The Mountain Cat

Chapter 16

By two o’clock Friday afternoon, the hour at which Clara Brand was shut in a room alone to think it over, the commotion at the Brand house on Vulcan Street had almost completely subsided. Cars, slowing down for their occupants to stare, frequently passed in the street and a uniformed policeman was hanging around the sidewalk in front to discourage collections of pedestrians, but that was all. Intent heavy-footed men were no longer peeking under shrubs to find where a revolver, hurled through a window by Delia Brand after shooting Rufus Toale, might have landed; that activity had been stopped some five hours earlier, when the ludicrous straw hat and the bloodstains had been discovered at the edge of the flower bed in the churchyard, as had been a similar exhaustive search inside the house itself. The same discovery had freed Delia from any further badgering, which had gone on intermittently all night; at least twenty times she had had to repeat her conversation with Toale after his staggering in, or rather, his monologue; and thrice she had re-enacted the scene for them, with her on the couch as she had been and Sheriff Tuttle in the chair doing Toale.

Now, at two o’clock, there was no one in the house with her except Ty Dillon, not even the reliquiae of the pastor who had fought his way there on God’s errand and had been choked to death by his own blood before he could complete it. Upstairs in Delia’s bedroom, she was lying down and Ty was slowly pacing the floor. Each time he turned at the end of his beat he halted and gazed at her, as she lay there on her back with her eyes closed and her fists clenched at her sides, but he said nothing. They had talked it all out. They were agreed: that they believed Clara’s story and she had no knowledge of the shooting of Toale; that whatever had motivated Lem Sammis’s request to Clara to withhold information from the county attorney, she should disregard it and tell everything she knew about everything; that if she were arrested Phil Escott should be her counsel; that anything like peace of mind and a tolerable existence for the Brand girls, in Wyoming or anywhere else, was impossible until the murders of Dan Jackson and Rufus Toale were cleared up; that the murder of their own father two years ago should be included, in view of the stigma which gossip had attached to their mother’s name; that they should not run away from it but should stick in Cody and see it through; and that if they, Ty and Delia, were to do anything about it, they hadn’t the slightest idea where to begin. Quinby Pellett, who had been there and talked with them for two hours, had likewise agreed to all those points, including the last one; he had no more cards up his sleeve, he confessed in cold and impotent rage, like his knowledge of the theft of Delia’s handbag; and he had gone off with vague mutterings about what he would do and what he would see to. That was the hopeless and dreary situation at two o’clock when Ty, halting for the hundredth time to gaze at Delia and to wish to God she would relax or take the drug the doctor had left her, heard the doorbell ring.

He opened the door to leave the bedroom as silently as possible, but Delia opened her eyes. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. I bribed that cop to keep everybody out. I’ll see.”

“Maybe it’s Clara — no, she has a key.”

“I’ll see.”

Downstairs, when he opened the door, he found two men standing there: the cop, and towering beside him one with a weathered face and nearly white hair, his eyes scarcely more than slits. The cop broke in on Ty:

“Yeah, I know, but the only way to stop him would have been to plug him one. He’s like a burro in everything but size. Maybe you don’t know who he is? It’s Squint Hurley. The one that was tried for the murder of Charlie Brand and got acquitted.”

Ty regarded the old prospector. “What do you want, Hurley?”

“I want to see Charlie Brand’s girl on a business matter.”

“Which one?”

“The older one, I guess she is. The one that was working down at Jackson’s office.”

“That’s Clara. She’s not here. She’s down at the courthouse.”

“When’ll she be back?”

“I don’t know. Possibly not till tonight.”

Hurley grunted. “I’ll wait here on the steps,” he said and turned, tramped the width of the porch, and sat on the top step.

“If you need help moving him” — the cop grinned — “phone the station for a squad.” He detoured around Hurley and strode down the path toward the sidewalk, where a group of schoolgirls had halted and seemed about to enter for an attack on the house.

Ty demanded of the denim shirt that covered the broad back, “What do you want to see Miss Brand about?”

“Who are you?” Hurley asked without turning.

“I’m Tyler Dillon, Clara Brand’s lawyer. Also Delia Brand’s lawyer.”

Hurley grunted. “Wherever you go in this damn town you run into a lawyer.” He twisted his head around. “Delia? That’s the one I found in Jackson’s office the other night with the gun in her hand. Maybe I might see her instead of her sister. Is she here?”

“What do you want to see her about?”

“Business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Important business. It ought to be important to Charlie Brand’s girl if she’s got any curiosity about who killed her dad.”

“Explain it to me and I’ll tell her about it.”

Hurley shook his head. “I guess not. I guess I’ll just wait here till the older one comes.”

Ty stood, frowning, through a long silence. Finally he asked, “You say it is something about the death of her father?”

“It sure is.”

“Wasn’t it you that discovered Brand’s body in that cabin?”

“It sure was.”

“Wait here, will you?”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Ty went in and back upstairs to the bedroom. Delia had swung her feet around and was sitting on the edge of the bed with her shoulders drooping. “Who is it, Ty? Anyone?”

He told her, and then advised her: “If I were you, Del, I’d go down and see what he has to say. You might as well be doing that as lying there clenching your fists...”

She consented to go, but with no eagerness, saying that if Squint Hurley knew anything he would have told it long ago. She brushed vaguely at her hair without making much impression on it, pulled her shoes from under the bed and put them on, and followed Ty downstairs. Not caring to enter the front room after what had happened there the evening before, she went to the dining room and was seated at the table, plucking at an edge of the embroidered cover, when Ty, having gone to the porch for the visitor, ushered him in. They sat. Hurley, on the imitation Sheraton chair, looked even more incongruous than he had in the courthouse office, but Delia didn’t notice it. Looking at him, she was trying to control the quivering of her nerves as she remembered the scene when that man who had been accused of killing her father had last entered a room and found her there.

She mastered the quivering and said, “Mr. Dillon says you want to see me about something.”

Hurley nodded. “You or your sister.” Keeping his squint directed at her, he aimed a thumb at Ty. “We don’t need him. I don’t do much talking anyhow and I do it better with just one.”

“That’s all right. He’s my... my lawyer.”

Hurley grunted. “You’re starting in awful young to have lawyers. I don’t know, maybe I ought to wait for your sister. It’s a matter of business. I’ve got to get back into the hills and I want a stake. I know a place in the Cheeford range—”

“Mr. Dillon said you told him it was about my father.”

“Sure it is. But I’d like to mention about the stake first. You’re Charlie Brand’s girl and I’d trust you same as I would your dad. I’d go ahead and tell you and trust you for the ante, but what makes it hard to talk is this lawyer sitting here. I go on and tell you and then he begins to talk and when he gets through neither one of us has got anything.”

Ty said, “I’ll go out if you want me to. But if you tell Miss Brand something, and she wants to grubstake you, I not only won’t talk against it, I’ll help her put up the stake. It’s true I’m her lawyer, but also I’m... we’re going to be married.”

“Oh.” The prospector slowly shook his head. “That don’t make it any better. I expect you’ll find it makes it worse. But I’m no good as a trader — if I was, I wouldn’t be reduced to asking a woman for a stake at my age. Anyhow, I ought to tell it for Charlie Brand’s sake, and by all hell, I won’t tell it to that coyote up at the courthouse. I told him too much already.”

“You mean Baker? The county attorney?”

“That’s him. He had me in there yesterday and I mentioned maybe he would stake me, and from the way he took it you might think I was a desert rat. I had already told him that that day when I got to the cabin and found Charlie Brand there dead, when I turned him over there was a piece of paper under him with writing on it, and I stuck it in my boot lining the way I do, and when I put Charlie on his horse and took him out to Sugarbowl and Ken Chambers came and began to slobber his bile, I didn’t mention the paper because I knew it wouldn’t do any good and I thought I’d better hang onto it. I never did mention it. I would have to Lem Sammis later, but he treated me like a desert rat, too. So I never mentioned it to anyone till Tuesday morning this week when I showed it to Dan Jackson and give it to him and he put it in his wallet, and he staked me. Three hundred dollars. I paid a couple of debts, and that night like a jackass I went to The Haven with Slim Fraser and dropped it all on the wheel. So since Jackson had been glad to get that paper I thought he might put up another stake and I went upstairs to see him. That was when I found you there with that gun in your hand.”

He shifted his squint to Ty and declared, “You ain’t much of a lawyer or you’d be asking questions.”

“Go on and tell it.”

“I already told it. That’s all. That’s what I told that Baker yesterday. Except that Baker told me that the piece of paper wasn’t in Jackson’s wallet when they went over him, so whoever killed him must’ve took it, so since they didn’t even take his money from him it must’ve been the piece of paper they killed him for. So whoever killed Charlie Brand two years ago killed Dan Jackson Tuesday night. That’s plain reasoning. Then of course Baker wanted to know what was on the paper and I told him I couldn’t tell him because I could read reading but I couldn’t read writing. So I told him it was a piece of white paper about the size of my hand, and it had been folded up, and the writing on it was five or six words, and that was all I could tell him—”

“You couldn’t tell him what was written on it?”

“No, sir, I couldn’t.”

“And the paper’s gone?”

“It sure is. Took out of his wallet by whoever shot him.”

“And you say you found it under Charlie Brand’s body?”

“Yep. When I turned him over.”

“And now nobody knows what was written on the paper?”

“That’s the way it looks.”

“And this is what you came to tell Miss Brand?”

“That’s it exactly. To tell her all that, and then tell her what was written on the paper if she thinks she might like to know.”

They both stared. “But you said you couldn’t read it.”

“No I didn’t. I said I told that Baker I couldn’t read it. After he acted the way he did about the grubstake—”

“Oh.” Ty was squinting back at him. “I get you. You want a stake. If Miss Brand will stake you, you’ll tell her what was on the paper.”

“That’s about it.”

“What if there never was any such paper? What if you made all this up?”

Hurley grunted. “That would be too bad. It sure would. But I didn’t make it up. I lugged that paper around with me for two years.”

“What if Miss Brand refuses to stake you? What are you going to do then?”

“That’s just the hell of it.” Hurley looked disgusted. “I’ll have to tell her what was on the paper anyway. She’s Charlie Brand’s girl and she has a right to know. But I’m telling you that place I know down on the Cheeford range—”

“I’ll stake him, Ty,” Delia blurted. “I have enough saved up so—”

“I’ll stake him myself.” Ty pulled papers and envelopes from his pocket, dumped them on the table, and found a checkfold among them. From another pocket he took a fountain pen and laid it on the checkfold. “All right, Hurley. Tell us what was on the paper, and I’ll give you a check now, or if you prefer cash—”

“I don’t want it now. I don’t want it till they’re letting me leave this town.” The old prospector’s lips twitched with an eagerness he could not conceal, and the tips of his fingers, one missing, were rubbing the table cover. “You mean you’ll stake me? Up to three hundred dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Half and half?”

“Whatever is usual.”

“All right.” His lips twitched again. “You don’t sound much like a lawyer. All right. What was on that paper was ‘Mountain cat ready for prey four hundred and fifty WD.’ ”

Delia exclaimed, “Mountain cat!”

Ty said urgently, “Wait a minute! Was it written in pencil or ink?”

“Ink. Black ink.”

“Was it — would you know if it was in Charlie Brand’s handwriting?”

“It wasn’t. I knew Charlie’s writing. This was big and round and heavy.”

“Was the whole thing written right along on one line?”

“No. ‘Mountain cat’ was on one line and below that was ‘ready for prey’ and below that was the ‘four hundred and fifty’ and below that was ‘WD.’ ”

“Was the four hundred and fifty written out or in figures?”

“In figures. Just a four and a five and a zero, no decimals or anything. Then the ‘WD’ was in capital letters, at the bottom.”

Delia exclaimed, “Ty! I tell you the ‘mountain cat’ stood for Wynne Cowles! I tell you it did! She was after Dad just then, trying to find out about his business — he used to joke about it at home—”

“It might have,” Ty conceded, “or it might not. Wynne Cowles is certainly always ready for prey. But the ‘WD’ sounds like a signature, initials. WD?”

“I don’t know. But the ‘mountain cat’ is Wynne Cowles.”

“Possibly. Do you know anyone whose initials are WD, Hurley?”

“Nope. I’ve had that in my head for two years.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t Brand’s own writing?”

“As sure as sand eats water.”

“You say the paper was under him? How, under him?”

“Just under him. I turned him over to get a hold to carry him out to the horse and the paper was there, folded up.”

“It might have been there before he ever got there.”

“Damn lawyer,” Hurley said impatiently. “Who put it there? I had been in and out of that cabin for two months and no one else.”

“It might have been just a paper he had with him and it fell out of his wallet when the murderer was going through him for the money.”

“Charlie Brand never carried a wallet. When he had a bulk of money like that he kept it belted to him, and papers, receipts and things, in a little leather case he could put in a saddlebag. It was there with the saddle on a post outdoors — hadn’t been opened.” Hurley’s eyes were buried by his squint. “If you want to know how that paper got there I’ll tell you.”

“You mean you know?”

“I mean I’ll tell you. I ain’t a lawyer, but I can figure out how a thing worked. I’ve had two years to figure this. The fellow that killed him left the road about two miles north of Sugarbowl, across the hills on the hoof—”

“Why two miles north?”

“Because that’s the only place along that road you can hide a car where it won’t be seen, where them cliffs are.”

“Why on the hoof? Why not on a horse?”

The prospector looked disgusted. “And exactly where the hell would he get a horse and no one know it?”

“All right. Go ahead.”

Delia put in, “That’s right about the money belt and the leather case. He always took them on a trip.”

“Sure he did. Who says he didn’t? So this fellow hoofs it across the hills and gets to the cabin before Charlie does—”

“Why before?”

“Because Charlie was riding Bert Oakley’s palomino he had got at Sugarbowl, and he had tied him to a post just outside the cabin door. That horse has got a habit when he’s tied, if anybody comes anywhere near except the man that’s riding him, he snorts fit to rip a gut. Charlie would have heard him and gone to the door, and he probably would have got his gun out with all that money on him. But his gun was still in the holster, and where he fell and died he was all of ten, twelve feet away from the door. So the fellow was already there, hid in the cabin.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, Charlie comes in and the fellow shoots him. It only takes one shot, as close as that. What he wants is the money and he goes after it in a hurry because he don’t know I’m going to be five or six hours late on account of my leg. That belt is good and bulky, and he takes off his coat or jacket so he can strap the belt up high on him and when he puts the coat back on it will be covered when he’s hoofing it back. Them hills is plenty lonesome, but it always might be someone sees him. He thinks I might be coming any minute and he’s nervous and he works fast, trying to get the belt off, and he don’t notice that when he jerks his coat off a piece of paper drops out of a pocket. When he turns Charlie over, working at the belt, he flops him on top of the piece of paper and never sees it.”

Delia was chewing at her lip. Ty was frowning, intent. He demanded, “Why did he hoof it back? Why didn’t he take Brand’s horse?”

“I wish to God he had. Even Ken Chambers couldn’t have locked me up if that palomino had been untied and gone and found two miles north of Sugarbowl. That fellow was smart enough to let the horse alone. Speaking of which.” Hurley squinted at Delia and back at Ty. “Ken Chambers is in Cody now. For all I know he was there Tuesday night when Jackson was killed. Whoever killed Jackson took that piece of paper from him. All I’m doing is telling you what was on that paper, but if I was you and I was really smart I’d get so curious about Ken Chambers I’d split my britches.”

“Do you think Ken Chambers killed Brand?”

“I ain’t saying I think. I say I’d be curious.”

“Have you any reason to suspect him? Any evidence?”

“Just common sense. I know him, that’s all.”

“Could he have done it? Where was he that day?”

“I don’t know. That’s part of what I meant I’d be curious about.” Ty shook his head, scowling, and was silent.

Delia said, “It couldn’t have been Chambers if the ‘mountain cat’ on the paper meant Wynne Cowles. I’m sure it did, Ty. How could there have been any connection between her and Chambers?”

“I don’t know, Del.” Ty let her have the scowl. “That damn paper that no one has even seen except Hurley here, and now it’s gone.” He shifted the scowl again. “Was it good paper or cheap paper?”

“Well — it was white paper.”

“Nothing else on it at all, nothing printed.”

“Not a derned thing.”

“Was it cheap and easy to tear like newspaper, or was it good tough nice white paper?”

“I didn’t tear it. It was just white paper.”

“You carried it in your boot lining for two years. Did it begin to come apart where it was folded?”

“No, it hung together all right. Of course it didn’t improve any as it went along. It got kinda seedy.”

“About as big as your hand?”

“About that. Maybe a little bigger.”

“What was the writing — wait a minute.” From the assortment on the table which he had taken from his pocket with the checkfold, Ty took an envelope, and on the back of it, with his fountain pen, wrote “mountain cat.” He handed it to Hurley, “Was the writing anything like that?”

The prospector squinted at it. “Not a bit. Bigger and more ink.”

“Forget the ink. That depends on the kind of pen you use. Just the kind of writing. Here, Del, you write it. Mountain cat.”

She wrote it on another envelope. Hurley took it and shook his head at it. “That’s even worse.”

“Well, here. Give him the pen, Del. Write it down yourself, as near as you can the way it looked.”

“Not me.” Hurley didn’t take the pen. “Except my name, I ain’t wrote more than a hundred words in forty years.”

“Try it.”

“No, sir. I could do it better with a pick on a chunk of rock.”

“But I just want to get an idea what the writing was like. Turn over that envelope and look on the other side. Was it anything — oh, it’s typewritten. Look at that other one. Anything like that?”

Hurley looked at the inscription on the envelope. “A little more, but not much. This is stubby.”

“Try this one.” Ty tossed another envelope across.

Hurley picked it up. As he regarded it, his lips slowly parted and his squint widened until he nearly had eyes. He lifted them from the envelope and gazed at Ty. “By... all... hell,” he said incredulously. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“That’s the same writing! That’s it!”

Delia reached across and snatched the envelope. She saw, written on paper of good quality: Tyler Dillon, Esq., 214 Mountain Street, Cody, Wyoming.

And in the upper left-hand corner, neatly printed: Broken Circle Ranch — Cody, Wyoming.

She dropped the envelope on the table and Ty picked it up. She said, only half a question, “Wynne Cowles.”

He nodded, glared at the envelope, and then at Hurley. “You mean the writing on the piece of paper was like this?”

“I mean it was that.” Hurley looked as if someone had pulled a coyote out of a hat. “That word ‘mountain.’ I couldn’t mistake that word ‘mountain’ as often as I’ve looked at it.”

“It looks exactly the same?”

“It is the same.”

“I’ll be damned.” Ty stared at the envelope. He looked at Delia. “That’s luck. I got this yesterday at the office, she was sending me a paper connected with her divorce suit, and ordinarily I’d just have tossed the envelope—”

“Oh! It was a paper connected with her divorce suit?”

“Certainly. What did you think— Hey! I’m dumb and so are you! It was there anyway — that WD! Two years ago her name wasn’t Wynne Cowles, it was Wynne Durocher! She not only wrote it, she signed it!”

“I was right, Ty. Mountain cat.”

“Yeah, you were right.”

“And that paper she wrote was found under Dad’s body. So she was — she knows something about it.”

“Not necessarily. You’ve got to go at it logically.” Ty screwed up his lips. “With what Hurley says about the writing, plus the WD at the bottom, we can regard it as settled that she wrote it. Okay. Then either she dropped it in the cabin herself and she did the murder, or it was dropped there by someone else and she knows who she gave it to. That’s easy. Ask her when she wrote that paper and what she did with it. But it’s not so easy if she dropped it in the cabin herself. In that case, since the paper is gone, there’s no evidence or proof of anything and it would be foolish to put her on her guard by asking her about it. So maybe that’s not the thing to do. Look here, Del. This is no time to hide anything, no matter what it is. Do you know of any motive Wynne Cowles might have had for killing your father?”

“No.” Delia looked straight at him. “And I wouldn’t hide anything, Ty. Not now. It’s not a question of vengeance, it’s stopping this... all this horrible... and Clara down there alone...” She swallowed hard. “And I don’t think Wynne Cowles killed Dad. She had no reason to. She wouldn’t do that anyway, I mean take that money from him. I don’t like her, but that isn’t a thing she would do. We must ask her why she wrote that on paper and who she gave it to. Somebody must.”

“It would be a big mistake if she had a hand in it. Maybe she didn’t do it herself but she was behind it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Ty gazed at Hurley. “Did you ever get a stake from Wynne Cowles?”

“Never heard of her.”

“The woman that bought the Broken Circle ranch.”

“Oh. Heard of her but never saw her.”

“Or did you ever get a stake from Paul Emery?”

“Hell no. That little squirt.”

Ty sat and frowned. “Well,” he said finally, “I can go and ask her. It seems pretty damned naïve. Of course there’s another alternative we might want to consider, we can turn it all over to the county attorney. He has resources—”

Hurley growled. “You mean that Baker? And let him lock me up because I told him I can’t read? I swear to God if I get locked up again—”

Ty waved it aside. “It’s no good anyway. Baker’s so deep in the politics of it he couldn’t see straight even if he wanted to, and there’s no assurance he wants to. We can’t trust any of them. The sheriff is only Baker’s office boy. Frank Phelan is Lem Sammis’s man and this may touch Sammis.” He gathered the papers from the table, including the envelope addressed by Wynne Cowles, crammed them into his pocket, abruptly shoved his chair back, and got up. “All right. I’ll go and see her.”

Delia arose. “I’ll go along.”

“No, Del. Please. She’s more apt to spill it to one than to two. I ought to go alone. And you ought to be here if Clara comes home. Another thing. What are you going to do, Hurley?”

“Me?” The prospector grunted. “Go to my room and sit. I’d rather do that than tramp these derned sidewalks.”

“Do you realize you’re a target?”

“Target for what?”

“For a bullet. Jackson was in possession of evidence against the murderer of Brand, and he was killed and it was taken: Rufus Toale — oh, you don’t know about that. But Toale was killed for the same reason. You are now the only living person who can offer a scrap of evidence against Brand’s murderer. You saw that paper and what was written on it. Chances are the murderer knows it. Who knows that you told the county attorney you can’t read?”

“Search me.”

“Well. I’m just saying that maybe you’d like to go on living.”

Hurley grunted again. “I’ve been pretty successful at it for close on seventy years.”

“I think you ought to stay here. Inside this house. There’s a spare bed upstairs.”

“Me?” Hurley’s squint widened. “In this kind of an outfit?” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “No, I guess I’ll do better if I mosey along to my room.”

“My car’s outside. I’ll drive you.”

“Nope.” He was positive. “Rather walk.”

“Suit yourself. Burro is right.” Ty turned to Delia. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. It takes forty minutes to get out there, if I don’t find her in town. I’ll come straight here.”

“Do.” She touched his arm. “Ty? Please...”

“I know, Del. I’ll do my very best.”

He kissed her. A blush of embarrassment showed on Squint Hurley’s cheek, faint but perceptible on his weathered old skin, as he hastily turned his face away.