A few horses stood huddled, heads drooping at the hitching post in front of the North Star. Up the street a dog-fight suddenly erupted, as suddenly ceased.

Carson and Delavan turned west, their boots ringing on the sidewalk. The wind whispered and talked in the weeds and grass that grew in the vacant space surrounding the creaking, groaning windmill tower.

“I want to talk with you,” said Delavan, head bent into the wind, hat socked firmly on his head. “About what happened today. I am afraid you may think –”

“It was a business deal,” Carson told him. “You said so, yourself.”

“No, it wasn’t,” protested Delavan. “It was the rankest sort of bribery and attempt at intimidation I have ever seen. I’ve played along with Fennimore because of business reasons. Fennimore, after all, was the only business in Trail City for a long time. I blinked at a lot of his methods, thinking they were no more than the growing pains of any normal city. But after what happened today, I had to draw the line. I told Quinn this afternoon –”

Red flame flickered in the weeds beside the tower, and a gun bellowed in the dusk. Delavan staggered, coughed, fell to his knees. His bowler hat fell off, rolled into the street. The wind caught it and it rolled on its rim, like a spinning wagon-wheel.

A man, bent low, was running through the weeds, half-seen in the thickening dark.

Carson’s hand dipped for his gun, snatched it free, but the man was gone, hidden in the thicker shadows where no lamplight reached from the windows on the street.

Carson slid back the gun, knelt beside Delavan and turned him over. The man was a dead weight in his arms; his head hung limply. Carson tore open his coat, bent one ear to his chest, heard no thudding heart.

Slowly, he laid the banker back on the ground, pulled the coat about him, then straightened up. The bowler hat no longer was in sight, but a half-dozen men were running down the street. Among them, he recognized Bill Robinson, the new store owner, by the white apron tied around his middle.

“That you, Robinson?” asked Carson.

“Yeah, it’s me,” said Robinson. “We heard a shot.”

“Someone shot Delavan,” said Carson. “He’s dead.”

They came up and stood silently for a moment, looking at the black shape on the ground. One of them, Carson saw, was Caleb Storm, the barber. Another was Lee Weaver, the liveryman. The others he knew only from having seen them about town. Men from some of the ranches.

Robinson glanced over his shoulder at the North Star. “Guess they didn’t hear the shot in there,” he said. “Probably helling it up a bit.”

“I’m thinking about Kathryn,” said Carson. “Delavan’s daughter. Someone will have to tell her.”

“That’s right,” declared Robinson. He considered it a moment, a square, blocky man, almost squatty in the semi-darkness of the street.

“My old woman will go and stay with her,” he said, “but she can’t break the news to her, not all alone. Someone else will have to help her do it.”

He looked at Carson. “You were going there just now. Kathryn told me when she came in to buy some spuds.”

Carson nodded. “I suppose you’re right, Bill. Let’s get Delavan in someplace.”

Storm and two of the other men lifted the body, started down the street.

“Come down to the store for a minute,” said Robinson. “The old lady will be ready to go in a minute or so.”

Carson followed Robinson. Weaver lagged until he fell in step with the editor. He stepped close to Carson and pitched his voice low.

“I got word to Purvis,” he said. “He sent out riders. Some of the boys will be coming into town.”

“I’ll be back at the office,” Carson told him, “as soon as I can get away.”

Feet pattered on the sidewalk behind them and a woman’s voice cried out: “Daddy! Daddy!”

Weaver and Carson spun around.

It was Kathryn Delavan, running across the street, sobs catching in her throat. She would have rushed by, but Carson reached out and stopped her. “No, Kathryn,” he said. “Stay back here with us.”

She clung to him. “You were so late,” she said, “that I came to see –”

He held her close, awkward in his comforting.

“You don’t know who –”

Carson shook his head. “It was too dark.”

Robinson lumbered through the dusk toward them. “Perhaps,” he said, “she might want to come to the store. My wife is there.”

The girl stepped away from Carson. “No,” she said, “I want to go back home. Martha is there. I’ll be all right there with her.”

She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “You will bring him home, too?”

Robinson’s voice was understanding, almost soft. “Yes, miss, just as soon – In an hour or two.”

She moved closer, took Carson’s arm, and they moved west up the street, toward the house where supper waited for a man who would not eat it.

The clock on the bar said ten when Carson pushed open the door of the North Star.

The place was half-full, and in the crowd Carson singled out a handful of Fennimore’s riders – Clay Duffy, John Nobles, Madden and Farady at the bar; Saunders and Downey at a table in a listless poker game. The rest of the men were in from other ranches or were from the town.

Carson walked to the bar and signaled to the bartender.

The man came over. “What’ll it be?”

“Fennimore around?” asked Carson.

“You don’t give a damn for your life, do you?” snarled the man.

Carson’s voice turned to ice. “Is Fennimore here?”

The man motioned with his head. “In the back.”

For a moment the room had grown silent, but once again it took up its ordinary clatter of tongue and glass and poker chip. One or two men smiled at Carson as he walked by, but others either turned their heads or did not change expression.