Clifton Adams - Boomer

Dagget's mouth twisted into what might have passed as a grim smile. “You're wastin' your time. You wouldn't stand a chance of getting back to Sabo.”

“I'm holed up in an old Boomer dugout upstream. It's not exactly fancy but it's tight; we won't freeze.”

The marshal gritted his teeth and said nothing as Grant pulled his belt tight around the splinted leg, then he lay still for a moment, breathing hard. “You're aiming to take me back to your dugout,” he said flatly. “Is that it?”

“Unless you'd rather stay here.”

“Before you go too far, we'd better get something straight. I'll not be bought, not even with my own life. As long as I'm alive I'll be after you for robbing that Joplin bank.”

“I figured you would be,” Grant said harshly.

Numb and near blinded, their clothing crackling with ice, Grant dragged the marshal the length of Slush Creek until they stumbled over the cottonwood log crossed with brush. Both men paused, breathing hard, the marshal holding fast to Grant's left arm.

“We'll have to climb the bank here,” Grant said, almost yelling.

Dagget nodded, but at the first step his icy face went gray and Grant had to catch him in his arms. He stood for a moment, his mind as numb as his body. He surveyed the sheer creek bank as a mountaineer might gaze hopelessly up at Everest's highest peak. In Grant's mind Dagget had ceased to be a marshal, or even another man. It was almost as if this dead, bulky weight was part of himself, a useless appendage that must be dragged along wherever he went. Slowly he tuned his ears to the wind and to the noise of driving sleet as it ripped the bark from cottonwood and scrub oak. He saw himself, no longer standing, but sitting leisurely in the snow, waiting for the insidious cold to work its painless magic.

At last a slow, insignificant fear began to stir inside him, and he thought, “I'm freezing. This is the way it is when the temperature drops thirty degrees in as many minutes.”

Abruptly, in a kind of bleak panic, he shoved himself to his feet and attacked the icy creek bank, still dragging Dagget's bulky weight with one hand. He crashed through the tall weeds standing like giant upside-down icicles in front of the dugout, and shoved open the stockade door.

Only after several minutes of rubbing his hands before the fire did he realize that he had left Dagget in the open doorway. He pulled the marshal inside and blocked the opening again.

“Dagget!”

Water from the thawing snow rolled down the marshal's face like giant tears. At last Dagget opened his eyes and glanced coldly at Grant. “This is quite a place you've got here.”

“It'll have to do.” Quickly he examined the marshal's leg and saw that the splints had held. “I'll pull you over to the fire; it won't he long before you're thawed out.”

Dagget sighed, a strange, hard cast on his blunt features. “Just a minute; there's something I have to do first.” Propping himself up on one elbow, he reached into his wind-breaker and drew his revolver. “You're under arrest, Grant. Let me have your gun.”

Grant felt himself go rigid. “You don't waste any time, do you?”

Dagget's voice was bleak, without tone or timbre. “I warned you how it was going to be. I didn't ask you to save my life.”

Grant's voice was almost a snarl. “I should have left you out there to freeze!”

“Maybe... but you didn't. I'm still alive and I'm still a deputy U. S. marshal.” He motioned with the muzzle of his revolver. “You're under arrest and I want your gun.”

“And if I don't give it to you?”

“You will, because you know I mean business.”

The day was an endless, howling eternity. Grant kept just enough wood in the fireplace to drive back the icy chill and warned himself to stay awake and alert. Sooner or later Dagget would have to sleep; eventually he would have to give in to exhaustion and pain.

But the marshal showed no signs of giving in. Against the far wall in the dark shadows, his face expressionless, the color of yellow clay, he sat hour after hour, the revolver handy at his side. As the day dragged on, Grant became acutely aware of his own hunger, the growling and sour nervousness of his stomach.

“I brought no provisions here,” he said at last, watching Dagget's face. “We've got nothing to eat.”

The marshal shrugged faintly. “The storm won't last more than a day or so. Then somebody from Sabo or Kiefer will come looking for me.”

“We're snowed in. How are they going to find us?”

Dagget shook his head as if to say he'd worry about that when the time came.

Once more the dugout became heavy with silence. Snow from the outside had clogged the chimney opening 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....”