by Frank Bonham
Jackson’s face hardened as he looked at his daughter. “Did Cameron tell you to say that when you were sneaking down that back street with him today?”
“You don’t have to talk like that to me,” Serena said. “I must say he talked more reasonably than you do.”
Jackson’s hands clenched the rifle as he glared at her. “He’ll talk us right into the poorhouse, I’m thinking. Maybe I’d better talk to you a little bit myself. You know, when you picked that watch up out of the dirt today, I learned something about you. When the time comes to choose between pride and money, maybe it’ll surprise you which you’ll take. It won’t me.”
She put her hand over the little watch on her breast. “It would have been wicked to leave it.”
Jackson smiled disdainfully. “It was wicked to throw it. But most girls would have let it lay, rather than march back in front of all those loafers and pick it up out of the street.”
She met his dark ironic gaze, but could not answer him. She did not know why she had gone back for the watch. She had other watches, but this one was so lovely and new.
“I’m going to have Vicente load my horse,” her father said. “Have that paper signed when I come back.”
Her voice caught him at the door. “You’re wasting your time going up, Dad. I’m not going to sign it.”
Jackson came back in four strides. He caught her wrist. His face was swarthy with anger.
“Serena, this has been a bad day. Don’t fret me with foolish jokes.”
“I’m not joking. Before you do anything, I want to talk to them myself.”
“I suppose,” Jackson said bitingly, “you figure on selling my own notes back to me at a profit.”
“Why don’t you go along?” Serena suggested. “I’ll come up to Pine Meadow and be there when the others come to talk in the morning.”
Jackson’s hand began to close on her wrist. The thick fingernails dug into her skin. She held herself tensely, staring at him. His face, yellow-brown below the leather-dark hair, was as grim as one of those Mexican faces carved in obsidian. She felt the skin cutting under his nails, and bit her lip to suppress a gasp. Jackson dropped her hand. He juggled the rifle and suddenly strode to the door.
“You’ll find pants in my closet and plenty of straight razors. Maybe you’d like to add them to your wardrobe. But understand this. Neither you nor Cameron nor anybody else will get in my way without getting hurt.”
When he slammed the front door, earth sifted from the willow boards above the ceiling beams. Serena rubbed the bluish crescents on her wrists. She was frightened and confused. A time she had loved very much was over. She felt as though she no longer knew her father, almost as though she scarcely knew herself. She wanted Troy terribly, to tell her it was going to be all right. But he was probably with that Becket girl at this very moment. In a flash of jealous anger, she flung her napkin on the table and left the room. If she tries to take him away from me by flashing a red dress at him, she thought, she’ll wish she’d’ve stayed in Texas.
IX
“Do you always carry so many guns?” Frances Becket asked.
She smiled at Troy as the horses moved upward along the wagon road. They had started early with the girl’s suitcase and some provisions loaded on a pack mule. It was still only midmorning, and the foothill air was sweet, clean, and soft. Among small cedars clustered with blue-gray berries were patches of reddish earth. There was a rifle under Troy’s knee, and he carried a plain Colt.
“Might get an antelope,” he said.
“But that’s with the rifle. What’s the revolver for?”
“In case I don’t get him with the rifle.”
“May I see it?”
“Just a forty-five-caliber Colt. Hogleg, some call them.” But he handed it to her. “Now, don’t say they don’t carry them in Fort Worth, because I’ve been there.”
He saw her peering at the handle of the revolver.
“No notches,” he observed.
Her face tipped up. The strong sunlight found no flaws there. She looked wonderfully healthy and rode her sidesaddle with supple ease.
“Gil told me you’d been a town marshal,” she said. “I was sure there’d be notches.”
“Bad advertising. Some fellow’s always trying to see whether you were good enough to warrant the notches.”
“Why did you quit to become a cowboy?”
Pushing the Colt back into the holster, Troy frowned. “Everybody asks that. I ran out of luck. That’s all.”
“Do you mean it was luck that you weren’t afraid to face a gunman, and use your gun if you had to?”
“The most important thing about luck,” Troy told her, “is thinking you have it. I got to thinking I didn’t. Then a bullet clipped me, so I knew I didn’t. That was when I quit.”
She looked disappointed. “I was sure it had to do with being haunted by the ghosts of … of men you’d …” She hesitated delicately.
Troy smiled. “The only ghost that haunted me was the ghost of a man who was going to draw his gun first.”
A short time later he heard team bells, and, without explaining to Frances, he swung out on a detour. From a hillside they looked down on a string of wagons and trailers and the broad backs of oxen. Earlier they had passed the spot at Sheep Bridge where Red Roth had camped the night before. He would camp again tonight and be in Pine Meadow early tomorrow.
“What are all those wagons?” Fran asked curiously.
“They’re loggers’ wagons. Man named Roth figures to cut some timber up here.”
“How nice. That will mean extra money for the ranchers, won’t it?”
Troy’s gloved hand tugged the mule along. “Miss Frances, you just don’t know a lot about this country, do you?”
Her face altered, offended, a little haughty. “Only what Gil—”
“Red Roth,” Troy said, “works for Big Jim Jackson. Jackson has a halfway legal rope around folks’ necks up here. Nobody’s said he could, but he’s cutting timber anyway. That’s if something can’t be worked out with him.”
She took time to think. The horses gained a windy divide. Before them lay a canyon and then a series of soaring ridges fading west.
“Well, my goodness,” she said, “this is the country of direct action, isn’t it? Why doesn’t someone take direct action
against him?”
Troy led down the narrow trail that threaded a conglomerate of Spanish bayonet and ironwood, juniper, and pine. “I was taking direct action against Jackson yesterday when your stage came in. Even if you hadn’t broken it up, I don’t think I’d have worked anything out with him. I don’t know … maybe he’ll be able to foreclose all this land that he used to lease.”
“I’m sure Gil and his friends will think of something,” said Fran quietly. Then with a woman’s directness she pointed out: “If you’re really serious about Serena Jackson, it must make quite a difficult situation for you.”
“Practically impossible,” he agreed.
He gazed across the canyon. Something had taken his eye there. On that cold northern flank the sun never touched during the winter. The growth was heavy and dark green. Troy halted his horse in the thin sunlight and it squealed under the bit. He put out his hand to warn Fran. Then he saw the wink of flame.
“Get off!” he shouted, twisting, pulling at his rifle as he sprawled from the horse and started back to the girl. But she was smiling.
“If you’d rather not talk about her,” she said, “you don’t have to be so dramatic.”
The bullet smashed into the ground near them and screamed away. A moment later the crash of the rifle reached them. Troy dragged the girl from the horse and thrust her behind a boulder. He ran forward a short distance and took shelter. Another bullet exploded in the rubble and shrieked over Troy’s head. The horses began to run down the trail. Fran’s
pony squeezed between the pack mule and the hillside and the mule lost footing and started rolling down the slope.
There was nothing to fire at but a drifting blur of smoke. Troy laid the rifle barrel on the rock and waited. He saw the flash, then, and fired at it. Fran was calling to him.
“Troy! Troy! What’s the matter?”
“Stay down!” Troy called back. The horses were still running. The pack mule had come to rest against a tree. Its packs were gone but the tarpaulin was still wrapped about it. Badly hurt, the mule kept raising and lowering its head. Troy took a bead on the animal’s head and shot it. Across the canyon echoed an avalanche of their own jumbled voices, and shots.
“I’m coming down!” Fran cried.
“No!” He turned swiftly. He saw her rise and come down the trail, holding her skirts high. He swung back and commenced firing across the canyon to cover her. She dropped and huddled against him. His firing pin fell on a dead shell. Troy levered out this last cartridge and reloaded. Across the canyon it was still. The smoke had cleared from the dark growth, and now, faintly, he heard a horse traveling over rocks in some side canyon. Numbly he patted the girl’s hand.
“Winter comes to the Defiances,” he said.
Big-eyed, frightened but self-conscious, she moved away from him. “Was that … was it a joke?”
He squinted one eye. “More than likely,” he said, “it was direct action on somebody’s part. We don’t have time for jokes up here.”
Although he did not mention Tom Doyle, he thought of him as they went on. Doyle had not been in town yesterday. Was he waiting out here in the hills? But why should he? Doyle was the kind of killer who liked an audience. Nevertheless Jim Jackson’s hand was in it. He would bet on that.
* * * * *
Gil’s place on Cave Creek was three miles past Mike Saddler’s Pine Meadow ranch. Saddler had left Frontera the night before to check on his men before returning to the roundup. But no one was around when they reached Saddler’s cabin and they rode on. Around midday they reached Gil’s home place. Lying below the spine of the Defiances, his cabin and an awkward sprawl of sheds and corrals were half hidden among the pines. Gil had cleared some timber for pasture and built a structure of blackish stone against a slope. In the lean-to a sheet-iron stove with a rusting stovepipe could be seen. The stovepipe joined the chimney from the fireplace. Some Dutch ovens hung from hooks thrust into the stones. Hides lay across corral fences. The whole layout resembled an unkempt bedroom.
Suddenly he was ashamed of having let her think he worked for Gil—that boy wonder of the Defiances. But she had asked for it, with her talk of recalcitrant employees, and of firing him.
“Who owns this place?” Fran asked wearily, gazing at the buildings. They had not spoken much since the ambush. She was tired from the long ride, and upset.
Frowning fixedly at a broken bar of a corral, Troy said: “This is Gil’s. A little rough, but it’s snug.”
“You mean it’s his bunkhouse or something?”
“No,” he said slowly, “it’s his home place. This is it.”
She made absolutely no sound. After an instant he looked up at her. She was going to weep. There was simply no question about that. She was tired and lonely and scared, and she was going to square with the world by weeping.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I’d have told you, but it seemed like you were always telling me. Gil’s getting on as well as anybody. But nobody but Mike Saddler has more than one cowpuncher up here. We sort of team up. You might say I was Gil’s employee when he wasn’t mine.”
“You let me make a fool of myself,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to. It was kind of a joke. Not a very good one. I’m sorry, Miss Frances.”
Her weeping was tight and silent and he wanted to suggest that she get it out of her system. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “There’s a cabin near where we’re finishing the roundup. You’d be fairly comfortable there until you decide what you want to do.”
“I’m going to … stay … of course,” she whispered.
“Now, look,” he said, “women don’t stay alone in these hills. We’ll rest the horses and go on.”
She dismounted angrily, waving him away when he wanted to help. She was almost too stiff to walk. She began untying the bundle of things salvaged from the packs, which Troy had tied behind her saddle. Troy guiltily carried in her carpetbag that he had carried on his saddle. He heard a thud, and looked back to see that a burlap sack of provisions had dropped to the ground when she tried to lift it down. But when he hurried back, she straightened with tear-filled eyes.
“Don’t touch it! I’d rather it rotted there than be helped by you.”
“Now, Miss Frances.” Troy smiled. She was so young and sweet and tired that he held both her arms and made her look at him. But he did not know what to say.
“When you go down,” she said, “will you tell my brother I’m here?”
“It’s going to be dark in a few hours. There aren’t enough cartridges in Arizona for you to shoot at every sound you hear. You’d better come with me.”
She pushed off his hands and walked to the doorway of the ranch house. “Thank you. I’ll be all right. Good bye, Troy Cameron. Do you think I’ll become a legend after you tell them? The girl with the red dress and big ideas?”
She went inside. Troy set everything beside the door, piled wood in the cooking lean-to, and finally placed his rifle, loaded and with his shell belt coiled about it, just inside the door.
“Adios,” he said. In the cold cabin he could hear her crying.
X
Troy turned his jacket collar up as he approached the roundup camp on Muddy Creek. Dusk was near, his face was stiff with the mountain cold, and a warped cigarette, long dead, dangled from his lips as he jogged into camp. The smoke and supper smells began to restore him. Slack in the saddle, he swung off and saw Gil Becket coming to the picket line. He looked troubled and embarrassed.
“Lemme get that,” Gil said hurriedly as Troy started to unsaddle.
Troy leaned against the horse and said: “Your sister’s here, Gil.”
“Mike told me. How … how’d she take it?”
“Rough,” Troy said. “You know, boss, you haven’t paid me for nearly six months now. How about it?”
Gil’s face reddened. “Well, I had to tell her something.”
“You didn’t have to tell her you were the Baron of Arizona. When I told her that was the home place, she busted out crying.”
Gil turned away, driving one fist against his palm. “I’d have told you, if I’d’ve known she was coming. If I’d gotten to her first, I could have fixed everything up.”
“With what … some more tall ones? You’d better get up there, Gil. Even the coyotes go around in pairs up there at night. And after …” He hesitated. Tempers were thin enough already, without word of the ambush. But it had to come out, if only to put everyone on guard. “Somebody took a couple of shots at us,” he said.
Gil turned blankly. “Who?”
“Didn’t see him.”
Gil started back through the camp. Mike Saddler, Colonel Edwards, and the others were eating in silence near a fire.
“Hey,” Gil called, “Jackson took a shot at Troy and my sis today!”
Troy walked into the warm surge of the fire. “I didn’t say that,” he reminded Gil. “I said somebody.”
“That still spells Jackson,” Gil retorted. “Look what he and Doyle done to Mike.”
Seated against a log, Saddler gazed up at Troy. His florid features had a bee-stung look—both eyes puffed, his upper lip protruding. He stared at the tall man by the fire.
“What happened?” Troy asked him.
“Jackson and Doyle jumped me near Anvil turnoff,” Saddler said. “Jackson roped me and then they both went after me.”
&nb
sp; Troy regarded him thoughtfully. It did not sound like Jim Jackson. But neither did the morning’s ambush sound like Big Jim, or the encounter with him in the Pima Bar yesterday. Perhaps Jackson, faced with bankruptcy, had deliberately turned a corner.
“When was this?” he asked Saddler.
“Yesterday afternoon. I went up to my place after I came to. I told Bill Thorne and the Basque to shoot anybody that came onto the land.”
“Getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you, Mike?” Troy asked.
Saddler got up. Color surged into his face as he took hold of Troy’s arm.
“I’ll get my preachin’ in church after this, deacon. I saw Jackson back you down in the saloon. I saw you go running after him when it was too late. OK. If you want to stand still till he chops you down, don’t let me stop you. But nobody’s speaking for Mike Saddler from here on out.”
Colonel Edwards came between them, shoving Saddler back. “We hang together, Mike, or Jackson hangs us separate.”
Saddler cuffed his hand away. “That’s fine, Colonel. But not with Cameron making policy for us. When Roth’s wagons roll into Pine Meadow tomorrow, I’m going to be waiting for them.”
He walked to where his blankets and gear lay against a tree.
“You can’t buck them alone,” Troy warned.
Saddler straightened. “Reckon that’s where you sing tenor and I sing bass. I figure nobody’s any bigger than a man who won’t be crowded.”
While Saddler girthed up, the colonel talked quietly with Troy. “What about it? Any use going slow with Jackson now?”
“It’s going to be a lot harder,” Gil pointed out, “to throw him off than to keep him off.”
“All I want,” Troy said, “is to get a cease and desist before the shooting starts. That might take a week.”
Saddler threw cross bucks onto a pack horse, loaded his war sack onto the animal, and swung into his saddle. He rode from the firelight. A moment later they heard his horses crossing the stream.