by Frank Bonham
A cold stream of purpose leveled out in Jim Jackson. Watching Saddler’s hunched figure crowding the horse, he jacked a shell under the firing pin. As he gathered the horseman in his sights, he wondered if Saddler had finally realized that it needed only one shot to cancel the contract he and Nate Croft had forced on him. Nate was no fighter. He would take his money back when Jackson was ready to give it to him, and keep his mouth shut.
Saddler could not run the horse hard because of the brush. Jackson settled on an opening in the yellow-green creosote tangles. Just as Saddler pushed his pony across it, the rancher squeezed off the shot. Then he heard Doyle yell: “Got ’im, Jackson!”
Red Roth said nasally: “Nah. Just winged ’im. Your ’coon’s gonna get away.”
Saddler, hatless now and clinging to the horn, disappeared into the thicker brush. As Jackson prepared to follow him, he told Roth: “Better come along, Red. He’s our ’coon, not just mine. He’s got a lot of stories to tell, ever he reaches Frontera.”
So when they took the trail after Mike Saddler, to corner and finish him, Red Roth disgustedly went with them.
XXI
It was curious how you could seldom remember your first estimate of a person after you had known him a while. But Troy had known Fran so short a while that he could recall exactly what he had thought of the haughty young woman who had arrived in Frontera a few days ago. He had judged her a rather sweet girl who needed some experience. Well, she had had it now. Yet it had not touched the fineness in her. It had only eliminated the foolishness and shown people she could take the jolts and grow stronger. And after he kissed her last night, she had come in singing.
He thought about her while he ate lunch. Having collected the things he would need for the desert crossing, he was trying to ease himself out with some food and coffee. But his nerves kept tightening like green rawhide, and, when Aperance suddenly said, “Say, the Becket girl was looking for you.” Troy dropped his fork.
“When was this?”
“Maybe an hour apast.”
“Did she say if anything was wrong?”
“Nope. Said everything was OK.”
Troy walked hurriedly to the hotel. Why would she be hunting him, if everything was all right? Behind his wicket, Ed Mattson told him she had gone out. “But she might have come in the back way,” he added. “I’ll see.”
“Never mind, I’ll go back.”
But she did not answer his knock. He moved to Serena’s room and heard her cross the floor when he rapped. The door opened, and, seeing him, she bit her lip and her eyes filled with tears. Troy took her hands.
“Serena … what’s the matter?”
She could not speak for a moment. “I told them where Gil was,” she whispered at last.
Troy swallowed hard. “Why?”
“To save Dad. They’d have killed him if I hadn’t told them.” Brokenly she told about the deal between Saddler and her father. Troy leaned against the doorjamb and rubbed his neck with his palm.
“When did this happen?”
“About an hour ago.” She tried to summon an excited confidence. “He’ll be all right, Troy. They promised to get him safely to—”
“Where’s his sister?”
“Is it his sister you’re worried about, or Gil?” Serena asked quietly.
Suddenly, as he studied her, he knew she had done this to get back at Fran. Whether she knew it or not, that was what she had been doing. Without a word he walked down the hall to the alley. Serena closed the door and followed him.
“Wait, Troy! I’ll go with you.”
Troy turned angrily. “Stay here! Do you want to see a lynching? Maybe a shooting? And know you set it up?”
“There won’t be a lynching,” Serena insisted. “Mike Saddler promised me. Dad had already left town, and Saddler was going to take Gil straight to the railroad.”
Troy ran into the livery barn. He found his horse and was girthing up when Serena called to the hostler: “Pete! Saddle my black horse. Please hurry!”
Troy rode out the door and entered the plaza from the side gate. The church looked empty and forgotten. But when he approached it, he saw the big, corpulent man with disheveled gray hair seated on the ground near the base of the steps. He dismounted and knelt quickly beside him.
“What’s happened, Fred?”
Stiles’ eyes only half focused on him. There was a purplish bruise below his ear and a scraped, bloody patch on his cheek.
“Oh … Troy,” he muttered.
“What happened, Fred? Did they get Gil?”
Stiles rubbed his ear, a fat old man trying to remember. “Somebody … Joe Wiley. Wiley got him. Somebody told him. And Gil’s sister …”
“Did she come with them?”
“She came to warn us.”
“Fred, think about this. Was she here when they came for him?”
“Had a gun,” Stiles recalled. “I took it away from her.”
Troy ran up the steps. He halted with one hand on the edge of the door, gazing into the church. At once he saw the carbine leaning against the wall. He started to turn back to ask Stiles which way he thought they had gone, but apparently Stiles had been slugged as soon as Wiley walked in. He ran back through the church, looking for the girl. They wouldn’t try to take her, he thought in panic. They’d tie her up and leave her. He searched through Stiles’ rooms, but she was not there. He went out the back door and saw where the horses had stood. Kneeling, he found the prints of a girl’s boots, and he stood again and gazed toward the mountains.
They had taken them both.
He went back into the church, shaken. He took his carbine from the vestibule. When he reached the front steps, he saw Fred Stiles shambling off toward the Mexican stores across the plaza. Serena sat her horse beside his. He shoved his gun into the boot.
“Troy, are they gone?”
“Of course. The girl, too.”
“But why?”
“Because she’d tell someone before they got far enough away.”
“I’m going with you,” Serena said as he mounted. “I’ll make Dad keep the bargain. They won’t be hurt, either of them.”
“How can you make him keep his bargain when Gil is probably already dead?” Troy asked.
As he rode, she stayed with him for a time, but a mile out of town she began to fall back. After a while he let his horse drop into a fast jog. They had an hour’s start on him, and all he knew now, in the middle of the afternoon, was that he had miles to cover. But their tracks were plain enough. Five horses traveling fast and keeping away from the road.
He came to where the trail split at the first lift of the foothills. Three horses had gone right here; two had continued straight on. He knelt, studying the tracks. Saddler rode a big Morgan horse and one of the horses traveling straight ahead had left the deep, round prints of a heavy animal. Saddler probably would be the one to take Gil. He would deliver him to Jackson and have Joe Wiley and that little fox-faced cowpuncher of his hold Fran somewhere until it was safe to let her go.
How safe would it ever be? She would know all about a murder. There was no use, now, trying to help Gil—one man alone against Jackson’s and Roth’s outfits. And he could not catch up with his own men, for they would have scattered at last to throw Jackson off completely.
He took the right fork, riding with his gun cocked, ready for them but knowing he might never see any of them again. They might keep going, cut south to Mexico and release the girl somewhere, keep going themselves. No telling now what Saddler’s deal with them was.
What did she ever do, he asked himself rebelliously, that she should run into all this? What have I ever done that I should fall in love with her? For now he saw Serena as a child, breaking down under the weight of her fears, and Fran as a woman, and he was more afraid for her than he had ever been for himself.
Presently he knew where the trail was taking him. Jackson’s Hay Ranch pasture was this way and there was a small hut on it. Once Jackson had kept a Mexican family there, raising hay in some good bottomland, but after being flooded out a few times he had given up. It was away from the main trails and yet close. He was almost sure Wiley and Thorne would take her there. He hit the horse with his spurs and it arched its neck and scuffed into a tired lope.
Shadows had begun to pour down the foothills when he halted above a wide wash. The old hayfields below still showed plainly, cropped over by cattle but well-graded and margined by rusting barbed wire. The hut near the far bank was an adobe, one room square, with a parapet roof and a sooty chimney like a melting piloncillo of sugar. A yellowing cottonwood grew at one side of it, and a rusted plow and some old harness lay close by. He saw no horses. It was about 250 yards across the wash to the hut.
He put his pony down the bank, and at that instant he heard a horse whicker, and a girl scream. He jabbed the horse with the spurs and bent over its neck. He heard the bullet hit the bank beside him and then came the bang and the cascading echoes of the rifle. The first heart-compressing shock left him. He felt exhilarated. She was here. She was all right!
As the pony struck the flats, he saw a drift of gun smoke from the roof of the hut. Then his eye picked up a flash in the window of the hut. Ahead of him was the dry, cobbled wash of the stream. He could not run his horse over this, and he left the saddle and hit the sand, running, carbine in hand. He fell just as a shot went over him with a silken tear.
A dark head showed above the mud parapet of the shack. Troy steadied and let his shot go. He saw dust fly as the bullet hit the crumbling adobe. A man rose in a crouch, ran to the back, and leaped to the ground. The horses were tied there, for Troy saw him reappear a few moments later on a paint horse and lunge up the bank into the brush.
That’s Bill Thorne, he thought dryly. Brave Bill Thorne. But it was not. For a moment later a man ducked out the door of the house, paused to fire two fast shots, and, as he started around the corner, Troy took him in his sights and recognized Thorne’s tough, wiry form. The carbine kicked against his shoulder. Thorne fell—either hit or playing ’possum. Troy rose and started for the cabin. He hit the streambed with its gray, washed boulders. Up on the flats behind the cabin, Joe Wiley had drawn rein. As he took aim, Troy dropped behind a rock. The shot fell short and wailed off across the wash. Wiley loped on.
Troy rose to a crouch, watching for Thorne. He saw him lying close to the line shack, both arms flung out. Suddenly Fran came from the doorway, left the cabin, and ran toward Troy. Troy went back to pick up the reins of his pony. Then he hurried to meet her.
She was crying. Her hair, shining and golden, had come unpinned and hung to her waist. It was soft on his hands as he caught and held her. He pressed his face into it and whispered to her, stroking her cheek and telling her it was all right.
After a time he picked her up and carried her back to the cabin. He saw that Thorne had not moved.
He laid the girl on the cot in the cabin. Then he went out and put his saddle on her horse, which was rested, and brought her saddle blanket and Bill Thorne’s Colt into the cabin. He went to his knees beside the cot and covered her with the blanket. She stopped weeping and watched him silently. He bent and kissed her. Her arm went across his shoulders.
“Are you going to tell me what you told me last night?” she whispered. “That it’s possible to love one girl and yet …”
“It’s possible,” he said, “to love a girl and not know it. Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I wanted you to find out,” she said. “Troy, dear, we’ve got to follow Gil.”
“I know.” He knew that when he left her he might not be coming back again, and he kissed her again before he left the cot. “Where were they taking him?” he asked her, standing near the door.
“To the road to Jackson’s ranch. Saddler kept telling us Gil wouldn’t be hurt. I think Gil believed it. But I can’t.”
“They might have kept the promise. Gil might have gotten away. And … anyhow, that Colt’s loaded and on safety. Pull the hammer clear back if you need to fire it.”
“No, I’m coming with you!”
“You can’t. I’ll be traveling fast, and I don’t know how far. Don’t let anyone near the cabin.”
“Troy, you’re alone, and there may be several men with
Saddler now!”
“There’s going to be one more with him before long,” Troy promised.
XXII
After Troy left her, Serena turned toward the ranch. She was frightened and indignant. It was the only thing I could have done, she told herself. They’d have killed Father if I hadn’t.
She wondered why the prospect of her father’s death did not disturb her terribly. She was more afraid that they would lynch Gil Becket, because that would make her a party to his death—at least in Troy’s eyes. She knew that, if Gil escaped, Troy would come back to her. That Becket girl, she thought. Just so much fluff.
She had not given them the notes she held on the Defiance Mountains ranches yet. Those would be worth quite a bit. With all that money, she and Troy could go away from here. I wish I’d told him that, she thought anxiously.
And then she heard gunfire. She stopped the horse, listening. It came from the rough brush and gully area to the north. She was almost to the ranch road. Anxiously Serena bit her lip. They wouldn’t dare kill him! she thought. She hurried on, planning to go straight to the ranch. But then she realized that Troy might be involved in it.
When she reached the big adobe gateposts, she hesitated. Then she followed the hoof marks leading northwest into the brush. Suddenly her horse reared. Serena gasped, clutching at the horn of the saddle. She struck the horse with her reins. It came down, trembling, as it backed from something in the brush. Then she saw it—Gil Becket’s body, sprawled under a large screw bean mesquite. His hands had been digging at the soil when he died. Serena turned her head and ran her horse on into the thickets.
Her father had done this. Big Jim Jackson, to stay big, had murdered the settler.
Again she heard the sound of guns. They had murdered Gil Becket. Were they trying to kill Troy? Serena drew the small buggy rifle she carried. She pushed on through the mesquite. She felt the last pins pulling from her hair as it shook loose, heavy and black. Then, hearing a shout, she peered ahead as she rode. The brush thinned on a high crease of land, and she saw something below that shocked her.
A small canyon pressed into the hills here and dead-ended. Its walls were steep and brushy. A man was crouched on the canyon floor, pointing a rifle almost at her.
Between her and the lip of the canon she saw two men on foot—Tom Doyle and her father. Red Roth sat his buckskin horse near them. They were all gazing down at Saddler, who was only a couple of hundred feet away, but fifty feet below. Only Roth’s rifle was in its boot.
Saddler was aiming upward. He fired. The bullet struck low and Tom Doyle rose quickly and snapped a shot back at him. Saddler crouched against a cutbank at the edge of the canyon. He was already wounded. Serena felt sick. It was like one of those Mexican games—pulling the head from a rooster buried in sand, driving lances into a chained bear.
“Dad!” she screamed.
Jim Jackson pivoted. His face was contorted—broad, red-mustached, vicious. Seeing her, he shouted: “Serena, go back! You hear?”
Serena started down to them. The brushy edge of the canyon protected Jackson, Doyle, and Roth from Saddler’s fire, and, when he fired, they could shoot through a gap while he cocked his gun. But Roth was not firing, and, as she halted, she thought he looked angry and disgusted.
“Let him go, for God’s sake!” he said. “He gave us Becket, didn’t he? So why all this?”
“Where’s your sporting blood?” Doyle chuckled. Doyle’s hat hung between his shoulder blad
es by its rawhide lanyard. She had never seen a man so drunk, so shining with lunacy and the urge to kill. “Miss Serena,” he suggested easily, “you all git down. Nothing but wild shots in that feller’s gun.”
“Naturally, since he’s wounded,” Serena said indignantly. She dismounted, went up to her father, and tugged at his gun. Jackson bushed her away. She fell against Roth’s horse. Roth curbed the animal, and then he snapped at the rancher: “You may be kidding yourself, Jackson, but you aren’t kidding me. If you kill Saddler, you’re top dog on Anvil again. I got Becket. That’s all I wanted. It’s your party from here on out. I never kill for business reasons.”
Jackson gazed stonily at him. Saddler fired another wild shot that ricocheted off a stone. Turning swiftly, Jackson snapped his rifle to his shoulder and took aim on the man crouched below. Serena cried: “Dad, if you kill that man …!”
Jim Jackson stood, tall and steady, squinting down the barrel of his gun at the black-haired man in the canyon. The gun blasted. Tom Doyle turned quickly to Jackson.
“Got your buck, boss. He’s down.”
I was part of this, Serena thought numbly. I helped them.
Roth patted her shoulder and reined his horse around. He had drawn his carbine and the hammer was back. “I’m just a working man, Jackson,” he said. “I don’t figure the tree’s been planted that’s worth all this. Why don’t you do your own logging?”
“Take it easy, Red,” Jackson said sternly. “I gave you Becket, didn’t I?”
“Yes, with Saddler’s hide thrown in. Maybe I didn’t give a damn for Saddler. But I don’t care much for bear baitin’s, either.”
Jackson’s hawk eyes were grim. “What’s the real trouble, Red? More money? OK, I’ll sweeten it.”
Roth showed his tobacco-flecked teeth in a grimace. “I figure your trouble’s just starting, Jackson. What about Troy Cameron? Man, there ain’t enough money in the territory to reconcile me to being dead. Adios, boys. Take care, Miss Serena.”
Jackson’s hand pressed down the gun Doyle wanted to raise. Roth kept his gaze on them as he wheeled. “Ladies present, Tom,” said Jackson ironically. He watched the dust drifting into the thickets where the logger was riding. But Serena, gazing north, was watching another dust cloud. Someone was riding up from Hay Ranch. Was it Troy? She walked back to her horse, but her father was at her side when she reached it.