The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

Deadliest Enemy!

Originally published in Detective Tales, October 1952.

I closed the car door behind me and bored my way across the village street through the lashing snow, moving toward the lighted warmth of Len Abbott’s general store. It was a bitterly cold day, an angry north wind hurling the snow down through the mountain passes. Though it was only four-thirty in the afternoon, the village lay cloaked in a thick, gray near-darkness.

I stomped my feet and shook my coat when I was inside the store. Len was dozing behind the counter. Three mountain men were grouped on nail kegs around the potbelly stove in the center of the store. Len said, “Howdy, doc.”

“Any mail for me?”

Len handed over a couple of envelopes and a small, brown package, mail from relatives and sample drugs from a pharmaceutical house. I stuffed the mail in my pockets, and bellied up to the stove, feeling its warmth on the full, red flesh of my cold face.

Though a mountain doctor has little time for such things, I always enjoyed a stop-off in Len’s. Like the mountains, the store hadn’t changed in its reflection of a way of life. The store meant grub when crops went bad or a man’s livestock sickened. It was a meeting place where Saturday poke buyers swapped news of Dogwood Mountain for news of Jackson’s Cove. Girls in their teens flirted behind their mamas’ backs and in summer young bucks pitched horseshoes or staged weight lifting contests with sacks of grain in the store yard. The main thing I liked about the store was its smell. It smelled just as it had when I was a boy coming to town with pa in the buggy when Len’s pa ran the store, fifty years ago. Time had blended the odors of new harness, salt meat, chewing tobacco, fresh denim, fertilizer, snuff, candy, crackers, until there wasn’t another smell quite like it on earth.

The trio about the stove continued their various occupations: one dozing, one chewing homemade twist, one just as studiously whittling thin shavings into the shallow sandbox in which the stove was set.

The tobacco chewer fried spittle against the cherry-red side of the stove and said, “Doc, I hear Edie Clane has had her baby.”

A silence took possession of the store. The whittler paused; the tobacco chewer stilled his lank, lean, stubbled jaw; the dozing man cracked his eyelids.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Rufe — the sheriff — told me. Said he was up there at the Clane place this morning, figuring the weather must have drove Jack in out of the hills. Said Edie is poorly from having the child with only a midwife.”

I felt the muscles on the back of my neck tighten. They were looking at me, waiting for me to affirm the report. But I didn’t affirm or deny. I said, “Edie can take whatever comes her way.” Then I turned up my coat collar against the wind and left the store.

Rufe was getting ready to leave his office when I got there, a swirl of snow entering with me. He grinned at me and finished stuffing the ends of his muffler under his leather jacket. He was a tall, handsome young man. There was rawboned, sinewy strength in the sweep of his shoulders and quick intelligence in his brown eyes. Rufe was born an inch above the average cut of man. He was hard-working, honest, a leader among his people. There was only this one bad flaw in him, this blind, unreasonable hatred he bore for Jack Clane. I, and all those close to him, knew that it was like a festering sore, eating away at the good fibers that made him a man.

“Doc,” he said, “this weather has brought the blood ready to bust out of your cheeks.”

“Not only the weather,” I retorted.

He raised his brows and went about pulling his hat down snug on his head.

“You know what I’m talking about!” I said. “It’s a low-handed trick you’re trying, putting out that rumor that Edie is sick from having her baby all alone. You know that word will get to Jack when he stops at some cabin for food or passes a hunter in the hills. You figure a new born babe and an ailing wife is bait strong enough to get Jack in the trap you’ll be ready to spring on him.”

“I’m the law,” Rufe said, “and he’s a would-be murderer on the run. If I can’t find him by going out in the hills, I’ll make him come to me. Doc, whose side are you on anyway?”

We stood a moment eye to eye, glaring. Then I sighed. “You young fool, whose side have I always been on? This poison you’re nursing inside yourself is about as safe as sleeping with a rattlesnake. In your heart you know that Jack Clane is no would-be murderer. And a trick like this — it’s beneath you. It’s not like you.”

He had pulled on his gloves. He was ready to leave. He locked the office when we were outside. I watched him walk to the mud-caked car with the sheriff’s emblem on the door. He walked straight, not bending against the fury of the storm, his booted feet hitting the frozen earth solidly, a gun hanging at his side, a star pinned on his chest. I shook my head and moved off toward my own car.

Jack Clane’s place was halfway up the reaches of Huckleberry Mountain. It consisted of a few acres of meadow land and rocky hillside farming patches. The barn and corn crib sat off beyond the house, which was a low structure of hand-hewn logs the color of brown earth, set tight and snug against the breast of the earth itself. This was the kind of place that required the hard fertilizer of a full measure of a man’s sweat, a place that yielded only when forced to by determined, work-calloused hands, if the human beings on the place were to survive.

By the time I stopped my car in the narrow, rutted dirt road below Jack’s house, the snow was abating, but the wind was higher. Whole stretches of barren, frozen mountainside were completely naked of snow. The wind had whipped it away to pile it in powder fine drifts in the low places as the snow had fallen.

I stumbled and slipped a time or two as I went up the path toward the small yellow spots of light that marked the windows of the Clane house. Puffing, my nose feeling like an ice box ready to start dripping, I knocked on the cabin door. It was opened by Belle Felder, the fat, sleepy-looking fourteen year-old daughter of a family across the ridge.

I moved inside quickly and Belle closed the door. Edie was sitting in a rocking chair near the yawning stone fireplace where an oak fire crackled. My knock had brought her to the edge of her chair, and she didn’t relax even after she saw who it was.

I put my bag on the center table, peeled off my gloves, and stretched my hands out to the fire. I smiled at her.

“You’ve got some word of Jack,” she said.

“Nonsense. I simply thought to stop by and check on my prettiest patient before turning in for the night. How do you feel, Edie?”

She ignored the question. She was a small woman of delicate bones. Her face was thin, made alive by a dream-like kind of sensitive beauty. As sometimes happens with slender women, she was great with child, massive with child. It seemed as if this offering to her race stirring within her would never stop growing.

I had worried about her more than I cared to admit. The delivery would take place right here in the cabin. That was tradition, convention; that was where all hill babies were born. But a factor far stronger than convention bound her to the cabin — her dread, surpassing even her terror of first-birth, that Jack would risk himself to return to her side and find her gone when her time came.

She looked into the fire; then turned her head to me and her large, dark eyes seemed to have gathered to themselves some of the heat of the flames. “I know what Rufe is trying to do. The Felders heard as early as this morning. That’s why they sent Belle over.”

“Are you sure Rufe started the rumor?”

“Who else would? Rufe couldn’t catch Jack; so he’s using this way.”

“There isn’t much I can say on Rufe’s behalf, is there? Would you believe me?”

“No, it wouldn’t be like you to defend him for a hateful thing,” she said. “Once I thought I loved Rufe. Now I can’t help pitying him. He’s living with his own private devil.”

After I examined her, I gave her a light sedative. She’d be hysterical before long if she continued to think back over this day, the arrival of Belle, big-eyed to see the baby, her questioning of Belle until she understood the tale that had been started.

When I went out in the night again, I paused below the cabin. My gaze moved over the windswept reaches of the wild mountains. I didn’t know exactly what I expected to see, perhaps Rufe’s shadow in the pale, cold moonlight that had come with clearing skies.

Alone in my house that night, I lay in my feather ticking and tried to sleep. The rushing wind, moaning in the eaves, annoyed me. Slumber danced away from me in the flames in the fireplace. My mind was on edge, remembering.

It was written in bone, muscles, blood, and brain that Jack and Rufe be either friends the powers of darkness couldn’t sever or the bitterest enemies. There was no middle ground, no meeting place for those two. The presence of one was a challenge to the other.

It had begun years ago, when both attended the one-room country schoolhouse below Walnut Gap. Jack’s ma had died and his pa had sent him from north Georgia, one segment of a broken family, to live with an aunt and her husband.

Rufe waited for Jack by the schoolhouse pump that first day. Rufe spat on his knuckles and said, “You have to fight me if you go to this school.” Rufe’s words carried no bravado. He wasn’t a bully, simply a young, primitive king already sensing a challenge to his domain. The boys fought that day, as if they were men, toe to toe, silently. Neither quit; both stopped fighting from exhaustion that left them on the earth sucking for air. But Rufe knew in his heart that the other boy had the edge on him.

They fought eleven times during that school term. Beatings by their elders failed to stop them, and the beatings they gave each other settled nothing.

Rufe went away to school, and Jack went to work on his aunt’s rocky, hillside farm. Rufe had advantages that Jack could never have, security, the prestige of a family that had long supplied the hill people with leadership. Yet Rufe would have gladly surrendered all these things if he could have, one single time, met Jack Clane on exactly equal terms and thoroughly and decisively whipped him.

When war came, both men quietly enlisted. Rufe became a lieutenant, Jack a sergeant. Rufe caught a piece of shrapnel on his first beachhead in Italy. Jack’s fighting carried him all the way from Normandy to the Rhine.

After they came home, sobered by war, they fought less often; only when they met at a schoolhouse dance or shucking bee.

The real trouble began when Edie Simmons came to the village to take the telephone operator’s job. With her delicate beauty she was like a gust of springtime. Rufe began seeing her constantly. He grew quieter in bearing. His eyes shone when he spoke her name. His hand trembled when he touched her.

Edie met Jack some time later when she went to a quilting party at his aunt’s house. He drove her home that night, and from that moment, she was a changed woman.

Six months later she married Jack. Men sat in church during the ceremony, blood pulsing thick and cold in their veins, and wondered if there was going to be a shooting in the church yard when the service was over.

But nothing so direct would now have appeased Rufe’s anger. Several months later he suffered the final outrage. He heard that Edie was going to have a child. Up to this point he might have felt that somehow he would gain her in the end. Now he knew that she was lost to him forever. He took the news with a pale face, and lips that tightened until his flashing white teeth were laid bare.

He took to stopping by the Clane place when he was in the neighborhood to pass the time of day, he said. It was a suffering man’s excuse to torture himself with the sight of her blooming toward the birth of another man’s child. Here for Rufe’s eyes was the evidence of love, the token of the manner in which her spirit was welded to the spirit of the hated enemy.

Jack was quiet on these occasions, as he was when he and Rufe met in town. Jack recognized the deadliness in the man before him. The same sidewalk wasn’t big enough to hold the pair of them, and it was Jack who slipped to one side, but with a calm grace that bespoke no cowardice, only common judgment, and made him the silent, un-aggressive victor.

Rufe was sheriff now, a young man of power in the community. What thoughts passed through his head none can say, but his cold attitude, the glitter in his eyes when Jack Clane’s name was mentioned indicated that Rufe had but one hope for his future, the utter annihilation of his enemy.

It so happened that a hound dog put Jack at Rufe’s mercy. A big, red-spotted creature, the hound belonged to a sullen farmer named Clem Coggins. The dog ran beneath the wheels of Jack’s truck as he was homeward bound in the dusk.

He delivered the dog’s crushed body to the Coggins place. Coggins came out of the house, saw the dog, and knocked Jack down. Jack struck back. Coggins tumbled from the blow and struck his head against the corner of the cement cap on his well.

Coggins was groggily getting to his feet when his wife and three children came out of the house. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Coggins,” Jack said. “I didn’t mean to kill the dog, or hurt your husband either. Better get him inside and dress that head wound. It’s bleeding some. And try to calm him down and tell him I’ll pay whatever the dog is worth.”

That was Jack’s story, as related by Edie.

I was called to the Coggins place late that night. Clem was in a near-coma when I arrived. He was suffering a fractured skull.

Jack vanished into the hills, a fugitive from a warrant charging him with attempted murder. Perhaps he hoped that Clem would relent as his condition improved. Or perhaps he hoped not at all, struggling only because that dogged courage would not allow him to do otherwise, knowing that surrender would place him in the hands of Rufe. Six days now he had endured the pinching hunger, the bone-rotting cold. In his mind must have been the intention to endure indefinitely, until Edie had her baby, until he could steal the two of them away to leave the hills and Rufe’s hatred forever.

It was a hatred poisoning my own flesh and blood; Rufe was my only son...

Lack of sleep caused aches to filter in my joints the next day. The snow still lay in the hollows and the earth crunched beneath a footfall. The sky was a cold, metallic blue. It turned into a leaden sheet as the day progressed and finally was tinged with purple when I went home.

The woman from the tenant family on my place, who has swept the house and done the cooking since my wife died, had put my supper in the range warmer. I felt too tired to eat, but ate anyway. I’d made the Clane place my last stop before heading for supper, and my mind was filled with thoughts of Edie. She was waiting for something horrible to happen, and I wasn’t surprised that her endurance was being beaten down to the vanishing point. Later tonight I intended to make another call at the Clane place.

Meanwhile there was a fire spreading its warmth through the parlor. The high-backed leather chair had molded to my body through years of use. My head nodded forward. I slept.

A shaft of brittle cold moonlight was reaching through the window when I awoke. The fire had died away to a few embers in the fireplace. My body shook against the cold that had seeped into the house. I started to get out of the chair, and a hand, lean, sinewy, strong, clamped over my mouth.

“Don’t holler, Doc,” Jack said quietly.

I relaxed and he took his hand away. I turned to look at him. He was a thin shadow beside my chair. Moonlight touched his face, making shadows of his eyes.

“I heard the tale, Doc. I came to see. She hasn’t had her baby, but she’s having it now. Worry and nervous strain are hurrying things up.”

“I’ll get my bag.”

“And an overcoat, Doc.”

“You’re cold?”

“No, but I’m hurt a little, and I don’t want her to see the blood. I’ve been shot. And your boy is right behind me, Doc.”

I brought him the overcoat, and he put it on. He was on his feet, still able to move. Edie, I decided, needed my attention first.

Jack and I walked halfway across the front yard before the headlights swooped over the hill above the house and bore down on us. Jack made a movement. I caught his arm. His face in that moment reflected the pain and naked hatred of years. But the moment passed, and a new expression took possession of his gaunt features. He was austere, beyond the reach of wounds most mortals feel. He stood straight, unbent, unyielding as the sheriff’s car swung to a stop.

“He saw you. You’d never get away.” I said. “But I promise you, Jack, that you’ll be there when your baby is born.”

Rufe got out of the car, his gun already drawn; He walked toward us, tall in the moonlight. The two men faced each other across this moment that was the apex of all the years they had lived. There was little for them to say. Rufe had run his man to earth; Rufe stood with all the power either of the two could summon in his own hands. Yet Rufe had not won. Rufe was not the victor, because Jack refused to be the vanquished.

“You don’t need the gun, Rufe,” I said. “He’s already carrying one of your bullets.”

“He was carrying a rifle,” Rufe said, “and refused to stop.” He motioned with his gun. “We’ll go back to the village in my car, Clane.”

“We’ll all three go to the Clane place in mine,” I amended. “His being there might make the difference between life and death for Edie. You can have your prisoner when I’m finished with my patients.”

Still he held the gun. My thumb pressed the latch on my bag. It flipped open. My other hand reached and withdrew the pistol I always carry in the bag.

“I’m sorry, Rufe. I made a promise to Jack. If it’ll make you feel any better, let’s just say that I bagged your man first.”

His hat brim shaded his face in the moonlight, but I saw his mouth move, forming words that made no sound; then slowly, he bolstered his gun.

Once or twice during the drive to Jack’s place, I wondered if I had a dying man on my hands. He swayed and gasped in the seat beside me. Every mountain doctor has experienced times when he needed four hands, two brains; a dozen hands, half a dozen brains — for that matter. As long as Jack remained conscious, I had to close my mind to everything but Edie.

Her moans smote us as we walked in the cabin. Belle Felder was hunched in the corner of the room, staring at Edie, biting her fist, and sobbing. I sent her into the other room.

As the wave of pain subsided, Edie eased her teeth from her lip. She held out her hand to Jack. He took it, kneeling by her bed. In the light of the fire and the yellow, flickering lamp, fine drops of agony sweat shone on her forehead and cheeks. She looked at Rufe and said to Jack, “He brought you back to be with me?”

“Yes,” Jack said quietly, “Rufe brought me.”

“Then everything will be all right,” she said in a limp voice.

Another pain took possession of her. The battle began in earnest then; and in five minutes I knew we had a real fight on our hands.

Her agony was long. It took the three of us to deliver the man-child, Rufe holding her against the bed after she went half mad with pain, Jack helping as much as he was able.

Then it was over, and she sank in slumber. I wrapped the baby and tucked him in the basket she had prepared for him days ago. Rufe watched me. When I finished tucking the baby in, he had turned his gaze to her sleeping face. Then he brought his glance to Jack and said, “Are you ready?”

“He needs some patch work,” I said.

Rufe cut me short with a gesture of his hand. He and Jack looked at each other, and I suddenly felt as if they had slammed a door in my face.

“I’m ready,” Jack said.

“Then stay that way. I’ll be back to get you when Doc has dug the bullet out of your ribs. I’ve beaten you all the way through. Did you know that, Jack Clane? I whipped you as a kid just as often as I took a whipping, but I had the notion in my head that you had the edge on me. I took some bullets in Italy. You never did. I whipped you wrestling, pitching horseshoes, lifting grain in Len Abbott’s store yard. If Edie had held the feeling for me every man wants in a woman, I believe I’d have whipped you there, too. I always beat you, but I never could seem to win. Tonight I found out why.

“You refuse to take the beating. You had me fooled all these years into thinking I was the one who was getting the licking. Now that I know the real score, I don’t feel the need to try beating you any more. I don’t need Clem’s lying testimony, and I don’t need Edie’s grief.” He turned and walked from the cabin.

Jack said, “He’s a scrapper, that one.”

I walked to the cabin door. Rufe was moving down the hill before me. The air was so cold it brought mist to my eyes.

In the brittle moonlight, my boy’s shadow lay straight, tall, and clean-cut against the hillside.