The Hopalong Cassidy Novels 4-Book Bundle

by Louis L'Amour

  Charleston might be a place to investigate, but that would come later, and it was certainly no place to take Red in his present condition. Other towns were too far away, so that meant a lonely ranch somewhere, or a hideout camp.

  Chapter 3

  A HORSE FOR RED

  That night Hopalong bedded down near Red and lay awake, watching and listening. Several times he dipped a cloth in water and placed it across the wounded man’s forehead, caring for him as much as he could. Once, when he walked toward the mouth of the canyon, he thought he saw the slinking form of a big cat, and several times an owl hooted. At the canyon mouth all was still. A cricket sounded in the brush, a night bird called, and the wind sounded on the strings of the tall timber.

  Red awakened early and stared at Hoppy. “Been awake all night, I bet. You get some sleep. You look like you need it.”

  Without a word Hopalong rolled up in his blanket and dropped off. Red rolled a smoke and stared at him. Did ever a man have a better friend? All along it had been Hoppy he wanted to see, Hoppy who he knew could pull them out of this, as he had so many times before.

  Red’s eyes scanned the cliffs. It was unbelievable that he had actually gotten down from there, wounded and only partly conscious, yet he had done it. He had done it and was alive to tell the tale, although had Hopalong not found him he would have been dead for hours now.

  Red’s mind returned to the trail he had been following when attacked. There had been at least thirty head in that bunch and they had been pushing them fast. None of the riders were known to him and it was a complete mystery where they were headed with the stolen cattle. He suspected all were recently rebranded 3TL steers—ample evidence to stretch a few necks if delivered to the right sources.

  They would never rest now until they had him. A cowboy named Grat had been in that crowd before the cattle were delivered to the strange riders. He knew the horse he rode and had followed its tracks more than once, often on Jack Bolt’s range.

  He checked his rifle and grinned when he saw it was loaded. He threw sticks on the fire and, without moving from his propped-up position, succeeded in getting the fire going and the coffee on. It was boiling when Hopalong opened his eyes and came awake.

  Hopalong Cassidy checked his guns and belted them on, then accepted the cup Red offered him. “You look better,” he said at last. “I’m going to leave you in this hideaway. Nobody seems to have come here for years, and if they do, you’re well hid. The trees and rocks give you cover, and you’re sure not going to let many of ’em get close with that rifle.”

  “Where you goin’?” Red demanded.

  “To get you a cayuse. You can’t walk out of here, and I’m not going to load my horse down with your carcass.”

  Red snorted and Hopalong swung into the saddle of the palouse and started off. Leaving the canyon, he took to the rocks, careful to leave no trail. In so doing he looked for his incoming tracks but found none.

  It was an hour later when he found fresh tracks of the cordon of riders that had been beating the canyons and valleys for Red Connors. The tracks looked less than an hour old, as nearly as he could judge, and they led down along the mountainside through the trees.

  Four riders were gathered over the ashes of a fire under the shade of a huge slab of granite. One of them he recognized at once, from the description Red had given, as Grat. Big, rough-looking, Grat was leaning against a rock, smoking a cigarette.

  “The devil with it!” Grat was saying. “He’s dead or gone out of the country!”

  “Well, someone slugged the Breed here,” Bones explained. “But I don’t think it was our fella. Anyway, what difference does it make? If we go back, we’ll be ridin’ fence and brandin’ cows. This here ain’t a bad life.”

  The others were a dark-faced man who wore his hat high over a makeshift bandage on the back of his head—Hoppy recognized him as the man he had hit with his pistol—and Hoyt, who had been one of the watchers left on the crest after Red had disappeared.

  Hopalong circled warily up the hillside behind them, then left his horse and worked his way down through the trees toward the rustlers’ camp. He had heard a few words and wanted to hear more, but he also wanted a bay that he could see picketed about twenty-five yards downhill from where the men were relaxing. On second thought he picked a gray. At a distance that bay might look enough like a sorrel to warrant investigation, and he wanted no trouble while Red was wounded.

  He studied the four men individually and found them true to type. All were tough-looking, all packed guns low, and all looked like men accustomed to using them. If this was the brand of men Jack Bolt had doing his rustling, they were no pushovers in any kind of a scrap.

  Nobody spoke for a few minutes. Hoyt was lying on the ground now, his head pillowed on his sombrero. He drew deep on his cigarette and looked up at the blue sky and idly drifting clouds.

  “The boss said he was takin’ a couple of us into Tascotal tonight,” he said. “I hope it ain’t me. This is the first rest I’ve had in months.”

  “I could go for some of that panther sweat they sell in there,” Bones said thoughtfully. “This ridin’ is mighty dry work.”

  Hopalong had moved down now within pistol shot of the horses, who were beyond the riders in a grove of trees. With infinite care, and taking all the time in the world, he eased himself through the trees and reached the picket rope of the gray. The horse jerked his head up, and Hopalong spoke gently to him. Curiously, the horse came nearer, and Hopalong murmured to him and scratched his shoulder, then his chest near the foreleg. The gray liked it, and after a minute or so Hopalong turned and led the gray back into the trees and tied him. Returning, he released the other horses. They seemed ready to go, and began drifting off.

  Mounting his own horse and leading the gray, Hopalong allowed his tracks to merge with the others in the trail, then cut off the traveled way, keeping to the flat rock of the country alongside the road and moving from one wide, wind-swept rock shelf to another until he had put a half mile between himself and the camp.

  After a couple of miles he cut off through the timber toward the canyon. Several times he made abrupt turns; once he made almost a complete circle, working his way farther back into the hills. It was almost sundown when he reached the canyon.

  Red looked at him and grinned as he came up. “Saw you comin’,” he said. “You got a horse.”

  “What did you want—a cow? Although,” he added dryly, “she might be easier for you to ride.”

  “Huh! I can ride anythin’ you can put a saddle on!” Red bristled. “I’ve seen you get piled a few times!”

  “You dream a lot!” Hopalong looked at him critically. “You figure you can stay in that saddle if I put you there?”

  “Try me!” Red hitched his way along the ground. “Let me get a hand on that stirrup and I’ll get in the saddle by myself.”

  “And get your head kicked off!” Hopalong replied.

  When Red Connors was in the saddle he grinned at Hoppy. “There was a time back there when I didn’t know whether I’d ever get up here again,” he said. “I figured maybe they had my number up at last.”

  “Let’s go!” Leading the way, Hopalong started down the canyon. They were careful to leave no tracks and once out of the woods near the canyon, Hopalong turned back into the higher mountains toward the north. At all costs, even at the risk of a longer ride, they must avoid trouble. Red was in no shape for a fight right now.

  “What about this Jack Bolt, Red? Know anything about him?”

  “Only what Gibson told me. He came in here about four years ago with two riders and bought a small spread. He paid cash for it, I hear, and the owner who sold to him left town right after. Seems somethin’ happened to him, because a year later they found what was left of him over near the Bruneau. He was long dead, just his skeleton and a few rags of clothes. They identified him by his boots and some letters in his leather jacket.

  “Nobody seems to have thought anything about tha
t, including Gibson. Lately, however, he’s been wonderin’ if that feller Newcombe wasn’t followed away and killed.

  “Bolt went to ranchin’ an’ stayed away from town most of the first year. When he started comin’ around, it was just to buy supplies, and he acted like a quiet, peaceful rancher. Then two rough-looking hombres hit town askin’ for him, and they went to work as hands. One of them was this Grat, who’s with him now. The other was Bones. Bolt, he got mighty friendly with that tough Springer outfit, but trouble didn’t start until Grat pulled in.

  “It was about that time folks began to miss a few cows. Bolt complained, too, but not until there had been some talk by others. Then Bolt went to the sheriff an’ told him he was missin’ stock. For a while the sheriff investigated, but nobody lost any stuff for several weeks, and then Fielding of the 3F came up with a lot of stock missin’.”

  “That 3F would make an 8 Boxed H, too,” Hopalong commented. “How about the other brands?”

  “It will cover more than half the brands in this neck of the woods,” Red said emphatically. “And you wonder why somebody ain’t pointed it out? A feller named Brown sure tried it. He said it right out in meeting before Grat, and Grat told him if he said the Bolt outfit were thieves, he was a liar!”

  “And Brown grabbed iron?”

  “Don’t reckon he meant to. I just heard about it. He said somethin’, and I figure he aimed to claim he was just mentionin’ the fact, but Grat called him a liar again, and that time he reached. He never got his gun clear. Grat downed him.”

  “And since then no comment, huh?”

  “That’s right, Hoppy. Bolt’s kept a good reputation somehow, and there’s only a few who think he’s anythin’ but honest. None of them cotton to his outfit too much, but nobody will come out and call ’em thieves.”

  Chapter 4

  RUSTLER PLANS

  Jack Bolt had every reason to feel satisfied. In the seven months of rustling, his hands had stolen over a thousand head of cattle from ranches within a day’s ride of his 8 Boxed H. All but fifty head of those cattle were safely out of the country, transferred to another ranch he now owned in northern California.

  With only six hands doing the rustling, the split was small, and not one of the six had any idea how he disposed of the cattle. At a certain point on the trail the herds were turned over to other men, who drove them north, then west. Only one herd had followed the trail discovered by Red Connors and that had gone to the mining camps of Western Montana for the purpose of immediate cash. Most of the returns had gone to the six cowhands.

  Bolt sat in a hide-bound armchair on his veranda and contemplated the situation. Gibson was down with a broken leg but would be out and around soon. If a big strike was to be made, it should be now. With Red Connors out of the way, the one man who knew anything definite had been eliminated, and the chances were people would believe he had drifted out of the country as he had come in.

  Bolt was very well pleased. The whole job had been handled simply but effectively and without any suspicion being directed toward him. There had been a little talk when Grat killed Brown, but Grat was only considered overhasty and was not otherwise under suspicion. Bolt had been careful to report small losses of cattle from time to time and, while making the usual complaints, had suggested the losses could also have been from straying, varmints, or lack of water.

  Jack Bolt was a tall man, well over six feet, and slightly stooped. His shoulders were narrow and rounded, his face long and saturnine, narrow through the cheekbones but wide at the jaw. His hide was browned like saddle leather, and his large nose jutted from between close-set black eyes. The hand that held his pipe was large, with prominent knuckles.

  Although he gave little evidence of it, he was a man of some education and he had begun life with large ideas, which expanded into grandiose plans, but plans that always waited for the lucky strike he expected to make, the big killing. At forty he was an embittered man who blamed the world for the success that had never come to him, failing to understand that the fault was his own. He was one of those who had always wanted to start at the top, and the idea of consistent effort to get there had seemed futile to him.

  His first break with the law had come when he was twenty-six and traveling with two hard-case hands. They convinced him that a stage holdup would net them all a stake, and he had fallen in with the plan. He had been badly frightened, nervous, and jumpy. He had fired the shot that killed a passenger with his hands in the air.

  The dispute with his partners that followed angered him because of their contempt, and while one of them was away from camp he had murdered the other and fled with the money. Attempting to build the six hundred dollars taken from the stage into a big stake, he had lost it all.

  In the following years he had been a stage driver, buffalo hunter, and livestock buyer, occasionally rustling small bunches of cattle and still hoping for the big break when somebody would recognize his sterling qualities and present him with a top job and much money, or someone would fall dead after making him the heir to millions. None of it ever happened, as it never does to those who expect and hope for it, and at last he had settled down to real effort.

  By that time he had the reputation of a hard man to handle. The killings that began his criminal career had been only two of many. There had been a man he killed in Caldwell, and another in Denver. In a poker game he won a few thousand dollars and had moved into the country where he now was and bought a small ranch and some cattle. With extreme care, for he now had his big plan started, he rustled a few cows, never letting his herd grow large, keeping his sale herds small but fat. By the same methods he was using, even without the rustling, he could in a few years have become honestly prosperous. But he had no such intention.

  On a trip north he had swung off the main trail and, in the mountains of California, had found a valley, built a cabin, and hired a couple of cowhands who wanted nothing so much as plenty to eat and a place to sleep. In the neighborhood he purchased a few cattle and a half-dozen horses.

  By the time he was ready to branch out he was well known around Tascotal, but nobody knew of the California ranch. He had picked up six cowhands whom he had carefully watched and tested, and then he began operations. At the end of seven months his own ranch showed only the natural increase, but the ranch in California was running a thousand head and he had acquired four more hands on that end.

  It was his nature to grow impatient. Thus far he had been slow, painstaking, and careful in the extreme. The plan had worked without a flaw. Until the coming of Red Connors, a cattle- and trail-wise veteran of many rustler campaigns, there had been no suspicion, and the losses had been so carefully scattered that many were still not convinced any rustling was taking place. Now he wanted to clean up fast. He wanted San Francisco, the bright lights and an easier life. And the quickest way was a sudden wholesale steal of cattle from the 3TL.

  Grat drifted into the yard and swung down from a weary horse. Stripping the saddle from the animal, he turned it into the corral and then stamped up to the porch, beating the dust from his hat against one leg of his chaps.

  “Ain’t found him,” Grat said. “Durned fool dropped plumb out of sight.”

  “That country closed up yet?” Bolt demanded sharply.

  “Sure is! We used them Aragon boys, like you said, and bottled up every trail, watched every water hole.” Grat had decided not to mention that he and the others had spent most of the afternoon chasing down horses that had mysteriously wandered off or the fact that some unknown person had hung a knot on the back of the Breed’s head. The men were still out looking and he hoped they’d have Connors pinned down or dead by tomorrow at the latest.

  “We found that sorrel he was ridin’, and there was blood on the horse’s withers. He’s bad hurt and the boys are closing in on him. Only thing that worries me: a man could lose himself back in there and die and might never be found.”

  Jack Bolt scowled. “You make sure you find him, or his body. He w
as from that old Bar 20 outfit, and they were plumb salty. I want to know he’s dead, no maybes!”

  Grat nodded. He was in complete agreement with that idea. So far this whole affair had gone off smoothly, increasing his respect for Bolt. His own inclinations had been to start rustling big, but now he realized that the other man’s idea had been much the best.

  “See anybody out on the trail?” Bolt asked. “Anybody from Tascotal?”

  “Nary a soul.” Grat leaned back and rolled a smoke, staring out over the dancing heat-waves in the valley. “You figurin’ on a drive?”

  “Uh-huh. Gibson’s still got that fat stock back in the canyon. There must be three hundred head there.”

  Grat grinned. “Now you’re talkin’! Let’s get after some big herds! We could have a thousand head of cattle out of here in three weeks with the right kind of breaks, and another thousand before they could get organized to try stoppin’ us.”

  “All right. Figure on it for night after tomorrow. Call a couple of men in and get them rested up. We’ll head right north and make a straight drive of thirty miles before we stop. A few hours’ rest, then twenty more. If they are tired they’ll be easier to handle.”

  Grat got to his feet. “All right.” He hesitated. “Say, Bones wanted me to ask if it would be all right for him to ride into town. Him and Sim Aragon—”

  “No!” Jack Bolt’s face hardened with irritation. “You know better than that! I don’t want any of you seen with those Aragon boys, do you hear? They got a bad rep around here. I want to keep you boys clean in this country. If he wants to go to town, he can go alone, but not with Sim. And if he does go, he’s to hobble his lip. He talks too much when he’s drinkin’.”

  Grat shrugged. “Don’t blame me! He said to ask.”

  “You’ve asked. If we start perambulatin’ around town with that no-account Aragon outfit, the first thing people will be findin’ us about as welcome as a polecat at a picnic! The Aragons are plumb mean. Sim killed a man in Tascotal only about a month ago, and for durned little reason, from all I hear.”