A mile farther they found it, half-buried in hurriedly kicked-up sand. Bowdrie picked it from the sand, shook it out, and brought it along. From time to time as they rode he turned it over as if trying to read something from the sacking itself. Then he stowed it in one of his half-empty saddlebags.
In Casa Piedras Bowdrie called to a Mexican boy. “Want to feed and water these horses? Then bring them back and tie them here.” He tossed the boy a bright silver dollar.
Bowdrie glanced at a horse hitched nearby as Butler joined him on the walk. “That steeldust’s wearing a bronc saddle with an undercut fork,” he commented, “and the horse has been ridden hard.”
“Let’s eat,” Butler suggested. “I’m hungry as a Panhandle wolf!”
It was boardinghouse style, and Bowdrie seated himself, turning a cup right-side-up, then reaching for the coffee. Another hand reached at the same time and only Chick’s dexterity prevented the pot from being upset. Bowdrie looked around into a pair of frosty blue eyes. The man had reached for the pot with his left hand. Chick smiled.
“Help yourself!” he suggested. “Coffeepots are bad luck when they are upset.”
Sam Butler nodded sagely. He speared a triple thickness of hotcakes and lifted them to his plate. “Sure is. Wust kind of bad luck.”
The frosty eyes turned ugly. For an instant they flickered to the badge on Butler’s chest, then shifted to Bowdrie.
“Uh-huh,” Bowdrie agreed. “I knew a gent once who got drilled right through the heart whilst holding a coffeepot in his right hand. Never had a chance.”
“Sho nuff?” A big blond cowhand at the end of the table glanced up. “A man surely couldn’t let go of a pot fast enough, could he?”
“That’s what the murderer figured,” Bowdrie replied. “This just happened a few hours ago, over at Pistol Rock Springs.”
The cowhand stared but the man with the frosty blue eyes continued to eat. “Been to those springs many a time,” the cowhand said. “Who was it got hisself killed?”
“Name of Jim Moody. He robbed the stage station over yonder last night, shot John Irwin, then cut across country to the spring. His partner was waitin’, an’ the way he was ridin’, I figure Moody expected his partner had a fresh horse waitin’. Instead of that he got lead for breakfast. This partner of his shot him, took the money, and lit out.”
“Now, that’s a dirty skunk if I ever heard of one!” the blond cowhand said. “He ought to be hung! Hell, I knew Jim Moody! He used to spark that Boling gal from over the way. Seen him at dances, many’s the time.” He turned to the man with the frosty blue eyes. “Sho, Al! I reckon you won’t be none put out. I’ve heard tell there was a time you was sweet on that Boling gal yourself!”
Al shrugged. “Talked to her a few times, that’s all. Same as you did.”
Something clicked in Bowdrie’s brain. Al . . . Al Harshman, a rancher. The ambitious one.
Al got to his feet. “I’ll be ridin’,” he said, to nobody in particular. Then he asked, “How much did he get away with?”
“Twelve thousand,” Bowdrie replied, his face inscrutable. Al was wearing his gun on the right side, butt forward, and pulled slightly to the front. “But he won’t have it long, Harshman. He left a plain trail.”
Harshman stiffened angrily and seemed about to reply, then turned toward the door. He glanced back. “I wouldn’t want the job of trailin’ him,” he commented. “He might prove right salty if cornered.”
“When a man is murdered without a chance,” Bowdrie commented, “we Rangers make it a point of honor to hunt him down. A Ranger will get that killer if it is the last thing he ever does.”
“Rangers can die.”
“Of course, but we never die alone.” Bowdrie smiled. “We always like to take somebody with us.”
When he had gone outside, Butler glanced over at Bowdrie. “How’d you know his name was Harshman?”
“He looked like a harsh man,” Bowdrie replied, smiling.
STROLLING TO THE porch outside, Bowdrie sat down on the bench after retrieving the burlap sacking from the saddlebag. He began to go over it with painstaking care. The Mexican boy who had returned the horses stood watching, eyes bright with curiosity. “What you look for, señor?”
“Somethin’ to tell me who the hombre was who used this sack. Nobody uses anything for long without leaving his mark on it.”
The outside of the sacking was thick with damp sand; much more must have come off in his saddlebags, Bowdrie reflected unhappily. Stretching the fibers, he searched them with keen eyes. Suddenly the Mexican boy reached over and plucked a gray hair from the sacking, then another.
“So? He had a gray or steeldust horse, Pedro?”
“The name is Miguel, señor,” the boy protested, very seriously. He bent over the sack, pointing at a fragment of blue clay. “See? It is blue. The sack has lain near a well.”
“Near a well, Pedro? Why do you say that?”
“The name is Miguel, señor. Because there is the blue clay. Always in this country there is blue clay in the hole of wells, señor. Always, it is so.”
“Thanks, Pedro. You’d make a good Texas Ranger.”
“I? A Texas Ranger? You think so, señor?” His expression changed. “But, señor, the name is not Pedro. It is Miguel. Miguel Fernández.”
“All right, Pedro.” Bowdrie stood up. “Just as you say.”
He glanced once more at the sacking, and suddenly, in the crease near the seam, he noticed a tiny fragment of crushed, somewhat oily pulp. He took it out, studied it, then folded it into a cigarette paper.
“Wait for me,” he said to Butler.
Swiftly he crossed the street to the store. A little old man with gold-rimmed spectacles looked up. Bowdrie asked him a question, then another. The old man replied, studying him curiously.
Bowdrie walked back to Butler. “Let’s go. I think we’ve got our man. I only hope we’ll be in time.”
“In time?” Butler asked. “In time for what?”
The Mexican boy caught his hand. “Señor!” he pleaded. “If I am to be a Ranger, you must know my name! It is Miguel! Miguel Fernández!”
Bowdrie chuckled and handed him another dollar. “If you say so, Pedro! Miguel it is! Adiós, Pedro!”
He swung to the saddle and started out of town, Butler beside him. “In time for what?” he repeated.
“To prevent another killing,” Bowdrie told him.
“Robley knew,” Bowdrie continued. “He guessed it when he saw the dead man was Jim Moody. He knew who it was when I said the killer was left-handed. He was away ahead of us.”
“You think it was Harshman? But how could he have known about the money? For that matter, how did Moody find out?”
The desert flat gave way to rising ground, the hillsides scattered with juniper. The sage had taken on a deeper color and there were clumps of grama grass. Chick dipped into an arroyo and skirted a towering wall of red sandstone, into a shaded canyon, then across another flat. The trail dipped again and they rode into the yard of a lonely ranch house. Nearby there were several pole corrals and three saddled horses.
Bowdrie dropped to the ground. As his feet touched the earth, Al Harshman stepped from the door. Narrow-eyed, faint perspiration showing on his brow, he looked from Butler to Bowdrie and back. “Huntin’ somethin’?”
“You,” Bowdrie said. “I am arrestin’ you for the murder of Jim Moody and complicity in the robbery and murder of John Irwin.”
Harshman took a step into the yard. He was smiling, a taunting smile.
“All you’ve got is suspicion. You can’t prove nothin’. I ain’t been away from here but that ride to town, where you saw me.”
He smiled again. “You can’t prove I was anywhere near Pistol Rock Spring. And how would I know about the money? How would Moody know?”
“I know how you knew about the money.” Tom Robley stepped around the corner of the house. His eyes flickered to Bowdrie and back. “I’d have beat you here, but I was looking for the gi
rl first.”
“What girl?” Butler demanded.
“Mary Boling. It was she told them about the money. She with all her talk about New Orleans and fancy clothes. She put poor Jim Moody up to it. She’s partly responsible for both Irwin an’ Moody bein’ dead. Me, I’m mostly responsible.”
“You?” Butler exclaimed. “Now, Tom, you just—”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’d nothin’ to do with stealin’ the money or the killing. It was my mouth. I was so busy tryin’ to convince Mary what an important job I had that I just ran off at the mouth. Because of my loose tongue, two good men are dead.”
Harshman laughed. “You think Mary had a hand in it? You’re a fool, Tom Robley, a double-damned fool. Suppose you had told Mary? What could that mean to me?”
Chick Bowdrie stood listening and curious. Watching the scene, every sense alert, quick to hear every word, he was also aware that three saddled horses, packed for the trail, stood at the corral.
The big rancher wore a dark blue shirt, two of the front buttons unfastened. His boots were highly polished, and he looked quite the dandy. Bowdrie smiled, understanding a few things.
“You’re pretty sure of yourself, Al, but Sam Butler and me, we trailed you. We know a left-handed man sat against a rock at Pistol Rock Spring and smoked cigarettes. He tossed the matches at the fire with his left hand.
“We trailed you from the spring, and it wasn’t even hard. You wrapped your horse’s hooves in burlap sacking so you wouldn’t leave a trail. We have the sacks.”
Harshman shrugged. “There are a lot of sacks around. Can you prove those sacks were mine? Don’t be foolish! Those sacks could have belonged to anybody.”
“I found gray horsehairs that will match your gelding, and there’s blue clay on them, as there is around your well.”
“So? There’s blue clay around half the wells in the county, and as for horsehairs, how many gray horses are there?”
“We’ve got somethin’ else, Al,” Bowdrie said. “Folks told me you were ambitious. That you had brains. Mary spoke mighty highly of you back there at the dance.
“You were smart, all right. You had ideas. You decided to try something new, Al. You had some cottonseed shipped in here so you could try planting it.”
“So? Is that criminal?”
“Not at all. You were away ahead of everybody else around this part of the country. You sent for cottonseed and you got it. Some of it came in that sack you used, Al. I found some of the cottonseed in the sack.”
“Bowdrie!” Robley shouted. “Look out!” Robley’s hand slashed down for a gun, and a shotgun roared from the window of the house and Tom Robley staggered, firing toward the house.
It was one of those breathtaking instants that explode suddenly, and Bowdrie saw Harshman grab for a gun—with his right hand!
The hand darted into the gaping shirtfront and the gun blasted, but a split second late. Bowdrie had palmed his six-gun and fired, then took a long step forward and right, firing again as his foot came down.
Al Harshman was on his knees, his face contorted with shock and hatred. Vaguely Bowdrie knew other guns were firing, but this was the man he had to get. Harshman had dropped the derringer hideout gun and was coming up with his other pistol.
Bowdrie held his fire and the gun slipped from Harshman’s fingers.
Butler was at the cabin door, gun in hand. Robley was down, covered with blood.
Sam Butler turned to Bowdrie, his face gray. “I never killed no woman before,” he muttered. “Dammit, Bowdrie, I—!”
“You did what you had to do. Anyway,” he added practically, “it might have been Tom.”
Robley was dying. Bowdrie knew it when he knelt beside him. “Mary? Wha . . . happened?”
“Mary’s gone, Tom. She was killed. So is another man in there.”
“Her brother,” Butler said. “We didn’t even know he was around.”
“Mary . . . it was Al all the time,” Robley was saying. “It wasn’t Jim or me.”
He lay quiet and Bowdrie got slowly to his feet. “Too bad,” he said. “He was a good man.”
“All because she was greedy. She couldn’t be content with the looks she was born with an’ clothes like the other gals had.” Butler swore softly, bitterly.
“Me,” Bowdrie said, “all I want is a good horse under me, the creak of a saddle, and a wind off the prairies in my face.
“An’ maybe, Sam, just like you, maybe I want to make things a little more peaceful for other folks. A man can’t build anything or even make a living when there’s somebody ready to take it from him.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Butler said. “Maybe you just said it. I never could figure why I took this job in the first place.”
Butler walked to his horse, and Bowdrie followed. “Ain’t more than six miles over to the Fernández place. She fixes the best frijoles anyplace around. We’ll just ride over there an’ hire him to haul these bodies into town.”
“All right,” Bowdrie said, “let’s ride over an’ see Pedro.”
“Miguel,” Sam Butler said. “The name is Miguel!”
Historical Note:
JOHN RINGO
THIS IS A short version of what was said to be his proper name, Ringgold. A mysterious character, evidently of some education, he was born in Missouri in 1844. He took part in the Mason County War as a follower of Scott Cooley, and was arrested. He broke jail and escaped to Arizona. There he allied himself with Old Man Clanton and his boys, and with Curly Bill Brocius.
He killed a harmless man named Louis Hancock for ordering beer when Ringo wanted him to drink whiskey, and he participated in the ambush of a mule train packing silver in Skeleton Canyon.
Just why Ringo was considered so dangerous doesn’t show in his record. Perhaps it was because he was mean and surly when drinking and of uncertain temper at any time. A sort of legend has grown up about his name, perhaps because it has a nice sound, and it has been used in many stories, including the movie Stagecoach. I have read a thousand lines telling of how dangerous he was without one line of evidence to prove it.
A RANGER RIDES
TO TOWN
MORNING LAY SPRAWLED in sleepy comfort in the sunlit streets. The banker’s rooster, having several times proclaimed the fact that he was up and doing, walked proudly toward the dusty street. The banker, his shirttail hanging out, was just leaving the front door accompanied by two men, both dusty from hard riding.
Outside the bank a rider clad in a linen duster sat astride a blood bay with his rifle across his knees and the reins of three other horses in his hands. The fourth man of the group leaned against a storefront some twenty yards away with a rifle in his hands.
The bank’s door was already wide open and the banker and his escort disappeared within.
East of town the dry wash had been bridged and the sound of a horse’s hooves on that bridge was always audible within the town. Now, suddenly, that bridge thundered with the hoofbeats of a hard-ridden horse, and the two men in the street looked sharply around.
Behind his house, Tommy Ryan, thirteen years old and small for his age, was splitting wood. He glanced around in time to see a man on a hammerhead roan, the horse’s sides streaked with sweat, charge into the street. The man wore a black flat-crowned hat and the two guns in his hands were not there for fun.
The man in the linen duster was closest, and he hesitated, waiting to see who or what was approaching. When he saw a rider with pistols in his hand and a Ranger’s badge on his chest, he lifted his rifle, but too late. The rider’s bullet cut a long furrow the length of his forearm and smashed his elbow. The rifle fell into the dust. Numb with shock, the rider sat gripping his arm and staring.
The rifleman down the street caught the second bullet just as he himself fired. He stood for an instant, then turned and walked three steps and fell on his face. One spur rowel kept turning a moment after he fell.
When the shooting was over, one of the banker’s escorts lay sprawled
in the doorway, gun in hand, and the Ranger stood over him, gun in hand, staring into the shadowy precincts of the bank.
Another man with a badge pushed his way through the crowd that gathered. “Hi, Bowdrie! I’m Hadley, sheriff. I didn’t know there were any Rangers in the country.”
“Looks like I got here just in time,” Bowdrie commented. He kept a pistol in his hand.
“Some shootin’,” a bystander commented.
“Surprise,” Bowdrie said. “They didn’t expect anybody to come shooting. I had an edge.”
Sheriff Hadley led the way into the bank. Two men lay dead on the floor, one of them the banker. He had been shot through the head at close range.
“He was a good man,” Hadley said. “The town needed him.” He glanced around. “You scored a clean sweep. You got ’em all.”
“That’s what it looks like,” he agreed. His eyes swept the scene with a swift, all-seeing glance. Then he went past the bodies and into the private office of the banker. It was cool there, and undisturbed.
Bowdrie paused for a long minute, looking around, considering not only what he saw but what he had just seen. This room had been the seat of a man’s pride, of his life’s work. He had been a man who was building something, not only for himself and those who followed, but for his country. This man was putting down roots, enabling others to do the same.
Now he was dead, and for what? That some loose-gunned wastrels might have a few dollars to spend on whiskey and women.
He turned to look back into the bank, where Hadley was squatting beside the bodies. “No business today, Hadley. I want the bank closed.”
“Young Jim Cane can handle it,” Hadley said. “He’s a good man.”
“Nevertheless, I want the bank closed for business. I want to look around. Don’t explain, just close it.”
Tommy Ryan stared wide-eyed at the Ranger. He had been hearing stories of Chick Bowdrie but had never seen a real live Ranger before. Bowdrie’s eyes wandered the street, studying the storefronts, the upstairs windows. Who might have been a witness? In a town of early risers, somebody must have seen what happened before the holdup.
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