The Pursued Read online

  Powers barely noticed. He set down his coffee cup gently in the saucer and stared at the envelope. His thoughts were far away from Minnie. He was conjuring up all he could remember of his old friend, Glenn Dobbs.

  Chapter Two

  The Bohne Sanatorium stood high on a long grassy knoll four miles outside of the town of Hopewell and was an impressive building consisting of one main central brick structure with two wings leading out from either side. The place was busy enough when Powers arrived. Horseback riders weaved between buggies and flatbed wagons that were moving in and around the yard out front, trying to find a place to park themselves. It appeared that tuberculosis was having a field day here in Hopewell.

  The high-ceilinged and domed foyer with its Grecian-style appointments was packed with patients, relatives, and friends, all vying for attention from the overworked reception clerk.

  The foyer echoed noisily, the voices clashing and rebounding around the domed roof. Powers looked at the desperate crowd with a twist of distaste; waiting in line was definitely not his style.

  Then he smelled it, that mix of scents so common around the sick. A mixture of illness and antiseptic. Not just medical chemicals but cleaning ones too. Carbolic soap. He looked around and found the source, a tired-looking cleaning woman in a damp-fringed floor-length skirt and apron. She slopped her mop from bucket to floor with all the slow boredom of a longtime employee who allowed only meager service to her tasks.

  He skirted the edge of the crowd and came up on her, a silver dollar in his hand. “I need you to help me out, ma’am,” he said, holding up the coin.

  She rested on her mop handle and eyed him calmly and then looked down at the money. She was a thin, worn looking woman who might have been in her mid-forties but looked older. Her hair was in disarray and prematurely graying, and dark rings hung below her eyes. A cynical curl lifted her upper lip. “I take it,” she said, “this is not a request for my services in a more regular regard?”

  “No, ma’am,” Powers said quickly. “Not that at all.”

  The woman shrugged. “I was afraid of that. Been a long time since anybody asked me down the primrose path.” She snatched the coin and it disappeared into her décolletage as if it had never existed. “How can I help?”

  “I need to find a patient.”

  The woman looked across at the harried receptionist. “And I take it you ain’t prepared to wade through that lot?”

  “You said it,” he agreed. “Find my man and there’s another dollar for you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Glenn Dobbs.”

  She smiled thinly and rested her mop against the wall. “Follow me,” she said, and led him toward the broad stone staircase that took them up to the second story.

  “You’ve got a lot going on here,” Powers observed as they climbed.

  She nodded. “Forty-four beds out there in the other wings and all of them taken. It’s an epidemic all right. We’re worked off our feet but this place is a regular boon for those patients who can make it out here; pharmacy, laboratory and operating room all in one place. It’s a goddamned miracle.”

  “How’d it get to be out here?” Powers asked.

  “Them sufferers need dry and clean air and this part of the country has it. Religious community of Mennonites had the place built, they still run it.’

  “Impressive,” he said.

  “Damned anabaptists,” she cursed and it seemed to Powers that she made bitterness a regular part of her day. “I ain’t no Holy Roller myself but at least the pay’s good and that’s the only religion I need.”

  They reached the upper floor and silence encompassed them; only the muffled shuffling of passing patients and the occasional hacking cough invaded the stillness.

  “Your friend’s room is along here. I knew the name, they’ve only got a few private patients.” The woman pointed down a clean, white corridor with windows on one side and six doors leading off on the other. She stood waiting, “Right at the end. I’d best get along now. You can find your own way, can’t you?”

  Powers nodded and shelled out another silver dollar. “Obliged to you.”

  She cracked a faded smile. “You need anything else, mister, you come calling.”

  After she had moved off, Powers knocked tentatively on the door.

  It was opened in a rush by a wide-eyed young woman who had obviously been crying. She looked at Powers and relief flooded her red-rimmed eyes.

  “Mister Brent!” she exclaimed in certainty and with a sudden brief smile. “Thank God you came.” She took his hand in both of hers and clutched it tight.

  She seemed an energetic young woman, and he guessed her age about twenty or so. Not particularly pretty with a long horse face and mousy hair, but her eyes were alive with a mixture of emotions and they enlivened her features. Powers saw both sadness and gratefulness in there. Overall, she gave an impression of intelligence and capability and Powers considered that under other circumstances he might enjoy her company.

  “He’s very weak,” she whispered in a hushed tone. “But he’ll be so glad to see you. It’s all he speaks of – when he can speak, that is. Please, come in and thank you again for coming.”

  Powers removed his hat and released her hand from his. “Think nothing of it, Miss Dobbs.”

  The room was painted totally white except for the stripped wooden board floor and even that was so pale as to make it appear white. Everything was absolutely clean, not a speck of dust to be seen anywhere. A few chairs, a stand with a water jug, glasses, a silver sputum tray and a stack of small towels. And the bed.

  Powers almost didn’t recognize the shrunken figure lying on the white enameled iron frame bed, a clot of bloodied towels bunched on the pillow beside the head.

  Glenn Dobbs had always been a small man and not particularly husky but the wasted creature that dully stared back at Powers bore no resemblance to even that distantly remembered individual.

  “Ain’t much left, is there?” The voice rasped from the seamed lips but it was enough to remind Powers.

  “Sorry to see you like this, Glenn.”

  “Not as sorry as me,” came the quick response. Glenn Dobbs, Powers recalled, had always been one for a ready answer.

  “Honey,” Glenn said, turning his head toward his daughter. “Can you give me a few moments with my old friend here?”

  “Sure, Pa,” she said and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

  “Good to see you, Powers. Come, get a chair and sit down here beside me.”

  Powers did as he was told and fetched a simple round-backed chair from the corner of the room and sat near to the head of the bed. “They got you pretty well taken care of here. It’s a fine place,” he said.

  The frail figure in the bed gave a rasping chuckle. “And it costs plenty too, but then…” A smile cracked the drawn features. “That’s never been a problem for us, has it?”

  Powers avoided the question by jerking a thumb at the closed door. “Your daughter seems to be a great kid.”

  “Pearl!” said Glenn. “Who’d of thought it, huh? Me, a wretched dog of a man and I get me a girl like that. I tell you, Powers, she’s a saint. A regular saint. She’s my little chickadee. She is that, all right.”

  A tear slid from his eye and down the gaunt cheek. They were the eyes of a hooked fish, Powers noted, scaled over as if the light were already fading from them. Powers was not sure if Glenn’s pale eyes were watering at that moment from his sickness or he was crying at the thought of losing contact with his obviously beloved daughter.

  Instinctively, Powers reached out in sympathy and covered Glenn’s hand where it lay on top of the bed sheets. It felt as frail and empty as the bones of a dead sparrow. “Where’s her Ma?” he asked.

  “Elsie? She’s gone on ahead. I guess I’ll be seeing her again soon enough. And I won’t mind that, she was a good woman, more than I deserved.”

  Glenn coughed slightly then. A thin string of bloody
sputum flicked from the corner of his mouth. “Hey!” he said suddenly, a gleam coming into his dead eyes momentarily. “Remember how we all met up back on the Double O?”

  Powers chuckled. “Sure do. What a day, huh?”

  They had all been young then. Twenty years’ old, give or take. Full of energy and bursting to experiment and experience life. The five of them had been taken on by the foreman of the Double O, all on the same day. He remembered that day. The dust raised from whirling horses and the angle of afternoon sunlight as it cut through the cloud of fine particles and turned them gold. At the thought, they appeared and paraded in a ghostly sequence before him in the sickroom as Powers remembered them all.

  The youthfully naive Bubba Jones, soft faced with a body leaning to fat but for some reason the girls all took to him. Laughing Andy “Red” McArthur, red-headed and bright as a button. A big man always ready for either a fight or fun, it didn’t matter which. Cole Loumis, lean faced Cole, the mean streak showing despite his ability to charm the birds from the trees. And then there was himself and Glenn. Shining and golden in the haze of memory. Handsome kings of the saddle, full of the chivalry of the time and their age.

  “What about the day we locked Bubba in the outhouse?” Glenn chuckled and a kind of devilish gleam came into his dead eyes. “You remember that?”

  Powers smiled. “I sure do. The two of us tippy-toeing around that privy with a riata of rope. By God, that was something else.”

  “We had him tied up tight as a whore’s purse by the time we was finished,” wheezed Glenn.

  “He went crazy, you recall?” Powers laughed. “Hollering and cursing, I thought I’d bust a gut, laughing so hard. Then he went and turned the whole damned thing over just to get out.”

  Glenn was hiccupping laughter but his laughter degenerated into throaty coughs that spilled blood onto his grizzled chin.

  “Here, partner,” said Powers. “Steady there.” He reached for a pile of clean towels laid out at the end of the bed and wiped Glenn’s chin clean.

  “That sure was a good time we had then,” Glenn panted, his breath heavy and sonorous.

  “It surely was. What a bunch we were. No more than kids, really, but we all hit it off real fine.”

  “We was never out of each other’s pockets,” said Glenn. “The five of us. If it hadn’t been for that damned war, we’d probably still all be together.”

  Powers arched an eyebrow and sighed. “Sure,” he said. “That messed up everything.”

  His fingers reached out and suddenly clutched at Powers’s sleeve. “That’s what I need to put right,” he said urgently. “I need to make amends, Powers. I’m going on any day now and I’m afeared I won’t be joining Elsie when I go. I don’t want to end up alone in that other place, you understand?”

  Powers laid his free hand over Glenn’s thin fingers, “You’ll be all right, partner. Don’t worry so.”

  “Look, Powers. You know me. You’ve known me best of all. I was a bad old hoss in my time but that thing we did, that was the worst of all. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  Powers shrunk at his words, his heavy shoulders hunching. “I do.”

  “You still think on it?” A wild light came into his eyes as he lifted himself up off the pillows. “I know I do. Night and day now.” He said it urgently, the breath coming faster. “It haunts me, Powers. Been twisting in my guts for years, it even tainted the best blessed marriage a man ever had. I held so much guilt, it spilled out and affected everything I did. So I want you to do something for me. Will you? I need you to do it for me, Powers. It’s the only way I’ll get any peace.”

  Powers looked him straight in the eye and felt a door open inside himself as he did so. The years fell away and he was back with Glenn Dobbs, the young roustabout and army corporal whom he had laughed with so many times and who had saved his life on more than one occasion. Something broke through the wall of years that not only separation but also the cold hardness of his position as a rancher had created. Powers felt the crack as his heart opened.

  “You know it, partner,” he promised earnestly. “Same as always. Whatever you want.”

  “I want you to find Cole,” Glenn whispered. “That’s the one thing we can do something about. The other?” He sighed. “Well, it’s too late for all that now. But I want you to find Cole Loumis and beg his forgiveness. He was our friend. One of us. Make amends for me, Powers. If I know that, then I can go on over without the pain of that particular sin dragging me down. I’ll rest easy then. Do it for me, Powers. Do it for me, will you?”

  Having said his piece, Glenn dropped back on his pillows, exhausted.

  Powers looked down at his old friend who lay so suddenly still with his eyes closed and chest unmoving and wondered if he’d died right then.

  But the frail fingers twitched and fluttered under his hand and he realized that Glenn was only sleeping.

  Powers looked for a long moment at the dozing man. Then he got up and gently straightened the bed sheets. Quietly he replaced the chair in its corner and stood at the end of the bed. The white room did little to enhance his friend’s sickly features, the clinical brightness washing away any color that might have lived in the flesh. It seemed that Glenn had already turned to nothing but pale parchment skin stretched over sticks of bone. He clutched the iron bedstead angrily in both hands, squeezing the metal under his big bunched fists. He wanted to lift the bed, to shake some life back into Glenn. To revive him by force. In his heart, he cursed Death and the remorseless defeat it offered every life and memory.

  Pearl was waiting patiently in the corridor. She watched Powers close the door gently behind him.

  “Was it a good visit?” she asked.

  He turned to her, a faint smile on his lips. “It sure was. Thank you so much for writing, I’m real glad I saw him again.”

  “Will you be going home now?”

  “Maybe in the morning. I’ll take a room in town. Your Pa has asked some things of me and I need to think them through first.”

  “Well.” She sighed, taking his hand in hers. “If anything happens, I’ll let you know, Mister Brent.”

  In his hotel room that night, Powers was filled with regrets. Regret that he had lost touch with Glenn, that he had missed the years of his friend’s marriage and the birth of his fine young daughter. And as they do, one regret followed another and he thought on the others. Bubba Jones, Red McArthur and, of course, Cole Loumis.

  He pulled a bottle from his saddlebag and poured a stiff drink into a small metal telescopic traveling cup he always carried for just such a purpose. Silently, he toasted Glenn Dobbs and downed a healthy sized swallow in one gulp. The liquor burned and his eyes lidded. Should he take Glenn at his word and go seek out Cole Loumis and beg his forgiveness for his old friend’s sake?

  He poured himself another and thought some more on Loumis.

  Cole had always been somewhat on the fringe of the group. It was true his wildness and recklessness had appealed to all of them, yet it had also kept him separate in a strange way. Cole had been the naughty boy, always willing to cause mischief. But he’d been likeable with it. A flair for charm that could lay a healing balm over any wicked trick.

  There had been the time Cole borrowed forty dollars from Bubba, who was noted for the caution he displayed over his finances. Bubba had come up hard, by way of a family of hillbilly sodbusters. A tough life with little to call on in the way of comforts. Bare feet until he was twelve and a bare earth floor in a wooden shotgun shack on an open hillside. Hard work from dawn until dusk. Not unusual for a farmer’s boy but tough all the same. Coming up with so little meant that whenever Bubba made a cent or two, he hung onto it as if he might never see the like again.

  Somehow, Cole charmed Bubba into lending him the whole of his cash poke of forty dollars. No mean feat, that was for sure, and proved only too well Cole’s ability to spin out a line. Cole had disappeared with the cash and not been seen back on the ranch for three days. The foreman
had given him all kinds of hell when he finally did show up, but Cole had wormed his way out of that one just as he did so many other times. The foreman also noted that he was looking kind of fat around the middle and Cole had to admit that he had feasted a while and ate and drank himself stupid and was now keen to get back to work and sweat it all off.

  Back in the bunkhouse, Bubba asked for his forty dollars. But Cole just shrugged and said he didn’t have it any more. There had been this bet…

  “What bet?” asked Bubba.

  “Camel race bet,” answered Cole.

  He had laid all the money on a race. A thoroughbred pony against a camel that some fool purchased from a traveling circus. Thing was, the camel won.

  Bubba was busted up. Broke and with all his hard earned money gone on a stupid bet. He blew up like a stick of dynamite. It was all they could do to keep him from taking his pistol and blasting Cole into the hereafter. The bunkhouse was a mess as Bubba turned over tables and bunk beds and threw chairs at the wall. He cursed out Cole and promised he was going to beat him to a pulp.

  When Bubba finally stopped to draw breath, he stood panting and disheveled and glowered at Cole.

  Cole smiled slowly back at him. That easy, slow, almost cruel smile. He righted a table and opened his shirt, then with a grin that split his face from ear to ear he allowed loose dollar bills to fall out like confetti and pile up in a mountain on the tabletop.

  “I didn’t say I bet on the horse,” he said, bursting out laughing.

  He’d put everything on the camel at four to one. Bubba gaped as Cole stood before him, stuffing money down into Bubba’s pants and shirt pocket, into his waistband and his boot tops.

  “There,” he said to Bubba. “You tight-assed rinky-dink farmer, you got it all back with interest.”