'I'm looking for some of your neighbors, Tick,' the sheriff told him. 'Fenwick, Polk, Frawley, Mullins, and two men called Chad and Doc, whose last names I don't know.'
'Haven't seen hair or hide of any of them for a week. Want 'em to serve on a jury, Elbert?'
'Not exactly. I saw a couple of lads at the corral as we arrived. Mind giving them a call, Tick?'
'Anything to oblige,' snickered Black. He raised his voice to a shout. 'Sam — Rusty. Where you boys at?'
A youngster came to the door of the stable and answered. 'What you want, Tick?'
'We got visitors who would like to see you.'
Two eighteen-year-old boys in levis and big Stetsons crossed the yard to the house.
'This is Sheriff Elbert, boys,' explained their employer. 'He's taking a pasear through the hills with these other gentlemen. Maybe they are working on the census. If the sheriff wants to know whether yore pappies chewed tobacco you tell him.'
The sheriff asked them their names. Sam Hitchcock and Rusty Peters, they told him.
Elbert turned to his posse. 'Any of you know these boys?'
One of the deputies said he had seen them at Fair Play hanging around a pool hall, but he had never met the lads.
When the sheriff quizzed the Double B men about Fenwick, Polk, and the others wanted, no information could be got from them. They could not remember exactly when they had last seen any of those for whom the officer had warrants.
'Why come looking for them here?' Black asked. 'They don't live on this ranch.'
'I thought you might know where they are, since you are their sponsor.'
'What d'you mean by that?' the ranchman snapped.
The sheriff looked steadily at him. 'I mean that you buy cattle from some of them and sell the stuff to a packing house, thereby vouching for them as the bona-fide owners.'
'I did not do any vouching,' Black disagreed. 'I showed Gibson a bill of sale. You can't touch me, if that's what you are getting at. Maybe the boys made a mistake or two in branding. You can't always be sure what cow a calf belongs to, and errors are made.'
'These were not legitimate errors. I have proof that brands were changed.'
'But not that I changed them. Gibson can bring a civil action for damages in case he isn't satisfied.'
'That won't go, Black. The brands were changed outside Casa Rita after you had bought the cattle.' The sheriff took from his pocket a paper. 'I have a warrant for your arrest.'
'I'll be out of jail inside of two hours after you put me in,' Black said, and tossed the paper back contemptuously so that it fell on the porch.
'I don't doubt it,' Elbert answered. 'But after your trial you'll be behind bars quite a while.'
'What evidence you got, outside of this mistake in the brand, which may be some trumped-up evidence fixed by Stevens?'
The sheriff did not intend to tip the hand of the prosecution. 'You'll find out when the time comes. If you want to pack a suitcase, one of the boys will go in and help you.'
Black clumped into the house, Arnold at his heels. He reappeared shortly carrying a shabby valise of imitation leather.
'Let's go,' he snapped. 'I won't need this suitcase at yore jail, but I'll probably stay in town a day or two while I'm starting a suit for false imprisonment.'
Arnold and Wall took the prisoner to the M K ranch, from which they could travel by car to Fair Play. A man was leading a horse across the yard to the blacksmith shop.
'Where is Hal, Mike?' asked Arnold.
'He left on horseback just after you fellows did,' Mike replied. 'Didn't say where he was going, but he carried some grub and a coffee pot with him like he was going camping for a day or two. Told me to tell you not to begin worrying till you saw him again, that he was aiming to commune with nature.'
'That's queer,' Wall said.
'I don't like it,' Arnold replied. 'This is no time for him to be going off alone. He's probably got some crazy idea in his nut.'
'I thought it was funny when he slid out of being on the posse,' Wall remarked. 'Even though he told us we were going on a wild goose chase and wouldn't bag any more than Black was willing for us to get.'
'Hal can look after himself pretty well,' Mike said, by way of consolation. 'I reckon he knows what he is doing.'
None the less, Arnold was troubled all the way to Fair Play and back again. Hal was too fond of playing hunches. Some day one of them would not work out.
CHAPTER 32
Hal Plays a Lone Hand
WHEN HAL reached the first mesa that looked down on the valley, he rested the buckskin for a minute and his gaze swept the country he was leaving. Distance softened the harshness of the desert, lent it a golden harmony that satisfied his sense of beauty. White billowy clouds were drifting across the sky, and the shadows from them moved very slowly along the undulating floor. He could see here and there a bunch of cattle 'standing on their heads,' as he had heard his father say of stock when grazing.
On this he turned his back and pushed to the far side of the mesa, his horse sidestepping the catclaw and the prickly pear. The ground rose gradually, and when he entered a rocky gulch with yucca sprinkling the steep sides, the ascent grew less easy. It brought him to a grassy park with a growth of live oaks rising to the yonder rim in the midst of which a low log house nestled. He circled around the lip of the park, out of sight of the house, and from the rear dropped down to it through the grove.
It was not a bad stand, he thought. The grass was good. A small stream ran into the meadow, and when he reached the house he saw pans full of sweet milk resting on the sandy bottom of the shallow brook. At the water's edge a woman stood washing clothes. When she turned, startled at the sound of the cowpony's hoof striking a stone, he saw that she was long and lean as a starved Yaqui, with the dry parched face Arizona gives to women who do not take care of their complexions.
'Good evening, Mrs. Kendall,' he said, every sense keyed to alertness. Danger might be ready to explode at him from the house, though his relaxed attitude in the saddle showed no evidence of his awareness of it. 'Aleck at home?'
Hal could see that her angular body was braced rigidly. That might mean only that the word had run through all the gulches and pockets of these hills that he was an enemy who must be guarded against.
'No, he's not,' she answered. 'He's gone — I don't know where.' She added, as an apparent afterthought, 'Looking for strays.'
Her visitor was relieved. She had been about to tell him where her husband was and had remembered in time to be cautious. Hal did not care where Aleck was, since he was not on the ranch watching him.
In spite of her obvious hostility, Hal felt a little rush of sympathy for her. As children they had gone to the same public school at Big Bridge. He had watched her grow up into a pretty girl with the color of wild roses fluttering in her cheeks. Several times, on his summer vacations from college, he had treated her to ice cream sodas at the drugstore, and once he had taken her to a barn dance. In those days she had been gay and full of laughter. But she had made a bad mistake in marriage, and life had done this to her.
'No see you for a long time, Sally,' he said. 'We ought to be more neighborly. Great Scott, it's — why, it must be ten years since I took you to the Peterson dance. You were the prettiest girl in the valley.'
A slow flush beat into her thin cheeks. She needed no reminder of the time when she could not see him without a pulse of excitement beating fast in her throat. She would have jumped then at the chance to marry him, but she knew now that no thought of such a result of their friendship had been in his mind.
'What are you doing here?' she asked stiffly.
'I'm hunting a bull that broke through a fence. Thought it might have strayed up this way.'
'You had better turn and go home,' she warned. 'Don't you know that any one of half a dozen men in this district would shoot you as they would a coyote?'
'Can you tell me where any of them are today?' he asked, smiling at her.
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p; 'No, I can't, and I wouldn't if I could.' She flung out the retort violently, then let her voice drop to an anticlimax. 'Aleck isn't one of those who would hurt you,' she said sullenly.
'I know that, Sally,' he agreed gently. 'Aleck is all right. It's a pity he homesteaded here, though it is a good spread.'
Kendall was a shiftless rancher. The rundown appearance of the house and other buildings testified to that, but he was a friendly and good-natured wastrel. 'There is a gang of ruffians around here who have murdered one man and want to kill more of us. Do you blame me for throwing in against them?'
'I blame you for riding up here alone, since you know that. Haven't you a lick of sense, Hal Stevens? Why did you come here? What do you want of me?'
'Sheriff Elbert rode in to the Double B today with a posse to arrest some of these outlaws,' he told her. 'He doesn't want Aleck. There is no charge against him. I hope he has kept his hands clean. But the sheriff wants Frawley and Fenwick and Polk, and three-four others. He won't get them, because news of his coming will have got in ahead of him. They have holed-up somewhere. I don't want to run into them. I am not asking you where they are, but where they are not.'
'What do you mean?' she frowned, puzzled.
'I want to go into the Rabbit Ear Gulch country — or at least into the outskirts of it — without meeting any of the Black gang unexpectedly,'
'But what do you want to do there?'
'Never mind about that, Sally. If Aleck isn't one of them, I'm not going to do him any harm.'
'He isn't. Aleck keeps out of their deviltry, but you're not fool enough not to know that he must keep his mouth shut and so must I.'
'I know that. I don't want to find out from you where the hiding place of these scoundrels is. You probably don't know exactly where they hole-up. But you can tell me this — and forget afterward you have told me. If I went to Ed Mullins's place, would I be likely to bump into them?'
Looking at him, the woman felt again for a moment the hot excitement that had so stirred her blood in the days of her warm youth. He still had the same lean clean build, the same reckless dancing eyes, wrinkled at the corners now from having squinted into a thousand summer suns. And he still carried his lithe body with that grace which was neither insolence nor pride, but had a touch of kinship with both — the poised power of leashed strength she had never seen in any other man.
'Go home, before anything happens to you,' she pleaded.
He smiled at her. 'You haven't answered my question, Sally. I'm not going home until I've finished my business.'
'But you won't tell me what it is,' she said sulkily.
'If you don't know, you can't tell your husband,' he reminded her.
'If I told him, he would never peep. But all right. Don't tell me.' She said, ungraciously: 'I don't think they will be at Ed's place today. They will be deeper in the hills.'
'Good. Enough said.' He gathered the reins, but before he started asked a friendly question. 'How have things been going with you, Sally?'
'I'm all right.' She brushed his interest aside rudely. 'Worry about yourself. They say you've grazed death a dozen times in these last weeks.'
'Yet I am here,' he answered lightly.
'For how long?'
As he rode out of the park to the bench above, the last challenge she had flung at him lingered in his mind. He could turn right toward the pleasant plain he had left an hour ago, or he could head toward the notched peaks which lay sharp and bleak above the huddled hills and tangled gorges to the left. What he had in mind was perilous, perhaps foolhardy. But at this same hour a hundred thousand American boys were following the hard straight path leading to certain and desperate danger. They were not going forward because they liked it, or because they were being driven by anything except the spark of self-respect burning in them that would not let them falter. It was their job. Well, this was his, a small one compared to theirs. Even to let the two sift through his mind together made him ashamed.
His buckskin climbed steadily, following no path, circling rocks, turning back where sheer cliffs in front of him made an impasse and searching for breaks in the rock walls that would permit a passage. There was an easier way to Mullins's mountain ranch, but it was essential to his purpose that he meet nobody en route. He did not worry about the tight-lipped, taciturn woman with whom he had talked. As long as he was in the hills, she would make no reference to his visit.
By way of a box cañon he came to a crotch in the hills from which he could look down on the cabin and the corrals Mullins had built in this mountain pocket. Already the hard dry peaks back of it were taking on the colors of sunset, the gorges in them filled with lakes of violet and purple. Through glasses he watched the clearing below, scanning every acre of it for signs of human life. No smoke came from the chimney. The door of the house was closed. Mullins had a shepherd dog. It was not moving about the homestead. Cattle and horses grazed in the pasture. Since a small stream ran through it, they could take care of themselves if the owner was absent.
Cautiously he rode down to the steading, alert for the least suspicious movement. The bay horse Mullins usually rode was not in the pasture. Hal was convinced the man was absent. He dismounted, opened the door of the cabin, and walked inside. The place was neater and cleaner than he had expected it would be. Fresh bedding and a swept floor, clothes hung up in an orderly way on a rack, surprised the uninvited visitor. There were evidences that the owner had left in haste. The table was set for dinner, but the meal had not been eaten. Half-cooked potatoes were on a stove in which only a few embers of fire were left. Coffee had been put in the pot, but no water had yet been added. It was plain that word had reached Mullins of man-hunters in the hills and that he had beaten a hurried retreat. He would not be back as long as Sheriff Elbert's posse was in the Rabbit Ear district. That might be for two or three days.
Hal camped in a ravine the entrance to which was fenced by nature with a thick growth of prickly pear. He waited until after dark before lighting a fire for fear somebody might come to the cove and see the smoke. The buckskin he picketed in a growth of alfilaria. He slept beneath the stars with his saddle for a pillow. Once he awoke, to hear the barking of a coyote, but fell asleep again almost at once.
While the darkness still held, he ate a breakfast of coffee, flapjacks, and bacon. Before the crystal dawn broke, he stamped out the fire. Objects were mysterious in the dim morning light, but as the sun rose the ocotilla and Spanish bayonets lost their ghostly appearance and the country took on its desert harshness.
There was no sign of life in the cabin. Hal watered the buckskin and picketed the pony in another place, after which he lay down in the shade of a mesquite where he could see the trail that descended from the rim. He had brought several books with him, in expectation of one or two long days of waiting. A volume of Shaw's plays he tried first. The acid tang of the humor suited his mood.
CHAPTER 33
Mullins Throws a Rope
HAL REMAINED a squatter on the Mullins place two days without seeing another human being. Though a man fond of activity, he had the capacity for patience acquired by years of life in the outdoors where nature cannot be hurried. He read and ate and slept. His pipe he smoked contentedly, no suggestion of restlessness in his easy indolence.
It was in the late afternoon of the third day that Ed Mullins came back to his ranch. Hal caught sight of him as he and his horse appeared in silhouette on the rim rock of the saucer where the rustler had homesteaded. The bay gelding moved down the ledge road and another horse and rider stood against the skyline. A third horseman appeared.
Hal sat up, a wry grin on his face. 'Holy smoke, it's an army,' he told himself aloud.
When he had finished counting, six riders were descending the steep trail into the ranch basin. Through his glasses he picked them out one by one — Mullins, Fenwick, Doc, Polk, Frawley, and Buck. One could not find a choicer bunch of ruffians in a visit to Alcatraz, he thought. No doubt they had gathered here on some defini
te mission of deviltry. It flashed into his mind that they might have come to get him, but he rejected this guess as improbable. They could not know he was on the place unless Sally Kendall had betrayed him, and he was quite sure she had not.
While they were still coming down the ledge road in Indian file, he walked through the brush to where his buckskin was picketed. The belly of the horse was full of alfileria, and fortunately he had watered it not more than an hour ago. He saddled, packed his belongings, and tied the animal to a mesquite. When he left, it was probable that he would be in such a hurry that every second counted.
From his observation post back of the prickly pears, Hal watched the riders unsaddle and turn their mounts into the pasture. Evidently they meant to spend the night here. Occasionally their voices drifted to him on the evening breeze, but they were too far away for him to make out what they said. He was pleased to see that Mullins's dog had reached home with his tail down and head dragging. Evidently the day's trip had exhausted him. After being fed the shepherd would very likely fall into a long sound sleep. Hal hoped so. An inquisitive and intelligent dog nosing about might destroy his chance of escape.
Some of the men hung around the corral. Doc went with Muffins into the cabin, from the chimney of which smoke presently rose. They were preparing supper for the party.
The long shadow from the mountain back of the park began to stretch across the floor of the little valley. In the crotch of two peaks the sky became a caldron of color, changing quickly from turquoise and magenta and rose to violet and purple. A film of mist softened the harsh outlines of the range. Night was dropping its blanket of darkness over the land.
Mullins came to the door and shouted, 'Come and get it.' The men outside hurried into the house.
Hal took from the saddlebags he had inherited from his father all the food that remained, a bit of dry cheese rind, a crust of bread, and a piece of chocolate. He announced formally, 'Dinner is served, Mr. Stevens,' and began his meal. If circumstances had been different, it would have been pleasant to drop in and eat a hearty meal with the outlaws. It amused him to wonder whether they would kill him at once or feed him first, in case he sauntered into the room and announced himself a guest. Probably he had got in their hair so much that they would rub him out before he could even speak.
Who Wants to Live Forever? Page 16