The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [189]
Leo Pyke, one of the three men standing near her, the curled brim of his hat straight and low over his eyes, said, “Looks more like a wick- iup. Someplace a ’Pache would bring his squaw.” He grinned, leaning against a support post, staring at Ellis.
Mr. Kergosen did not look up, but said, “Shut up, Leo.”
“It’s no fit place,” Pyke said, straightening. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Phil has work to do on it,” Ellis said defensively. “He’s already put on a new roof.” She looked quickly at her father. “That’s what I mean. We didn’t just run off and get married. We’ve planned for it. Phil paid down on the house and property more than a month ago at the Dos Mesas bank. Since then we’ve be making it livable.”
“Behind my back,” Kergosen said.
Ellis hesitated. “Phil wanted to ask your permission. I told him it wouldn’t do any good.”
“How did you suppose that?” her father asked.
“I’ve lived with you for eighteen years, Pa. I know you.”
“Can you say you know Phil Treat as well?”
“I know him,” Ellis said simply.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Kergosen said, “he qualifies as a man. But certainly not as the man who marries my daughter.”
Ellis asked, “And I have nothing to say about it?”
“We’re not discussing it here,” Kergosen said.
He had hired Treat almost a year ago, during the time he was having trouble with the San Carlos Reservation people. He lost two men that spring and roughly two dozen head of beef to raiding parties. The Apache police did nothing about it, though they knew his stock was being taken to San Carlos. So Ivan Kergosen went to Fort Thomas and hired a professional tracker whose government contract had expired, and went after them himself. They turned out to be Chiricahuas and the scout ran down every last one of them.
The scout’s name was Phil Treat. He had been a soldier, buffalo hunter, and cavalry guide, and had earned a reputation as a gunfighter by killing three men: two of them at Tascosa when they tried to steal his hides; the third one at Anton Chico, New Mexico—an Army deserter who drew his gun, refusing to go back to Apache land. Only three, but the shootings were done well, with witnesses, and it took no more than that to establish a reputation.
And after the trouble was past, Phil Treat stayed on with Mr. Kergosen. He was passing fair with cattle, a good horsebreaker, and an A-l hunter; so Kergosen paid him top wages and was pleased to have such a man around. But as a hired hand; not as a son-in-law.
All his life Ivan Kergosen had worked hard and prayed hard, asking God for guidance. He built his holdings according to a single-minded interpretation of God’s will, respecting Him more as a God of Justice than a God of Mercy. And his good fortune, he believed, was God in His justice rewarding him, granting him success in life for adhering to Divine Will. It had taken Ivan Kergosen thirty years of working and fighting—fighting the land, the Apache, and anyone who tried to take from his land—to build the finest spread in the Pinaleño Valley. He built this success for his own self-respect, for his wife who was now deceased, and for his daughter, Ellis—not for a sign-reading gunfighter who’d spent half of his life killing buffalo, the other tracking Apache, and who now, somehow, contrary to all his plans, had married his daughter.
He heard Leo Pyke’s voice and he was brought back to the here and now. “Fixing the house while he was working for you, Mr. Kergosen,” Pyke was saying. “No telling the amount of sneaky acts he’s committed.”
The man who had gone to the corral came out, leading a saddled and bridled dun horse. He looked back over his shoulder, then at Mr. Kergosen, and called, “He’s coming now!”
Ellis was aware then of the steady cantering sound. She saw Leo Pyke and the two men with him—Sandal, who was a Mexican, and Grady, a bearded, solemn-faced man—look out past the corral, and she said, “In a moment you can say it to his face,