by L. P. Holmes
Lee straightened up, crushed out the butt of his cigarette on his saddle horn. “I got things to do. Be seeing you folks again, shortly.”
His glance went to Kip Vail again, and the swift brightness of her smile was something he carried away with him.
VII
“You figure your ride out to Carbide Junction was worthwhile?” Buck Theodore asked.
“I’ll let you be the judge of that, Buck,” Lee Cone answered.
They were gathered in the old line camp cabin on Laurel Creek—Lee, Buck, and Jack Dhu.
Jack, on directions from Lee, had ridden out to the place, introduced himself to Buck, explaining that he was to wait there with Buck until Lee got back from Carbide Junction. During the few days’ interim, Jack and Buck had become well acquainted, knowing respect and liking for each other.
Jack Dhu had been a lone wolf most of his life, drifting from one job to another across a wide spread of country. It had been a hard life, many times holding to only a whisker’s width inside the law. The loneliness had made him hard-shelled and aloof, and for years he had counted the gun at his hip his only real friend.
But now, in Lee Cone and Buck Theodore, Jack Dhu had found two men he liked and trusted. Here, in this little cabin, he knew a strange contentment he’d never hoped to find. He grinned at Lee.
“Go ahead and tell him, Lee. He’s been itchy as an old pack rat.”
“Well,” Lee began to explain, “I got a look at some cattle shipping invoices at Carbide Junction. I didn’t go through all that were there, but I looked over enough to serve my purpose. Buck, you told me you didn’t know where the cattle Tasker Scott rustled went to. I’ll tell you. They went out through Carbide Junction. Flat T cattle, vented to Lazy Dollar. And …”
“What’s that?” yelped Buck. “Flat T vented to Lazy Dollar! Why, I never sold a head of stock to Tasker Scott. Not a single damned head!”
“Of course you didn’t,” Lee said quietly, attempting to soothe Buck’s rising temper. “Those vented brands were rustled stuff. There’s no way you could blot a Flat T to Lazy Dollar and make it fool any inspector. So Scott just played it bold as brass. He vented, just like he’d bought the stuff on a regular, square deal. And here’s the snapper on the whip. He had gall enough to sign his own name to the shipping invoices.”
Jack Dhu whistled softly. “That man is either crazy, or figures he’s too big to be touched.”
“The last,” Lee agreed, nodding. “He figured he had Buck licked, and he never expected me to show up again in Maacama Basin. He was wrong in both cases. And to top it all off, he hasn’t got a bill of sale for any Flat T cattle to back his hand.”
“Not only crazy,” murmured Jack Dhu. “But a plain damned fool.”
“No,” Buck Theodore said slowly. “Not altogether, Jack. Call him slick and a gambler. And I was licked, just too tired and discouraged to care anymore. And Lee was gone, maybe dead, for all anybody here knew. Call it a gamble, and not as long as some that have got by. And also, he figured he was too big and had too much influence to be hit. Maybe he’s right, there. What do you aim to do about it, Lee?”
“Choke him on the whole business,” rapped Lee. “Here’s something else.” He went on to tell about the word of the railroad spur coming in through Smoky Pass. And he also told of the attempt to run the Vail family off their land.
“I promised John Vail our help,” he ended. He studied the faces of Buck and Jack, before adding: “And we got to make that promise good. Buck, you and Jack roll up some blankets for yourselves and spend the night along the river near the Vails. If those two buckos, Stump and Pecos, show up acting nasty and threatening, you know what to do.”
“Now that,” said Buck with alacrity, “is something that sure appeals to me. Them two jiggers been holding down at the old home ranch like they owned it. I’ll enjoy a chance to set ’em back on their heels. But where you aiming to be, boy, while the fun is going on?”
“I’ll be around,” Lee assured him. “But I got some things to do first. Starting with a shave. How’s for a loan of your razor, Buck?”
VIII
The Lazy Dollar headquarters stood just where the more level land of the basin began to climb into the first slope of the Mineral Hills. Even back in the days when Pete Garland was alive, it had been the biggest spread in that part of the country.
The ranch house was big and solid and comfortable. Lee Cone rode up to it with some caution and a great deal of grimness. For sight of it brought back a lot of memories. Memories of evenings spent on the broad veranda with Lucy Garland and of the fine dreams he had fashioned there, as well as the memory of that bitter day when Lucy and Tasker Scott and Pete Garland had stood on that same veranda while Pete Garland had given him the word of Lucy’s sudden marriage to Tasker Scott.
The place was quiet now. In an open-faced shed out by the corrals stood the shiny buggy Lucy had been driving the day Lee had come into town and seen her, so he figured she was home.
A moment later Lucy herself stepped from the ranch house door and came out to the edge of the porch. When he pulled up in front of the steps, she exclaimed with pleasure.
“Lee! I knew you’d come to see me.”
He dismounted and looked at her gravely, knowing a small feeling of irritability. She still felt she held the old power over him, and just now he wasn’t sure that she didn’t. For the same old sultry, exciting dark beauty was there. He tried to keep his tone casual as he climbed the steps.
“I came because I had some things to tell you, Lucy. Things I’m afraid you won’t enjoy hearing … especially from me.”
She tilted her head and said with assurance: “I’m interested only in talking about us, Lee. Come on in.”
Lee hesitated, but he needed to talk to her, so he followed her inside.
The living room was big and cool and shadowed. It had its memories, too.
Lucy turned abruptly, came close to him, put her hands on his arms, and stood staring up at him. She nodded.
“The same man. A little older, but the same man.”
Lee shook his head, and his tone ran dry. “No Lucy. The older part is right … but I’m not the same man. The Lee Cone you knew is one who belongs to the past. This is a different one.”
“I don’t believe it,” she retorted. “There was always something steadfast about you, Lee. I was the wrong one. And if it’s any satisfaction to you, I’ve paid … plenty!”
“Folks who try to play both ends against the middle generally do, Lucy.”
He tried to move away from her, but she clung to him.
“No, Lee … no!” Then, before he could stop her, her arms had slid around his neck, she had pulled his head down, and her lips were warm and pulsing against his own.
For a moment he was blindly confused, and then a curious calm ran through him. For there was no sweetness for him here, only a cold distaste. And he knew in this moment that any lingering spell this woman had held for him was completely dead. This was not the person he’d once loved. This was another man’s wife, a selfish woman whose only sense of values was her own personal desires. And the fervor of her kiss left him completely unmoved.
He pulled her arms from about his neck, held her away from him. “It won’t do, Lucy. You’re married, remember? You’re Missus Tasker Scott.”
She stared at him for a moment. Then she said: “Tasker Scott! I hate him. I despise him!”
Lee nodded. “That, I think, was inevitable from the first. But the fact remains that you’re still his wife. And to me you’re just another woman.”
“I don’t believe that, Lee. You’re not the sort to change …”
“Time changes many things,” he cut in. “Circumstances, too. The old days are dead, Lucy.”
She watched him intently, and then a hardness crept in about her mouth.
“If they are, why d
id you come to visit me?”
He twisted up a cigarette before answering, and then he spoke slowly through a haze of blue smoke. “Mainly, I came to tell you that I’m going after your husband.”
“Going after Tasker! In what way?”
“I’m going to break him.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Lee said slowly, distinctly, “he’s a crook. He’s lied, thieved, and fattened himself on better men. He’s taken things away from me and my friends. I’m going to take them back. Doing it, I’ll be hurting you, too. I’ll be sorry for that. I have no wish to hurt you, Lucy.”
He watched the change come over her, watched that calculating hardness which reduced her natural beauty to a brittle shell that repelled him.
Abruptly she put back her head and laughed, and the laugh was as hard as her look.
“You find it funny?” Lee drawled.
“Very funny.” She looked him up and down. “You … a rundown, drifting cowhand … talking of breaking Tasker Scott. Yes, that’s very funny. Tasker may be all you say he is, but he’s much too big for you to break him. You’re a fool to think you even have a chance at that … a hopeless fool.”
Lee might have been completely impervious to her personal charms, but he was not to the scornful bite of her words.
“We’ll see who is the hopeless fool,” he retorted. “Ask your husband what kind of a fool would ship vented brands, and put his name on the shipping invoice, while not holding any sort of bill of sale for those vented brands. Ask the damned cow thief that!”
Then he turned and left the house.
She followed him out onto the porch, hating him now because he had rebuffed her, hating him because he saw through her so completely. Her voice was shrill as she called after him.
“You realize of course that when you fight Tasker, you fight me, too. For all that Tasker has is mine. And what is mine, I keep!”
It stood out in her now, naked and unashamed, the self-centered, calculating selfishness that had been the guiding spirit of her entire existence. It was the thing that had made her marry Tasker Scott in the first place. She had weighed him against Scott, measured them both with a calculating shrewdness, and decided that she saw in Scott a man able to furnish her with more of the world’s goods. It was doubtful that she had ever really loved either of them; it was doubtful if she’d ever loved anyone but herself.
Just why she hated her husband, and had so bluntly said so, Lee didn’t know. Perhaps the ruthlessness in her had clashed with the ruthlessness in Scott, and out of it had sprung a mutual hate.
Lee took a final drag on his cigarette, tossed the butt aside. “I’m sorry for you, Lucy,” he said. “No matter what you think you have, you really haven’t a thing in the world that really counts. Someday you’ll understand that.”
He walked over to his horse, swung into the saddle, and rode out of the yard.
* * * * *
Less than an hour later, Lucy Scott’s shiny buggy whirled to a stop in front of her husband’s office. Inside, Tasker Scott was talking to his two henchmen, Stump and Pecos, and in a far corner of the office, Braz Boland sat staring grumpily at the floor.
At Lucy’s abrupt entrance Scott started up impatiently, but Lucy forestalled the words she saw coming.
“You’d better listen to me, Tasker. It’s important.”
He stared at her, then jerked a short nod. To Stump and Pecos he said: “You fellows know what to do. Make it stick!”
They went out, Stump looking at Lucy with an insolence that made her flush. To Boland, as he followed the other two, Scott said: “I’m giving you another chance, Boland. But if you let anybody take that badge off you again, you’re finished.”
Left alone with his wife, Scott turned. “Well?”
“I had a visitor out at the ranch,” Lucy told him. “Lee Cone.”
The jealous anger flared in Tasker Scott’s eyes. “You’ll taunt me once too often about that fellow. I’ll stand for no sneaking behind my back. You or nobody else can make that kind of a fool out of me.”
“Maybe you’ve been a fool in other ways. Did you ever ship any Flat T cattle, vented to Lazy Dollar?”
Tasker Scott’s eyes narrowed. “I may have. Why should it concern you?”
“It doesn’t, but it better concern you. Because Lee Cone knows about it. He also knows that you have no bill of sale to cover those Flat T cattle and that you were stupid enough to have your name on the shipping invoices.”
Tasker Scott lowered himself slowly in his desk chair, got out a cigar, and lighted up. “Cone told you this?”
“That, and more. He said he was going to break you, and if he’s got that kind of evidence, he’s liable to.”
“Why should he have told you that?”
Lucy shrugged. “Because in his way he’s a fool, too. He said he was going to break you, and that he knew I’d be hurt, too. That part of it he professed to regret, though why I can’t understand.”
Tasker Scott sneered. “Still in love with you, my dear. Still hoping.”
“No,” said Lucy curtly. “He’s not in love with me at all. But men like Lee Cone have a sense of honor that people like you and I can’t figure out. We live on one level, he’s on another. And it is a considerably higher level than ours.”
Scott sneered again. “Now you’re getting sentimental. Did you see any of those invoices that you spoke of?”
“No. But Lee must have, or he wouldn’t have had the wording so pat. They exist, don’t they? And that wipes out my last shred of respect for you, which was respect for your shrewdness.”
Scott did not flare at this. Instead, he rolled his cigar about in his mouth, then took a deep drag on it and peered with narrowed eyes through the smoke.
“I’m trying to figure out why you bothered to bring me the word?”
“Because your business affairs are my business affairs. What you have is mine, too. And what is taken away from you is my loss,” she paused to let that sink in. “Well, I’ve warned you,” she added before turning and heading out the door before he could say another word.
* * * * *
Tasker Scott stayed as he was, scowling through the smoke. A thread of uneasiness stirred in him. How had Lee Cone found out about those invoices? And had he set any forces of authority to work? What could Scott do now to save himself?
The answer came to him with hard, abrupt impact. He still felt he had nothing really to fear from Buck Theodore, especially if Buck was alone, for Buck had reached the age when no fight was worth it. But Lee Cone! There was the sticker … Lee Cone.
Tasker Scott got up and went to a rear door of his office, which opened into the warehouse, and yelled a man’s name.
When the man appeared, he listened to Scott’s order, nodded, and went away.
Scott himself went over to a heavy iron safe in a corner of the room, opened it, and, glancing around before he did so, pulled out a cash drawer. From this he counted out some currency. He went back to his desk, split the bills into two equal amounts, put each of these into separate envelopes, and sealed them. Then he touched a match to his cigar and waited.
* * * * *
It was nearly an hour later before Stump and Pecos came in.
Stump looked at Tasker Scott inquiringly and grumbled: “What’s the idea … change of plans?”
Tasker Scott nodded. “For the present, yes. That granger out at the foot of Smoky Pass is the least of my troubles now. So he can wait. But this fellow Cone we talked about before … you’d know him if you saw him again?”
They both nodded.
“We’d know him,” Pecos affirmed. “We got a good look at him that day he was out at the ranch, when he was asking about Buck Theodore.”
“Wish I’d known he was going out there that day,” Scott said harshly. “I could have tipped you boys
off. You could have closed out a lot of trouble for me, right on the spot. As it is”—he indicated the two envelopes sitting on his desk—“there’s two hundred and fifty dollars in each of these. The day Lee Cone turns up dead, you fellows can each pick up one of the envelopes.” He paused to look at the two thoughtfully. “Well?” he asked.
They glanced at the envelopes, and then steadied their eyes on Scott.
A small, feral spark shone in Stump’s eyes. “Getting troublesome, this fellow Cone?”
“Plenty!” snapped Scott.
“How, when, and where?” Pecos droned nasally.
“Any way, any time, any place,” Tasker Scott responded. “And the quicker the better.”
Stump grinned wolfishly.
IX
John Vail had left his heavy wagon at the spot of his original camp, as indication of ownership of the quarter section he’d filed on, but he’d moved a lot of his equipment down to the more comfortable camp beside the river.
The afternoon was running out when Lee Cone rode in there.
Buck Theodore and Jack Dhu had already arrived, made themselves acquainted with the Vails, and explained why they were there. Buck Theodore had already won the hearts of the two Vail youngsters, his pocketknife busy with a piece of soft pine driftwood, fashioning all sorts of amazing things dear to the hearts of a small boy and girl.
Jack Dhu was squatted on his heels, smoking, watching John Vail mend a bit of harness. Mrs. Vail and Kip were busy about the supper fire, but as soon as she saw Lee, she straightened to face Lee with open gladness.
Lee had become supremely conscious of this young woman. He was particularly so now, after the distasteful memories of what he had left behind him at the Lazy Dollar headquarters. There he’d found deceit, dishonesty, and hateful spite. Here was the direct opposite. It was like meeting a clean, sweet wind after climbing out of some dank lowland.