by Zane Grey
“Allen Neece,” burst out Bodkin, in surprise. He had not expected to see the owner of that name.
“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 various other comments greeted Brazos’ ears, and drew from Bodkin the harsh decree:
“Cowboy, you’re under arrest.”
“Hell! I’m not blind or deaf,” retorted Brazos, sarcastically. “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 I am drunk or crazy?”
“I reckon you don’t,” replied Bodkin, with glinting eyes taking stock of Brazos.
“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, contemptuously, with piercing glance of scorn flashing from Bodkin to his men. “What kind of Westerners air yu?”
Brazos’ scornful stand, his cool nerve in the face of a critical situation obviously impressed some of the riders.
“Bod, I’d recommend a fair trial fer this fellar,” said one.
“It shore has a queer look, this whole deal,” interposed another. “Kiskadden has grown testy of late. Better let him be the jedge.”
“Wal, if you-all ain’t fer hangin’ him pronto, I’ll hev to take him into town,” said Bodkin, in gruff reluctance.
“See heah, Mister Deputy,” spoke up Brazos, keen to catch his advantage. “Last night aboot dark I was held up by three men. I saw them first, pullin’ their hawses behind the trees there. One of them was goin’ to shoot me when another knocked up his arm. I’ll shore remember his voice an’ the name he called thet man. . . . Wal, I hailed them an’ one fellar rode oot. Never mind what he said. But by Gawd! his dodge is clear to me now. They rode away, an’ I turned my hawse loose an’ went to bed in the cabin heah. Sometime in the night I woke up. I heahed what I thought was rain drippin’. Aboot daybreak I woke again an’ heahed thet same drip—drip—drip. Then I smelled blood. I got up an’ caught some of thet drip on my hand. It was blood. I was carryin’ my saddle oot when yu rode up.”
“Haw! Haw!” laughed Bodkin, with a leering sneer. “An’ what way was you goin’ to ride, cowboy?”
“Hot for Las Animas, Mister Deputy Bodkin, yu can bet yore life on thet,” rang out Brazos.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t care a damn what yu believe. I’m tellin’ yu, thet’s all. It’s my way of givin’ yu a hunch.”
“Say, I’m an officer of the law an’ you’re one of these rowdy windy cowboys, of which this hyar range is too thickly populated.”
“Wrong again, officer. You may have the law behind yu, but yu’re not very bright. I don’t resist arrest. But I’m innocent of this charge. I want a fair trial an’ a chance to prove it. What’s more, if yu knew me yu’d be most damn shore of yore proofs before yu pressed this charge.”
“I would, huh? Suppose you acquaint us with your name an’ status in Colorado.”
Brazos made no reply to the deputy, and spent the following interval in a hard scrutiny of the members of this posse. It was significant that two of them in the background moved to hide behind those in front.
“Bod, you cain’t hang this Texan on such heahsay evidence,” advised the 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 the brief duration of that quiet 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 herein 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 towhead off.”
Brazos’ captors shoved him forward. Bay had been found and saddled. He did not like this crowd and pulled at his bit, held hard by one of the posse. 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 center.
For a while, Brazos was too busy scrutinizing the faces of Bodkin’s men to pay much attention to the lay of the land. When he did look beyond them, however, it was to see the Purgatory River winding down through a beautiful stretch which he remembered. At its extreme eastern terminus the sunrise over the horizon flooded the range with a soft rose light. Vast gray prairie lands rolled away to the north. Dots and strings and herds of cattle dominated the landscape. Columns of smoke rising about green field and red and white houses marked the location of Las Animas. Manifestly the town had grown since Brazos’ last visit there six years and more ago. At that time the railroad had just reached it.
Brazos inquired of the rider on his left as to the size of Las Animas, but received no response from that worthy. The posse appeared to be a surly lot, not given to much talk.
“Say, pardner,” he ventured, accosting the young man on his right, “how big is Las Animas now?”
“Right pert town. About twenty-five hundred, I’d reckon,” was the civil reply.
“Gee! Thet’s shore a metropolis. Wide open like it used to be?”
“Purty wide. I’ve only been there a year. Folks say it’s slow now.”
Bodkin turned to glare at the young rider. “Shet up. This man is under arrest fer murder.”
Brazos felt the old gusty fire thrill along his veins, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from a sharp retort. But he would bide his time. He had seen numberless Westerners of Bodkin’s type. His knowledge of them equaled his contempt. There would be men in Las Animas who would remember Brazos Keene and who would be certain to give this fourflush deputy a jar.
The cavalcade traveled on at a slow trot and at length reached a site strangely familiar to Brazos. It was the head of the valley. He identified a grove of cottonwoods stretching far on each side of the river. Many a time had he camped there. The difference consisted in that the wildness of the sylvan spot had given place to a ranch that would have gladdened the eye of any cowboy. A long, low, red-roofed, red-walled adobe ranch house stood upon the north bank of the river, and below it, where the 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 in the enthusiastic appreciation of his kind. “Whose ootfit is thet?”
Inskip, the Texan, riding second on Brazos’ left, took it upon himself to reply.
“Twin Sombreros Ranch,” he replied, his dry drawl significant of something more than information. “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.”
“Wal, I don’t wonder,” returned Brazos, feelingly. “Gosh, I’d rather be a grub-line-ridi
n’ cowboy.”
Bodkin turned again with malignance in his visage. “You’ll be a swingin’ cowboy before sundown.”
“Yeah?” drawled Brazos in his cool slow speech. “Bodkin, I savvy thet if I don’t swing, it shore won’t be owin’ to yore kind offices.”
It so happened that when the cavalcade reached the crossroad to the ranch a sextette 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. His proud, fiery nature rebelled at the indignity Bodkin had forced upon him.
“What’s this, Bodkin?” demanded the leader.
“Mornin’, Mr. Surface,” replied Bodkin, with both importance and servility. “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.”
“Open up here!” ordered Surface, and in another moment a few feet of unobstructed lane intervened between the rancher and Brazos Keene. 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, not one iota of which denoted sympathy.
Brazos gave the rancher a long stare. Among Brazos’ gifts was the rare one of an almost superhuman perspicuity. The time had long passed in his eventful career when he distrusted that peculiar faculty. Surface fell under a category of Westerners far removed from the open-faced, eagle-eyed, great-hearted pioneers whom Brazos revered.
“Wal, who I am is shore none of yore business,” replied Brazos, 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 fourflush, Deputy Bodkin?”
The sharp unexpected query disconcerted Surface and elicited a roar from Bodkin.
“I put Kiskadden in office,” said the rancher stiffly, putting forward a fact Brazos could see no reason for mentioning. “I recommended to the Cattlemen’s Association that we appoint deputies to help rid this range of desperadoes an’ rustlers—an’ rowdy cowboys.”
“Wal, Mr. Surface, yu shore impress me powerful,” drawled Brazos, scornfully.
“What’s your name?”
“Wal, I’m not advisin’ yu to ride into town an’ find oot. Yu might, along with yore deputy hired hand heah, find yoreself disappointed.”
“You insolent ragamuffin of a Texan!” fumed Surface, evidently resenting his failure to be given due importance.
“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 greaser 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’ arraignment was broken by Inskip.
“Surface,” he said caustically, to the pale-faced rancher. “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.”
“Bodkin said he had proofs,” rejoined Surface, testily. “I took his word.”
“Texans hang together,” tartly interposed the deputy sheriff, giving a double meaning to the verb. “Inskip wanted to ride out on this hunt. I reckon he had a hunch. I really didn’t want him.”
“Bodkin, I’m givin’ you a hunch,” drawled Inskip, with tone and glance that warmed Brazos. “Kiskadden is a Texan. Mebbe you didn’t know thet.”
At this juncture, when a strong argument seemed imminent, the redheaded 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 redheaded girl an intent look and a smile of gratitude for her championship. Her big eyes, still wide and dark, appeared to engulf him. Then the cavalcade started. Brazos soon regained his composure. Presently, it occurred to him that this situation had approached a provoking complexity. He cursed his luck. It was bad enough to fall into a perilous predicament without having it assume irresistible interest. He would fight that, and the hour he was freed, he would ride away from Las Animas.
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.
“Sartinly, Mister Surface,” returned the deputy, hastening to fall out of line.
“About that suit of mine against—” he began, with something of pomposity. But Brazos made quick note of the fact that that was all he could hear. Bodkin and Surface walked their horses out of hearing. Brazos was not missing anything. The two riders who had the disagreeable task of holding the corpse in the saddle and keeping it covered swore openly at this second loss of time. As Brazos turned to face forward again, he met Inskip’s deep gray eyes in which there flashed a bright steely glint that could be interpreted in only one way. Brazos’ 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. Their faces set away from the prisoner. 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’ 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 gray 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. Oaks and cottonwoods lined the west bank.
“Stop hyar, man,” ordered Bodkin, wheeling his horse. “Inskip, you ride on in an’ report.”
The Texan made no reply nor any move to act upon the deputy’s command.
“Segel, you an’ Bill wait hyar with Neece,” 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, Bodkin?”
“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 realized 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 the desperate will and nerve, the unlimited resourcefulness of the cowboy whose flame-spirit had been engendered by such terrible situations as this. There would be one chance for him and when it came he must grasp it with the speed of lightning.
Bodkin led down the west bank of the brook. The trees and rocks broke up the formation of the posse. Brazos’ sharp eye caught the rider behind Bodkin bending forward to untie his lasso from his saddle. They entered a rocky glade comminated by an old cottonwood tree with spreading branches and a dead top. Brazos had been under that tree before.
“Open up,” shouted Bodkin. “Prod his hoss out hyar.”
A moment of cracking ironshod hoofs on rock and Brazos’ horse champed his bit under a widespreading arm of the cottonwood. All the men faced Brazos, pale, with thin lips set.
“Boss,” spoke up one of them, hoarsely. “I’m bound to speak out. This deal is too raw fer my stomach.”
“Rustle then. Git out of hyar,” yelled the leader, livid with passion.
“I sure will. Come on, Ben. We didn’t join this outfit to hang a cowboy thet ain’t proved guilty.”
The lean rider addressed detached himself from the group.
“Bodkin,” he said, forcefully. “You’re too damn keen on this necktie party. Frank an’ me are slopin’.”
“Yellow, huh?” shouted the deputy, as the couple rode off. “All right. I’ll bear it in mind.”
“See heah, Bodkin,” interposed Inskip, “did you ride all this way to have yore mine changed by Surface?”
“Inskip, you go to hell!” hissed Bodkin, enraged at the sarcastic implication. Nevertheless, it could scarcely have been rage that paled the redness out of his malignant visage.
Brazos read in Inskip’s eyes what Bodkin failed to see; and it was that intelligence which sustained him. The Texan might have a trump card up his sleeve, but Brazos could only think of two desperate chances, one of which he was sure would be presented.
“Flip thet noose, Barsh,” ordered Bodkin, sardonically, addressing a lean rider whose hat shaded his face. He had a coiled rope in his left hand. He gave the coil a toss. The loop spread to fall over Brazos’ head and lodge on his shoulders. Another flip and the noose closed round his neck. The feel of the hard smooth hemp against Brazos’ bare flesh liberated in him the devil that he had kept leashed. Brazos had never before suffered the odium of this phase of border law. Barsh plainly quailed before Brazos’ steady gaze.