by Zane Grey
Brazos had in mind an image of this man Brad—tall, heavy, dark of face with beady black eyes—black garb—forceful presence. He was not the first man Brazos had tracked without ever having seen him in the flesh. It was possible for him to be mistaken in a description, but never in a voice. He had heard Brad talk.
The sidewalks were deserted. A farm wagon, drawn by big horses, appeared at the end of the street, raising slow clouds of dust. At the opposite end two horsemen rode out of town. The stillness seemed unusually pronounced, oppressive, full of suspense. But Brazos knew his mood—how it magnified his senses.
Halfway between Hall’s saloon and the Happy Days there stood an unoccupied adobe structure, one of the old landmarks of Las Animas, yellow and crumbling with age. Brazos took his station there in the doorway, from which he could not readily be seen except from a point almost directly opposite. Answering to Inskip’s suggestion he meant to wait there a little while.
So Brazos waited with hawk eyes alert, wholly now in the grip of this strange mood that had become a part of him—of faculties which made him so dangerous. He was conscious of enhanced physical activity, a strain, a gathering of nerve forces, of augmented heartbeats and throbbing pulse, of his tight cool skin. In fact, except for his keen thought and cold resolve, he was a tiger in ambush.
He did not have long to wait for the quiet of Las Animas to be broken. There came a movement of vehicles up and down the street, and of boot-thumping, spurjangling pedestrians along the sidewalk. Two cowboys went by with their awkward gait and they saw Brazos, started to check their talk; and when Brazos made a slight gesture, they hurried on whispering, their heads together. It would not be long from that moment when a wave of expectancy would run along this street.
Brazos decided to forestall that, and he was about to start out when a tall man emerged from Hall’s. He answered to the description Brazos had in mind as fitting Knight. Three men followed him out of the saloon. They talked. And Brazos detected a nervous excitement in the way they stood and spoke. Then Knight turned his dark face in Brazos’ direction. One of his comrades accompanied him, a lean man apparently used to the saddle. He was in his shirt sleeves and his vest was open. Knight wore a long black frock coat. It bulged over his right hip. Brazos smiled scornfully at the folly and blind arrogance of a man who packed his gun like that. The lean man took no such chances.
They came on. It looked to Brazos as if Knight was on parade for the benefit of Las Animas. The other man showed nothing of such a mien. He would bear watching.
As they came on, Brazos made his final estimate of Knight. In another moment, Brazos stepped out to confront them.
“Howdy, Brad,” he drawled.
If that name did not belong to this man, it certainly had power to halt him with a stiffening jerk.
“My name’s—Knight,” he rasped out.
“Aw, hell!” ejaculated Brazos in cold derision. The voice was the one he expected.
“Who are you?” demanded the other, suddenly.
“Wal, if yu don’t know now, yu haven’t got a long time to get acquainted.”
The lean man, staring hard at Brazos, said quietly: “It’s Brazos Keene.”
“Good guess, stranger. . . . Slope damn pronto or I’ll bore yu,” returned Brazos, just as quietly.
The man wheeled as on a pivot and his boots rang on the hard sidewalk.
“Wal, Mr. Knight, yu’ve met up with Brazos Keene at last.”
“What of that?” retorted Knight.
“I cain’t say for yu, but I can guess tolerable wal what of it for me.”
“You’re this Texas cowboy I hear so much about?”
“How much do yu heah?”
“I’m fed up on it.”
“Ahuh. Wal, yu kinda look like it disagreed with yu. Bad stomach, I reckon. . . . An’ yu don’t strike me very healthy in yore mind,” drawled Brazos, sarcastically.
“Is that so?” snapped Knight, his queer voice whistling.
“Shore. Cause if yu were very bright yu’d savvy what yu’re up against.”
“Brazos Keene, ah? Ha! Ha! It doesn’t impress me, you bragging cowpuncher.”
“Wal, it’s agonna, Brad.”
“Damn you! My name’s Knight,” burst out the other, fiercely. Brazos saw the leap of thought in those beady black eyes. It was a steely red glint, a compass needle wavering and fixing—the intent to kill. Brad would attempt to draw on him, Brazos knew, and he felt profound amaze at this man’s ignorance of real gunmen.
“Wal, it’s Brad too.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody. I just heahed Bodkin an’ thet other hombre call yu Brad.”
“When and where?” queried Brad, heatedly, but he had begun to whiten.
“Thet night at Hailey’s. Just after the midnight train had pulled in from the East. I was in the next room an’ had a hole cut in the wall.”
“You meddling cow hand!”
“Shore. . . . Brad, I shore got a hand to draw to—an’ I got one to draw with!”
Knight vibrated to that. He blazed with passion. It was fury, not fear, that dominated him.
“An’ I’m packin’ a gun, too! Which is what yu knew my Texas pard, Bilyen, wasn’t.”
“To hell with you Texans!”
“Ump-umm. Texans don’t go to hell for depletin’ the West of such two-bit hombres as yu. . . . Brad, yu an’ Bodkin an’ Surface—all yore ilk air nothin’ but a lot of blood-suckin’ cattle ticks.”
Knight appeared to be beyond speech, clamped in his rage, slowly awakening to the inevitableness of something sinister that loomed like a specter. Still he had no fear. But it was rage, not nerve.
“Why, man alive!” went on Brazos, in his cold taunting voice of absolute assurance. “I’ve met up with some real men in my day. Yu’re nothin’ but a low-down coward that shoots unarmed men. . . .”
With a grating curse Knight jerked for his gun.
Brazos stepped through the drifting pall of smoke to look down upon the fallen man. But he was too late to see Brad die. The rustler boss lay on his back, his right arm pinned under him, clutching his half-drawn gun, his visage distorted in its convulsive change from life to death. And at that instant his sombrero, which had rolled on its rim off the sidewalk, tilted and flopped to a standstill.
It was not until then that the blood lust in Brazos, the passion to slay, his implacable hatred of these parasites of the cattle range, all of which had been developed by circumstances over which Brazos had no control, leaped out of his controlling restraint to make him terrible.
He slipped a fresh cartridge into the one empty chamber of his still smoking gun. A crowd blocked the sidewalk in front of Hall’s. Across the street white faces appeared at doors and windows. A noise, like a single expelled breath, arose among the men outside, to augment and swell into voices. It expressed release of suspense, a tragedy enacted.
“Atta boy, Brazos!” yelled a lout at the back, in hoarse venting of his passion, and a laugh, nervous, not mirthful, ran through the crowd.
Sheathing his gun Brazos whirled on his heel to stride rapidly in the direction of the sheriff’s office.
It was locked. The dispenser of Las Animas justice wasted little of his valuable time there. Brazos burst into three places before some one told him where to locate Bodkin.
“Seen him go in Twin Sombreros restaurant,” called out this individual.
Brazos laughed. Of all places for Bodkin to be cornered by Brazos Keene! There was a fate that waited upon evil men. Bodkin, on the hour that his ally Knight had tried to murder Bilyen, and himself lay dead in the street, should have been in his office surrounded by his deputies and guns, or in the saloon where he drank and gambled and planned with members of his secret contingent. It boded ill for him that he was entertaining visitors from Denver and business men he desired to impress.
Brazos opened the door of the restaurant, slipped in, then slammed it behind him. This eating house of the Neece twins was f
ull of customers. On the right side, facing the street from which Brazos had entered, several of the small tables had been placed together, round which sat ten or a dozen men. Brazos’ lightning eye had scanned them to locate his victim.
“Everybody set tight!” yelled Brazos.
His appearance had as much to do with the sudden petrified silence of those present as had his stentorian voice. He surveyed the men at table. Miller he recognized. His passion was such that even the presence of the banker Henderson among them occasioned him no surprise. Several other faces were familiar, evidently belonging to new business men of Las Animas. The rest were strangers.
“Haw! Haw! Haw!” Brazos laughed, lustily, wild as a maniac. But a keen observer would have noted that the cowboy swerved not the slightest hair from his slight crouch—that his hands were low and the right spread a little from his body. Far removed indeed was Brazos from irrationality. He was a death-dealing machine, as impersonal as a lightning stroke. “Haw! Haw! Funny aboot findin’ yu heah, Bodkin!”
The guests at that table rose so hurriedly that half their chairs turned over. They split, some on each side, leaving Bodkin alone at the head, his ox eyes rolling at Brazos, his leather visage losing its swarthy line.
“Keene, this hyar’s an intrusion. . . . Insult to my guests. . . . I——”
“Haw! Haw! . . . yore guests, huh? Wal, they must be crooked as yu or the damnedest fools in Colorado.”
“Drunk again! Same old Keene! . . . You get out or I’ll clap you in jail.”
Brazos spat like a cat. “Jail? . . . By Gawd, yu make me remember I got thet on yu too! . . . Wal, Bodkin, my rustlin’ sheriff, yu’ll never clap me in jail again . . . or any other cowboy!”
Still it did not quite dawn upon Bodkin that he was in for more than abuse at the hands of Brazos Keene. There must have been a very strong conviction locked in his dense mind—no doubt the gossip that if Brazos was to marry into the Neece family his gun-throwing days were over in Colorado.
“Get out, Keene. You’re drunk an’ you’re blowin’ off. Why do you pick on me?”
“Wal, I didn’t feel full of talk when I busted in heah,” drawled Brazos, bitingly. “But seein’ yu all dressed up, throwin’ all this bluff, I just feel like crowin’.”
“Well, you can go out in the pasture an’ crow,” replied Bodkin, angrily. “Let me alone. You can’t want anythin’ of me.”
“Hell, I cain’t!”
There ensued a pause of suspense, fraught with the significance of the cowboy’s icy voice.
“What you want—then?” demanded Bodkin, hoarsely.
“Wal, first off I wanted to tell yu, Bodkin,” drawled Brazos, with irritating slowness. He paused. Then he leaned a little more, like an eagle about to strike, to launch words swift as bullets. “Yore pard Brad is layin’ oot there in the street daid!”
“Brad?” Bodkin choked out the name.
“Yes. Brad. He calls himself Knight. He’s yore new man. I savvy thet empty chair I seen heah next yu was for him. Wal, he couldn’t set in yore little game. . . . He’s daid!”
“Who shot him?”
“Some hombre from Texas.”
“You!”
“Bodkin, yu’re so good a guesser maybe yu can guess some more.”
“Well, that’s no great concern of mine,” returned Bodkin, harshly. “You’re one of these even-break gunmen, so I can’t arrest you. I knew him as Knight. Now get out——”
“Aw, Bodkin, yu’re all lie,” flung out Brazos, and in two long strides he reached the table. He lifted his boot against it and shoved powerfully. The laden tables slid and tumbled with a crash, overturning Bodkin and half covering his burly form.
“Come up with yore gun!” ordered Brazos.
Bodkin floundered to his feet and would have made a ludicrous figure but for a stark and ghastly terror that was etched on his face. He made no move for his gun, which swung free without coat to hamper it.
“I’m not fightin’ you—gun slinger,” he panted.
“Yes, yu air—or be the first man I ever bored withoot it.”
“Let me by. If you’re spoilin’ for a fight I’ll find men——”
“Bah, yu chicken-hearted greaser! Cain’t yu make no better stand before yore guests? Cain’t yu die game?”
“Brazos Keene, I’ll not add another notch to your gun handle.”
“Wal, I’ll break my rule an’ cut just one notch for yu, Bodkin. An’ wherever I ride I’ll show it an’ say thet’s for the yellowest, dirtiest skunk I ever shot.”
“I tell you I won’t draw,” shouted Bodkin, desperate in his fear.
Brazos’ gun twinkled blue. Bang! . . . Bodkin screamed like a horse in agony. His leg gave way under him and he would have fallen but for the chair he seized. Brazos’ bullet had penetrated the calf of his leg.
“Air yu gonna take it by inches?” demanded the cowboy.
Bodkin gazed balefully, with wobbling jaw. Horribly plain his love of life, his fear of death! And still it eluded him—the destroying truth of this cowboy.
“Bodkin, yore game is up. Yu’ve dealt yore last hand at cairds. Yore lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’ days air over. . . . Yore murderin’ days air over. . . . For yu was Surface’s tool in Allen Neece’s murder. Yu tried the same deal when yu set Bard Syvertsen an’ his girl Bess to murder me. . . . Yu’re a menace to this range. These Las Animas fools who elected yu sheriff air crazy or crooked.”
“You’re the crazy—one,” gasped Bodkin.
“Listen man. Cain’t yu see things? I could kill yu on a personal grudge. But I’m gonna kill yu for better reasons.”
“Keene, you can’t prove. . . . You have no case. . . .”
“Hell! . . . Heah’s one yu cain’t deny. I was in the room next to yore’s at Hailey’s. I had a hole cut in the wall. I heahed yu come in at midnight, with two men. One of them this Brad hombre I just shot. . . . An’ I heahed yu talk. About Brad’s failure to get the gunman, Panhandle Ruckfall, to come heah to kill me. . . . Aboot the gold Syvertsen stole from Neece an’ gave to Surface. . . . Aha! yore memory is comin’ to, Bodkin, old-timer! . . . Aboot how yu reckoned yu would hang on heah an’ get elected sheriff. . . . An’ last, how the third man of yu three thet night—the one whose name I never heahed—how he said the cattlemen of this range was wakin’ up an’ he was gonna slope.”
Damning guilt worked upon the lessening fear and agony in Bodkin’s visage.
“Now will yu go for yore gun?” added Brazos, sardonically.
“No—you—hydrophobia-bitten cow hand!”
Crash! Brazos shot the other leg out from under Bodkin. Still the sheriff did not fall, nor this time did he scream out. He sagged a little, until his knee on the chair upheld him. Then the horrid expression faded, smoothed out of his face, and into it came a vestige of the realization of death and a dark desire to take his merciless adversary with him. He let go of the chair with his right hand and drew his gun. Brazos let him swing it upward. Then Brazos leaped aside and shot. Bodkin’s gun boomed so close afterward that the two shots seemed simultaneous. But Bodkin’s bullet crashed through the window and Brazos’ reached its mark. Bodkin slumped over the chair, his arms hanging, his head drooping, and on the instant his grip on his gun loosened to let it clatter on the floor.
Then the cowboy faced the ill-assorted group of men who had assembled there as Bodkin’s guests. There was not the sign of a movement among them. They stood as if petrified.
“Henderson, yu’re in bad company,” rang out Brazos, “an’ no matter what yore excuse, it’ll be remembered in Las Animas. . . . Miller, I’m brandin’ yu as hand an’ glove with this Surface ootfit. . . . Yu business men an’ yu strangers all know Bodkin now for what he was. . . . An’ I reckon thet’ll be aboot all for Brazos Keene in Colorado.”
CHAPTER
15
BRAZOS rode away from Las Animas at dawn, as the sun was reddening the gray landscape, without ever once looking back, as he had done so often in
his tumultuous range life.
His heading for the south, however, with the lean eager nose of his horse Bay turned toward Texas, had an air of finality. Thirst for adventure and even for romance, had been effectually killed. As Brazos took to the well-worn cattle trail, he felt sick and old and unhappy. He reflected that he would recover from the former, which was mostly revulsion at the shedding of blood, but he doubted that he would ever be young or happy again.
For long days he rode alone, shunning the cow camps, going around several little towns, camping at water holes and living upon the food he had packed. He made a gloomy and strange traveler. The gray miles filed past and every one of them seemed a dropped fetter. And in due course the bitter dregs of his last killing orgy wore out of his stomach. But the sense of loss still pressed heavily upon him. He forgot that it had been wise for him to ride away from the scene that had outlawed him, however unjust the law was, and despite the multitude of friends he had left behind.
Brazos knew his despair had to do with a broken heart. That susceptible member had been broken often before, and the time he had ridden away from Holly Ripple he thought it could never be mended. Nevertheless he had been mistaken.
Despite the stress of his emotions, however, Brazos could not prevent the influence of the open and the solitude. There was something healing in the waving grass, the swales and green flats, the winding tree-bordered river bottoms, and the distant uplands. Autumn, his favorite season, met him with its golden and gorgeous Indian summer. The dry fragrant breeze soft in his face, the poise of hawk and bound of jack rabbit, and the slipping away into the willows of deer, the gradual drawing from sight of cattle herds, the warming color in the distance, the smell of dust that at times rose from the clip-clop of Bay’s tireless hoofs, the cottonwood grove where he had once camped, the great sycamore tree on the bank of the Purgatory where he had helped to hang a horse thief, the subtle essence of the lovely land which had been so much in his life—these wore upon him more and more until his old philosophy got hold of him again, and reason made clear the change in his life, and that with his marvelous memory he could not be anything else but appreciative even with his broken heart.