by Zane Grey
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 1
THE SUN HUNG gold and red above the snow-tipped ramparts of the Colorado Rockies. On a high bluff across the Purgatory River a group of Indians sat their mustangs watching the slow, winding course of a railroad train climbing toward the foothills, fearful of this clattering, whistling monster on wheels that might spell doom to the red man. Had they not seen train after train loaded with buffalo hides steam eastward across the plains?
A lithe rider, dusty and worn, mounted on a superb bay horse, halted on the south side of the river to watch the Indians.
“Utes, I reckon,” he said, answering to the habit of soliloquy that loneliness had fostered in him. “Like the Kiowas they shore die hard. Doggone me if I don’t feel sorry for them! The beaver an’ the buffalo aboot gone! The white man rangin’ with his cattle wherever grass grows! Wal, Reddies, if yu air wise, yu’ll go way back in some mountain valley an’ stay there.”
“Wal, come to think aboot it,” mused the lone rider, “they’re not so bad off as me — No money. No job. No home! Ridin’ a grub line, an’ half starved. Nothin’ but a hawss an’ a gun.”
He put a slow hand inside his open vest to draw forth a thick letter, its fresh whiteness marred by fingerprints and soiled spots. He had wept over that letter. Marvelling again, with a ghost of the shock which had first attended sight of that beautiful handwriting, he reread the postmark and the address: Lincoln, New Mexico, May 3, 1880. Mr. Brazos Keene, Latimer, Colorado, c/o Two-bar X Ranch. The Latimer postmark read a day later.
“My Gawd, but this heah railroad can fetch a man trouble pronto,” he complained, and he stuck the letter back. “What in the hell made me go into thet post office for? Old cowboy habit! Always lookin’ for letters thet never come. I wish to Gawd this one had been like all the others. But aw no! Holly Ripple remembers me — has still the old faith in me — An’ she named her boy Brazos — after me.”
“Only five years!” mused the rider, with unseeing eyes on the west. “Five years since I rode along heah down the old trail from Don Carlos’s Rancho — An’ what have I done with my life?”
A savage shake of his head was Brazos’s answer to that disturbing query, as also it was a passionate repudiation of memory. He rode on down the river trail toward Las Animas. He did not know how far it was in to town. His horse was lame and weary. This stretch along the Purgatory was not prolific of cow-camps; nevertheless, Brazos hoped to run into one before nightfall.
The trail worked up from the river to an intersection with a road. In the gathering darkness, Brazos’s quick eye caught sight of three horsemen riding out from a clump of dead trees which only partly obscured a dark cabin. The riders wheeled back, apparently thinking Brazos had not seen them.
Brazos heard a sibilant hissing “hold thar!” and a sound that seemed like a gloved hand slapped on metal. A hoarse voice, thick-tongued from liquor, rasped low. Then came a young high-pitched answer: “But, Bard, I’m not risking—” The violent gloved hand cut that speech short. To Brazos the name that had been mentioned sounded like Bard, but it might have been Bart or even Brad.
“Hey, riders,” called Brazos curtly, “I seen yu before yu seen me.”
After a moment of silence, Brazos heard the word “Texan” whispered significantly. Then one of the three rode out.
“What if you did, stranger?” he asked.
“Nothin’. I just wanted yu to know all riders ain’t blind and deaf.”
Brazos’s interrogator’s features were indistinguishable. But Brazos registered the deep matured voice, the sloping shoulders, the bull neck.
“Thar’s been some hold-ups along hyar lately,” he said.
“Ahuh. An’ thet’s why you acted so queer?”
“Queer? Playin’ safe, stranger.”
“Yeah? Wal, if yu took me for a bandit yu’re way off.”
“Glad to hear thet — an’ who might you be?”
“I’m a grub-line-ridin’ cowboy. I’m tired an’ hungry, an’ my hawss is lame.”
“An’ whar you makin’ for?”
“Mister, if I wasn’t hungry, an’ tired I wouldn’t like yore pert questions. I’m not goin’ anywhere in particular. How far to Las Animas?”
“All-night drill for a tired hoss.”
“Any cow camp near?”
“Nope. Nearest ranch is Twin Sombreros, three miles from town.”
“Excuse me for askin’,” went on Brazos with sarcasm, “but do yu fellers belong to an ootfit that’ll feed a hungry cow-puncher?”
“My boss hasn’t any use for grubline riders.”
“Yu don’t say. Wal, I reckon I don’t eat. But would yu tell me if there’s any grass heah-aboots for my hawss?”
“Good grass right hyar, stranger. An’ you can bunk in the old cabin thar.”
“Thanks,” returned Brazos dryly.
The burly rider turned to his silent companions. “Come on, men. If we’re makin’ Lamar to-night we got to rustle.”
The couple joined him and they rode by Brazos too swiftly for him to distinguish anything. They took to the north, soon passing out of sight.
The cabin proved to be close at hand. Brazos peeped in the open door. It was pitch dark inside and smelled dry. He removed saddle and bridle from the bay and turned him loose. Brazos carried his paraphernalia inside and deposited it upon the floor. He felt in his pockets for matches. He had none. Then he groped around until he bumped into a bench made of boughs. This, with his saddle blankets, would furnish a better bed than many to which he had of late been accustomed.
Some time in the night he awoke. Usually a light sleeper he thought nothing of being aroused. But after a moment he felt that this was different. And he attended to outside sensations.
He heard a drip, drip, drip of rain on the floor. Evidently the roof leaked. A low moaning wind swept by under the cabin eaves. Drip — drip — drip — slowly the dropping sounds faded in his consciousness.
Dawn was at hand. Through the window he discerned a faint blue of sky. Apparently the weather had cleared. But all of a sudden — drip — drip — drip! The drops of rain water were slow and heavy. They spattered on the earthen floor. It was now light enough in the cabin to make out a ladder leading up to a loft.
All at once a cold chill crept over his skin. That dank odour, dominating the pungent dry smell of the cabin, assailed his nostrils. Drip — drip — drip! Brazos was wide awake now. In a single action, he slid upright off the bench.
The drip came from the loft just about the centre of the cabin. Brazos could not see the drops, but by their sound, he located them — stretched out his upturned palm. Spat! Despite his steely nerve the heavy wet contact on his hand give him a shock. He strode to the light of the doorway.
“Blood! Cold an’ thick — There’s a daid man up in thet loft. Aha! Them three hombres last night! Brazos, I reckon yu better be rustlin’ oot of heah pronto.”
Hurrying back to the bench, Brazos wiped the blood on his saddle blankets, and carried these with his saddle to the door. Dawn had given way to daylight. And at that moment a clattering roar of hoofs swept up, and a group of riders pulled their horses to a sliding halt before the cabin.
“Ahuh. Jig aboot up! I savvy,” muttered Brazos, and he flung down the saddle and blankets to stand at attention. He needed not to see the rifles to grasp that this was a posse.
“Hands up, cowboy!” came a harsh command.
“They’re up,” replied Brazos laconically, suiting action to words. The levelled guns and grim visages of this outfit showed that they meant business. Most of these riders had the cowboy stripe, but some of them, particularly the harsh-voiced, hard-faced leader, appeared to be matured
men.
“Pile off, Stuke, an’ you, Segel,” ordered this leader. Whereupon two riders flung themselves out of their saddles to rush at Brazos from each side. “Grab his guns! Search him. Take everythin’.”
Brazos was quick to recognise real peril. He surveyed the group of horsemen to ascertain that they were all strangers to him. In a moment, he made certain that not one of them had ever seen him. He had not been in that vicinity for six years, which was a long time on the range.
“Bodkin!” called a rider from within the cabin, his voice queer.
“What! You found him?” queried the leader sharply.
“Yes. Up in the loft. Send someone to help us let him down.”
Brazos listened with strained ears to the sounds and husky voices inside the cabin. Presently three of the posse came out, carrying the body, which they deposited upon the grass. Brazos’s startled gaze bent down upon a handsome youth barely twenty, evidently a cowboy from his garb, dark-haired and dark-skinned. He had been shot through the back. All his pockets were turned inside, out.
“Allen Neece!” burst out Bodkin.
“Shot in the back.”
“Robbed!”
“Purty cold-blooded, I’d say.”
“Bod, I reckon we might jest as wal string this hombre up.”
These and other comments greeted Brazos’s ears, and drew from Bodkin the harsh decree: “Cowboy, you’re under arrest.”
“Hell, I’m not blind or deaf,” retorted Brazos. “May I ask who yu air?”
“I’m Deputy Sheriff Bodkin of Las Animas, actin’ under Kiskadden’s orders.”
“An’ what’s yore charge?”
“Murder.”
Brazos laughed outright. “My Gawd, man, air yu loco? Do I look like a hombre who’d shoot a boy in the back, rob him an’ hang aboot waitin’ for an ootfit to come get me?”
“You can’t never tell what a cowboy will do from his looks.”
“Aw, the hell yu cain’t,” replied Brazos, with a piercing glance of scorn flashing from Bodkin to his men. “What kind of Westerners air yu?”
Brazos’s scornful stand, his cool-nerve, obviously impressed some of the riders.
“Bod, you cain’t hang this Texan on such heahsay evidence,” advised a slow-spoken member.
“Why not? Cause you’re a Texan yourself?”
“Wal, as to thet, Texans, whether they’re guilty of crime or not, ain’t very often hanged. Personally, I reckon this cowboy is innocent as I am of this murder. An’ mebbe I’m not the only one. If you hang him, Kiskadden will be sore. An’ if by any chance he ain’t guilty an’ it comes oot — wal, it’d kind of heat up the stink thet hasn’t died oot cold yet.”
During that speech Brazos gauged both men — the sandy-haired, sallow-faced Texan whose looks and words were significant — and the swarthy Bodkin, dark-browed, shifty of gaze, chafing under the other’s cool arraignment of the case, and intense with some feeling hardly justified by the facts presented.
“All right, Inskip,” rejoined Bodkin, with suppressed anger. “We’ll take him before Kiskadden. Prod him to his hoss, men. An’ if he bolts, blow his tow-head off.”
Brazos’s captors shoved him forward. Bay had been found and saddled. Brazos mounted. The body of the boy Neece was lifted over, a saddle and covered with a slicker. The rider of this horse essayed to walk, which gave Brazos the impression that Las Animas was not far distant. Presently the cavalcade started toward the road, with Brazos riding in the centre.
They travelled on, and at length reached a site strangely familiar to Brazos. It was the head of the valley. A long, low, red-roofed, red-walled adobe ranch-house stood upon the north bank of the river, and below it, where cottonwoods trooped into the valley, spread barns and sheds, corrals and racks in picturesque confusion. The droves of horses in the pastures, the squares of alfalfa, and the herds of cattle dotting the valley and the adjacent slopes attested to the prosperity of some cattle baron.
“Doggone!” ejaculated Brazos. “Whose ootfit is thet?”
Inskip, the Texan, riding second on Brazos’s left, book it upon himself to reply: “Twin Sombreros Ranch. Operated now by Raine Surface runnin’ eighty thousand haid of the Twin Sombreros brand. Used to belong to Abe Neece, father of the daid boy we’re packin’ to town. Abe is livin’ still, but a broken man over the loss of thet ranch.”
It so happened that when the cavalcade reached the crossroad to the ranch a sextet of riders, some of them cowboys, rode down from above to halt their mounts at sight of the posse. Brazos espied two young women riders and he burned both inwardly and outwardly at the indignity Bodkin had forced upon him.
“What’s this, Bodkin?” demanded the leader.
“Mornin’, Mr. Surface,” replied Bodkin. “We been out arrestin’ a cowboy. Charged with murder. An’ I’ve got the proofs on him.”
“Murder! You don’t say? Who?”
“No other than Abe Neece’s boy — young Allen Neece.”
For Brazos it was one of those instinctively potent, meetings of which his life on the ranges had been so full. He turned from his long glance at the two girls, the older of whom had hair as red as flame, a strikingly beautiful face, with blue-green eyes just now dilated in horror.
“Who are you?” demanded Surface with intense curiosity.
Brazos gave the rancher a long stare.
“Wal, who I am is share none of yore business,” he replied coldly.
“Cowboy, I’m Raine Surface, an’ I have a good deal to say with the business of this county,” returned the rancher, plainly nettled.
“I reckon. Do you happen to be in cahoots with this four-flush, Deputy Bodkin?”
The sharp query disconcerted Surface and elicited a roar from Bodkin.
“I put Kiskadden in office,” said the rancher stiffly. “I recommended to the Cattlemen’s Association that we appoint deputies to help rid this range of desperadoes an’ rustlers — an’ rowdy cowboys.”
“See heah, Surface,” flashed Brazos, his piercing tenor stiffening his hearers. “I am a Texan an’ one of the breed thet don’t forget insult or injustice. You’re a hell of a fine Westerner to act as an adviser to a Cattlemen’s Association. A real Westerner — a big-hearted cattleman who was on the square — wouldn’t condemn me without askin’ for proofs. You take this Bodkin’s word. If he hasn’t got some queer reason to fasten this crime on me, it’s a shore bet he itches to hang someone. Wal, I happen to be innocent an’ I can prove it. I could choke up an’ spit fire at the idee of my bein’ taken for a low-down skunk who’d shoot a boy in the back to rob him. An’ swallow this, Mister Raine Surface — you’ll rue the day you insulted a ragamuffin of a cowboy who was only huntin’ for a job.”
The silence which followed Brazos’s arraignment was broken by Inskip.
“Surface,” he said caustically, “you’re new to this range. All you Kansas cattlemen need to be reminded thet this is western Colorado. Which is to say, the border of New Mexico. An’ mebbe yore years oot heah air too few for you to know what thet means. All the same, Bodkin an’ you should have given this cowboy the benefit of a doubt.”
At this juncture, when a strong argument seemed imminent, the red-headed girl moved her horse close to Surface and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Dad, don’t say any more,” she implored. “There must be a mistake. You stay out of it. That cowboy never murdered Allen Neece.”
“Lura, don’t interfere here,” snapped her father impatiently.
“Mr. Surface we’ll ride on in,” said Bodkin, and gave his men a peremptory order to move on.
Before the riders closed in on Brazos, he gave the red-headed girl a smile of gratitude. Her big eyes, still wide and dark, appeared to engulf him. Then the cavalcade started.
Before they had ridden many paces a clatter of hoofs behind and a call for Bodkin again halted the riders. The rancher Surface followed.
“A word with you, Bodkin,” he said, reining his mount.
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p; “Sartinly, Mister Surface,” returned the deputy, hastening to fall out of line.
“About that suit of mine against—” he began. But Brazos made quick note of the fact that that was ail he could hear, Bodkin and Surface walked their horses out of hearing.
He met Inskip’s deep grey eyes; in which there flashed a bright, steely glint that could be interpreted in only one way. Brazos’s blood took a hot leap, then receded to leave him cold. This halt boded ill to him. Sight of Bodkin’s grim visage, as he came riding back from his short colloquy with Surface, warned Brazos of the unexpected and the worst.
But Bodkin took the lead of the cavalcade again without a word other than a command to ride. His tenseness seemed to be communicated to all. Inskip took off his heavy coat and laid it back across the cantle of his saddle — an action Bodkin might have taken as thought provoking had he noticed it. Brazos’s reaction revolved around sight of the two big gun butts sticking out of Inskip’s belt. They spoke a language to Brazos as clear as had been the grey lightning in Inskip’s eyes.
The outskirts of Las Animas lay just ahead, beyond a bridge over a brook that brawled down to the Purgatory.
“Stop hyar, men,” ordered Bodkin, wheeling his horse. “Inskip, you ride on in an’ report.”
The Texan made no reply nor any move to act upon the command.
“Segel, you an’ Bill wait hyar with Reece,” went on Bodkin. “The rest of you come with me.”
He turned to ride off the road. “Inskip,” he said, suddenly, halting again. “Are you takin’ orders?”
“Not when it doesn’t suit me,” replied the Texan. “What you up to?”
“I’m goin’ to finish this job right hyar,” rejoined the deputy fiercely. “An’ if you don’t want your Texas pride hurt, you’d better not see what’s comin’ off.”
“Wal, I ain’t so sensitive as all thet,” drawled Inskip.
Brazos realised the game now and what a slim chance he had for his life. That chance was vested in Inskip. An awful instant he fought the shuddering clutch on his vitals, the appalling check to his thought. It was succeeded by desperate will and nerve. There would be one chance for him and when it came he must grasp it with the speed of lightning.