by Noel Loomis
Oliver Major, sprawled deep in his chair beside that ancient ornate desk, regarded Hughes morosely from deep-set eyes as the cowboy let himself into the office unannounced. Hughes saw at once that the old man had changed notably since he had last seen him, that morning in Adobe Wells. He appeared younger, but at the same time the creases in his leathery face were very hard and deep; and a look of battle was upon the whole man, so that he resembled more than ever an old wolf, an old war eagle.
If Major’s battle for the Buckhorn water was going to force him to spend the last energies of his declining years in bitter war, apparently he was reconciled to it. Now that it had come, it seemed that the old man was something more than willing to throw the last of his resources into one final, irresistible raid of destruction upon his enemies. Apparently, also, he was more than half convinced that one of his enemies stood before him now.
“I see you’re still wearing your gun,” said Major noncommittally.
“That I am,” Hughes said. They faced each other across the ancient desk. Unexpectedly the old man began to chuckle, but it was a strictly private chuckle, for it ceased immediately as soon as Hughes permitted a faint, one-sided grin to come into his own face.
“I was kind of hoping,” said Oliver Major, “that you’d be gone.”
“Gone?” said Hughes. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” said the old man. “Don’t tell me you couldn’t have out-smarted Bob Macumber and got away.”
“It never come into my head to try.”
Oliver Major sighed deeply. “You’re one too many for me,” he admitted. “I’ve been watching you awful close, but I’m darned if I know where you stand. Bart Holt is dead certain—but you know what Bart Holt thinks. You certainly have got no friend in Bart Holt. It’s a mystery to me why, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, you didn’t go over the hill while you had the chance.”
Hughes admitted to himself that that was certainly something hard to explain. He couldn’t very well tell the old man that the grey eyes of Sally Major made it impossible for him to turn tail, even if he wished to. He had watched vaqueros make their horses stamp and rear when a girl was watching, and he had held them in contempt for that; but he had to admit to himself that the presence of Sally Major at the Lazy M gave him an entirely different view of expediency than that which he would have considered reasonable a week before. There was still a chance—slender though it was—that such circumstances would arise as would enable him to throw the balance between right and wrong. But how could he explain all that to Oliver Major?
“Of course, what Bart Holt hangs to,” Oliver Major went on, studying him, “is that empty shell that was found in the ashes of your fire in Crazy Mule; though I must say I take less stock in that particular thing than some do. But, considering that nobody understands exactly what your game is here—it looks mighty funny, even to me, when you crop up with an understanding with Earl Shaw that makes it possible for you to fold him up and back him down.”
“Ask yourself what would have happened if I hadn’t backed him down,” said Hughes.
“I haven’t any pipe dreams about that,” Major assured him. “There ain’t the least doubt in my mind but what Earl Shaw would have made a fight of it, right there, the way things was going. We was awful close to fight—and we would have got licked too. I’ve heard of cases where five men stood up to twenty and beat ’em, but the Buckhorn is no place to get together twenty such nincompoops as that takes!”
“Then just what’s your complaint?”
“What Bart Holt keeps asking me is just what’s your connection with Earl Shaw. The way he puts it, when we know what your connection with Earl Shaw is, we’ll know why you haven’t gone over the hill before now—and some other things too, maybe, that he only hints at, probably because he doesn’t know what he means himself.”
Hughes swung one leg onto Major’s desk and helped himself to the old man’s tobacco. “I’ve sure worked myself into a funny position,” he admitted. “Almost anything I say seems to be taken for a lie; and the more I try to side you fellows, the worse I look. I’m plenty tired of this everlasting dodging around the bush. If you want to know what backed down Earl Shaw, there it is.” He tossed the torn fragments of his note to Earl Shaw upon the desk.
Major stared at him for a long moment. “How do we know this is the same note you wrote Shaw?” he asked.
“There’s a good sample of it,” said Hughes. “Nobody’s going to trust the least thing I say. I suppose you can call it a sample of the thanks a man gets now days in the cow country. Well, this time I’m ahead of you, Mr. Major. I tore that piece of paper off a newspaper that was lying on Earl Shaw’s desk. You’ll find the date line of the paper on it, which’ll show you that it came in no earlier than yesterday—and also you’ll notice that his name is printed on the margin, where they put his address when they mailed it to him! I took special notice of those things when I tore that piece of paper off.”
“By golly,” said Major, “I guess you thought of everything, all right.” With slow fingers he began arranging the fragments of the paper before him. Yet, when this was achieved he seemed mystified, and slowly turned the whole assortment of scraps over to see if there were anything on the other side. “Is this all?” he said at last.
“It was enough, wasn’t it?”
Major read aloud, “‘Did you ever shoot a United States Marshal?’ Just that one line,” he said wonderingly. Then abruptly he demanded, “Are you a federal man?”
“No,” said Hughes.
“Then how—”
“It was just a kind of a hint,” said Hughes, “sort of rigged up to side-track Earl Shaw’s mind, and maybe confuse him, some.”
“But why should he—”
“Put yourself in his boots. That stand of his, that Crawford had no authority to act as sheriff, was all right as a bluff—as long as he controlled the county, and the general machinery of the law, but if one of us had been a United States Marshal—down here to look around for some wanted man, for example—and Shaw’s outfit had gunned him down, look what a different breed of investigation Shaw would have been up against then! Shaw isn’t wanting any investigation of a shoot-out from the federal government. He’s been wondering, same as you, why I’m putting into this thing. When I made that suggestion, it came to him all of a sudden, I guess, that there was some outside reason—and he guessed the shoot-out better be postponed.”
“I can hardly believe it,” said Major slowly. “I’ll never forget you standing there grinning at Shaw, and him sizing you up, and wondering. I’ll swear if ever a man looked like he knew what he was talking about, you did then.”
Hughes shrugged. “Well, anyway,” he said, “it looks as if he didn’t want to take the chance.”
“But you actually ain’t a marshal at all?”
“No. It’s easily looked up if you’ve got any doubts.”
“Then why didn’t you show me this when I first asked you in Adobe Wells?”
“It’s a queer thing,” said Hughes reluctantly, “to dodge out of a shoot-out on the basis of a lie. It isn’t a place that a man wants to put himself in, Mr. Major, if it can be got around; nor a thing he likes to talk about when it’s done.”
“Why did you do it then?” said Major abruptly.
There was weariness in Clay Hughes’ smile. He was thinking of Sally Major with the starlight on her up-turned face as she had told him that she counted on him to prevent a shoot-out if he could; counted on him because he was the only one in the Lazy M’s posse who had his right sense about him, and a cool head. He couldn’t very well tell Oliver Major that he had promised the old man’s daughter to turn trouble aside if he could; nor could he explain, even to himself, why he had taken that promise literally and seriously, and would have felt he had to do his best to carry it out at whatever cost to himself.
And now, he thought dimly, all that move had got him was an imputation of cowardice. He had hoped that the thing could be sl
id over, withheld until circumstances had awarded him a better average of achievement. The ignoble concealment to which he had been impelled in withholding the Shaw note from Sally had done him no good. Her last words to him had voiced the suggestion to get out and stay out. Now that he had tossed concealment aside, he supposed that she would consider him yellow, as well as an undesirable renegade. Yet he did not see how he could have done any differently, the way things had fallen out.
“I played it as I did because there wasn’t any sense to a shootout,” he told Major impatiently. “What would it have got us?”
“Nothing,” Major admitted. “You mean you wasn’t scared of a fight, if it come to that?”
“Sure I was scared,” said Hughes. “I was scared stiff, and if there was anybody else there that had any sense, so was he!”
Oliver Major’s face relaxed in a grin. “I guess there’s not much danger of anybody accusing you of lack of nerve,” he said. “I’m sorry I sent you back from Adobe Wells. Even then, I kind of thought maybe you was still with us—though for a little while it was pretty hard to see how, the way you made it look like you had a stand-in with Earl Shaw. You was a blame fool not to tell me at the jump-off what the game was.”
“I suppose,” said Hughes. What he couldn’t tell the old man was that if Sally Major had not, only a few moments before, appeared to withdraw her moral support, he would have been holding out yet. The stiff brittle pride of youth was very strong in Hughes. Until Sally went back on him he could not have brought himself to expose the details of a device which had been forced upon him, but which he felt put him in an ugly light.
“Did you make out all right after I left?” Hughes asked. Openly, but with a minimum of words, old Oliver Major now sketched over what had been accomplished—and what had not—since that morning. With Earl Shaw under lock and key, together with Dutch Pete and two more, the Lazy M had made a vigorous but hardly hopeful effort to wrangle some sort of information out of their prisoners. From Earl Shaw and his lieutenants they learned exactly nothing, however. Nor could Oliver Major find out the whereabouts of Alex Shaw, brother of the Adobe Wells boss, whom Major had hoped to seize along with the others.
Immediately Oliver Major and his son, leaving the Adobe Wells situation in the hands of Jim Crawford and Bart Holt, had driven the rough eighty miles south-westward to Walkerton, the little, dusty county seat far down below, where the main line of the railroad crossed the corner of the county. Major hunted out the supervisors there. With Earl Shaw in custody pending a capital charge—supposedly that of conspiracy to murder—Major had hoped to throw such a scare into Shaw’s personally owned county supervisors as to make them confirm Jim Crawford as sheriff, successor to Hugo Donnan.
This attempt, bold as it was, had carried a certain promise. Two of the three county supervisors were characterless men, who, Major had hoped, would abandon Shaw’s support in time of danger, like rabbits leaving fired brush.
And he had partly succeeded. Being of a type of men forever fearful of being with the loser, two of the three had been thrown into the air by the sudden turn of events which had lodged Earl Shaw in the Adobe Wells jail. To confirm Jim Crawford as sheriff in the face of the powerful Earl Shaw was beyond their courage; yet they were momentarily paralyzed by the apparent strength of Oliver Major. They sought cover, stalling for time, hoping to leave themselves a loop-hole or two in case it should turn out that Earl Shaw was once more to be ridden down by the Lazy M tornado. They had expected the Lazy M to show no strength at all; and news that the great Shaw himself was in jail on a dangerous charge rendered them incapable of immediate action. For the present Jim Crawford was acting sheriff; how long this might endure, nobody knew. Unless the luck continued its swing toward the Lazy M, it could not last long.
“One thing,” Oliver Major concluded, “is absolutely sure. The minute that Earl Shaw gets control of the county law again, he’ll have a posse here to take Dick—and you too, Hughes. If that time comes—but it mustn’t come, that’s all—God knows how we’ll hold it off, but we got to.”
“But if it does?” Hughes asked.
“I never supposed,” said Major in a clear voice, “that anything would ever come into this feud more important to me than holding onto the Buckhorn water. I’m not so much afraid of Dick being brought to trial; they’d never convict him, I’m certain. And I’m not afraid of what I know they’ll hang on me either—the least of which would be accessory after the fact. Of course, you can see what would become of my influence in this state then. Once a trial for murder got to dragging out, I wouldn’t have no more influence left than a banty rooster in a cyclone; and the machine that Shaw’s a part of would bite down on the Buckhorn water like a trap, and this valley wouldn’t ever be anything but desert again. But, I tell you, it isn’t that that’s worrying me now.”
“What then?” said Hughes.
“Hughes,” said Oliver Major, “I don’t know as you’ll believe. You young fellers don’t understand the iron type of guts that goes with the old ways. Men have died before, in this long feud between me and Shaw; good men, some of ’em, too. I tell you Earl Shaw isn’t the man to be afraid to add on a couple more to the string. If his posse ever rides down a long prairie after dark with you and Dick—” he raised a clenched fist above his desk but lowered it slowly—“I tell you neither one of you will ever be seen alive again.”
“It don’t hardly seem like—”
“And why not?” Major exploded at him. “It’s happened in this valley before, and will again! It’s too easy a thing for a crooked sheriff to do, if his case is uncertain, and there’s a powerful lot at stake. ‘The prisoners was trying to escape,’ says he. He had to gun ’em when they tried to ‘escape.’”
“I guess,” Hughes said, “some of us has got kind of used to thinking that things like that don’t happen anymore.”
“When we finally got the law established here in the west,” said Major, “we kept it going good for quite a while, but once politics goes rotten on you, I tell you, you’re a lot worse off than before there was any law at all! With the law you can gang up to crush a man so he hasn’t got no chance. People didn’t use to stand for that. If you read the papers, you know that law in the cities has been haywire for a long time, and as for killing off a helpless man in some lonely place at night, they’ve even got a special name for that in the towns, it happens so much. You can’t pick up a paper without reading that somebody was ‘took for a ride.’”
“I know,” said Hughes.
“If ever you or Dick get into the hands of a Bar S posse, do you think Earl Shaw will be the man to pass up his easy chance, after all these years? It’ll be a western style of ‘ride’ maybe, and different in some ways, but you won’t come back from it, just the same!”
“If you’re sure of that—” Hughes began.
“I know my man!” declared Major. “I licked him when he come with cattle, and I licked him when come with sheep, but now if he comes with law—boy, I don’t know! But this I do know: Dick Major never goes into the hands of Earl Shaw’s men, not if I have to fight the county and the state. I’ll never surrender him, nor you neither.”
“You mean you’d stand out against the law?”
“What choice would be left me?”
“Whatever could be the end to it?” Hughes wondered.
“Quien sabe?”
There was silence while they looked at each other, yet neither seemed to be seeing the other’s face. Perhaps each was looking beyond into the shadows of a possible cataclysm so relentless and implacable as to offer no choice and no escape.
Oliver Major stirred himself. “But it must never come to that. If it does—but we’ve got to stave it off. Walkerton is buzzing like a bee tree; I never saw news spread so fast. Adobe Wells, and I guess Walkerton too, knew all about the death of Donnan before ever we rode in there. Within two days Shaw’s lawyers will have him up before Judge Greer on a writ of habeas corpus. Greer is a Shaw man: he’ll turn
him loose if there’s any possible way. Twelve hours after Shaw is out of jail he’ll have his supervisors whipped into line, and the Buckhorn will have a new sheriff—Alex Shaw himself I wouldn’t be surprised. Whatever the end will be, it’ll come very quick after that. We’ve got to balk all that! I’ve wired for the best lawyer in the state. He’ll have to come to Walkerton by plane to carry the law fight.”
“Who’s that?”
“Stephen Sessions—maybe you’ve heard of him. Old Judge Sessions that used to be on the state supreme bench. He’s better than half way retired now; but he’s still the man that can bulldog them all.”
“Are you sure he’ll come?”
“Steve never went back on me yet; he’ll be here all right. And when he gets here we’ve got to have such a case to lodge against Shaw as will hold him tighter than a drum, regardless of bail or anything else. Dear God, Hughes, if, only you can figure out what Donnan was trying to say—”
“Whatever it was, he’ll never add to it now,” Hughes evaded.
“But there’s another man who’ll come close to telling us something,” said Major. “I suppose you know Grasshopper Tanner’s gone up to the Crazy Mule?”
“The old fellow with all the dogs?”
“Yeah, that’s him. If there’s a man in the world that can unravel sign, Grasshopper’s the man. I wish now that I hadn’t gone up there with Bart Holt before Tanner come. If he’d had a fair chance—I don’t believe it’s possible to kill a man and not leave sign of some kind that Tanner could nail onto.”
“He’s got little enough chance now after you four fellers have been all over it.”
“I know,” Major admitted wearily. “I know, but if only he’d find something, some one little thing—He promised to start down from the Crazy Mule as soon as it got too dark to work. He’ll be trailing in some time tonight. Go get some sleep. I’ll see you’re called when he comes.”
Out in the patio Clay Hughes picked up the banjo again and ran weary fingers over the strings: “De la Sierra Morena…” The banjo did not answer the notes he hummed; there was no use trying to sing any more. Those last words of hers—“Get out and stay out—” took the assurance out of song. He no longer had the feeling that she was near and listening. He struck an angry thumb across the strings, and one of them broke with a shrill whine.