Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories by Elisabeth Grace Foley Page B

Lupin in the firelight—a face at once that of a child and
a woman, with brows bent over her dark eyes in an expression of
perplexed, hurt wonder, as though she could not quite believe what
she had heard could be true.
    Lupin said abruptly, but not as if he were
at all affected by the look or her presence, “Callie, what are you
doing here?”
    She moved forward, slowly, her eyes still on
him. “I saw you leave,” she said. “I looked out the window, while I
was getting dinner, and I had a funny feeling—I didn’t know where
you could be going—after what I’d told you…”
    Her father made a short gesture with the
hand that held Jim’s gun. “Go on back home now. There’s no need for
you to be here. I’ll be along directly.”
    Instead she came a step nearer. “Pa, what
are you doing?”
    “Can’t you guess?” said Jim. He hated the
brutal tone of his own voice, but his nerves were raw, and what he
was seeing happen to the girl increased his own sense of
helplessness.
    She not only guessed, she knew; the same as
he had done. He saw urgency take the place of disbelief in her
face. “You can’t kill him, Pa. You wouldn’t do a thing like
that!”
    Lupin let out a rasping breath of
impatience. “You’re a grown girl, Callie, and you know what stolen
cattle means. You ought to know I can’t let this boy talk. What do
you suppose we’ve been living on this past year? Or more like two
years?”
    He moved as he spoke as if to take a step
forward, and Callie, pale but determined, slipped rapidly between
him and the corner where Jim lay, her hands spread out a little at
her sides as if shielding him. “No!” she said. “I won’t let you do
it! I won’t keep quiet. I’d tell everything sooner than let you
kill someone!”
    Lupin’s face darkened, as he seemed to
recognize for the first time that she was not behaving as he
expected. “You’d sooner turn over your own father?” he said. “Is
that all the feeling you’ve got? He’s nothing to you; nothing to
either of us, except he’s going to ruin us, that’s what!”
    “I don’t care! You don’t understand. It’s
not just because of him; it’s for you! Whatever else you’ve done,
don’t do murder , Pa! You can’t have something as black as
that on your soul. I don’t want you to, any more than I wanted it
for—oh, Pa, don’t!”
    Lupin’s heavy face was set in expressionless
anger. His thumb shifted over the hammer of the Colt, and he
motioned with it again. “For the last time, Callie, I’m telling you
to go home. Are you going to do as I say, or not?”
    “No,” she said, and her voice quivered not
with fear but with resolve.
    With a harsh muttered oath Lupin stepped
toward her and grasped her arm. The hand that held the Colt swung
around and Jim saw that he meant to twist the girl aside and fire
down around her. But with a cry Callie wrenched free and clutched
at his arm with both hands. The gun went off with a deafening
explosion in the closeness of the mine. Jim, who had instinctively
stiffened himself against the expected shock of the bullet, saw
Callie stumble and fall to her knees just beside him, jolting
against him and sending an agonizing throb of pain through his bad
leg, and at the same time heard the scream of the ricochet off the
rock wall just inches above his body. Lupin stood as if turned to
stone, staring down at his daughter, the smoking gun held out as if
he had stopped in the very middle of the act of firing it. Callie
was holding her left wrist tightly with her other hand, and as she
rocked back a little, sitting back on her heels, Jim saw a thin
dark line of blood trickling down the palm of her left hand.
    She lifted her head to look at her father,
again with that perplexed, pleading look in her eyes. “You don’t
understand,” she said. “I was only doing it…for you…”
    Then she broke down and began to cry, small
helpless sobs like a child. Lupin did not move, or take his eyes
from her—it seemed