The Third Western Novel

by Noel Loomis

  “Who was it done in Tanner, Ross? Did you get a look at ’em? Could you make a guess who they was?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t say for sure, Mr. Major.”

  “Can’t you make a guess at all?”

  “Mr. Major, I’m afraid I can’t even do that. You people got any more water here?”

  Major drew a deep breath. He squared his shoulders with an effort as he turned to the others. “Get out of here, and quit using up the air,” he ordered. “The poor feller’s all in. Bart, you stay with him, so if he thinks of anything else, or wants anything.” He led the way himself as they all trooped out.

  Sally Major was weeping silently. Hughes heard her murmur, “That poor old man, that poor old man…” Outside the door, in the cool of the hall, Major stood waiting, wiping his hands; and presently when everyone but Stephen Sessions and Clay Hughes were gone, he spoke again, his voice harsh and low.

  “There you have it,” he told Sessions. “There you have the story, plain and square in front of your eyes! Now you know what would have happened to Hughes here, yesterday, if I’d left him go. And you know what would have happened to Dick, and will yet, if ever he gets into Earl Shaw’s hands!”

  Stephen Sessions shook his head slowly, and that weary, infinitely exasperating smile of his crossed his face. “You’re illogical, Oliver. An hour ago you were asking me to think that Walk Ross was the one who influenced Earl Shaw to get rid of Tanner. Now Ross comes back with a different story, and you want me to believe that! Why, Oliver, that man would be discredited as a witness in any court in the world. An hour ago you had it that Grasshopper Tanner didn’t have a friend, and Ross was his worst enemy. Now you want me to believe that Ross held Tanner so dearly that he risked his life in order to—to do what? To defend Tanner from unidentified enemies in Adobe Wells. If you’ll just stand off and look at that proposition, Oliver, you’ll have to agree with me that—”

  “What can I say to you,” said Major with repressed savagery, “if you can’t look at a man and tell when he’s telling the truth? Why do you suppose Walk came back here if he isn’t on the level?”

  Sessions shrugged. “We don’t even know why he went to Adobe Wells in the first place. If you’re going to try to hang weight on the wild stories of every shifty, gun-throwing cowboy in the southwest, you’re going to lose yourself entirely. I suppose he came back here because he was run out of Adobe Wells—for gun throwing of some kind. Speaking of questions, you haven’t explained yet how the idea was conveyed from here to Earl Shaw that Grasshopper Tanner knew anything to begin with.”

  “There’s that missing Mexican cook,” Major offered.

  “You think Shaw is fool enough to take the story of some irresponsible mess shack hand? Oliver, you’ve believed exactly what you want to believe for so long that you expect everybody else to do the same. You didn’t even bother to ask Walk Ross what he thought about that side of it.”

  “We’ll ask him now,” said Major. He thrust his way back into the room in which Walk Ross had been put. “Walk,” he asked the wounded man, “did you talk to anybody in Adobe Wells about Grasshopper Tanner?”

  “Mr. Major, I didn’t talk to anybody about anything.”

  “Then what is your theory about how word got to the Shaw outfit that Tanner had found out something—maybe could name the killer of Hugo Donnan?”

  “Mr. Major, that’s the question I been asking myself.

  “Walk, are you dead positive you didn’t let drop anything?”

  “Dead certain! I didn’t speak a soul.”

  “All right, Walk, that’s all I wanted to know.”

  “You see?” said Sessions.

  “I suppose,” said Major slowly, “that you think his story about the posse coming out here is pipe smoke too.”

  “No; I’m afraid that part of it has the look of truth. What would you expect, Oliver? You’ve refused to cooperate with Alex Shaw in his position as sheriff. You’ve held back from him by force—or what amounts to it—the very men he has to question in running down the Donnan case. Ask yourself what would become of the law in this state if that sort of thing was tolerated. Alex Shaw hasn’t any choice. He has to come here and get his men if it takes twenty men to do it, or fifty. You ought to be able to see that.”

  “He isn’t going to get ’em, Steve!”

  “The trouble with you,” said Sessions, “is that you’re living in the past. This is the day of law and order. The old shoot-out days are gone.”

  Oliver Major stared at him for a long time. Sessions had as good as admitted that, as an observer for the governor, he was in a position to advise Governor Replogle what to do; and his effort to suggest that his advice would not be acted upon was feeble at best. Yet, his monstrous incredulity, his supremely placid assurance that only he saw to the bottom of all things, composed an impenetrable shell, apparently more invincible than a wall of Stone or a cordon of guns.

  Here, within this man, lay the influence which alone could extricate the Lazy M from the ruination of open battle against the travestied authority of the law. Yet Sessions remained blind, either unable to comprehend or unwilling to acknowledge the danger which overhung them. His suave plausibilities turned aside every argument converting the obvious and inescapable to paltry imaginings with a word.

  The tantalizing nearness of the unattainable must have been unbearable to Oliver Major; yet his voice was quiet as he spoke again. “Steve, look back,” he urged. “Look back to when you and me and the rest opened this country up.” He was trying to bridge the years, carrying their relationship back to the days when Sessions and Major had looked alike and thought alike, cattlemen in a raw cattle country. “I’m not asking you if there were ever notches on your own gun, Steve. I’m only saying those were hard days, those old days behind.”

  “Thank God they’re behind,” said Sessions.

  “Are you sure they’re behind? Can they ever be behind, while the men that made them are still alive? How many men do you think are down underneath the bunch grass, because Earl Shaw could never give up the idee of jumping my range? Two? Five? Steve, many more than that. Do you think Earl Shaw’s the man to flinch at downing one or two men more? There was Tanner last night; you can try to tell yourself different all you want, but you know now exactly how he died, and you know why. You know that if we give in now the same thing will happen to Hughes; and to my son! You’ll learn some day why Shaw wouldn’t dare anything else!”

  Stephen Sessions made a vague, uncomfortable gesture. Then suddenly he turned to grip Major’s shoulders with his big pale hands. “Drop it, Oliver!” he urged. “Forget this damn fool fight. In heaven’s name, if you can’t bring yourself to cooperate with the law, take Dick and hide out until this thing blows over! Man, man—with the whole commonwealth against you, don’t you know when you’re licked? Pull out and go over the line, and I’ll—”

  “There’s no hope in that,” said Major in a dead voice. “We got to stand and fight it here. Do you think I’ve put my life into the Buckhorn, just to turn tail now? What’s left? A riding job, some place, under a different name? I’m too old for that, Steve.”

  “Then for lord’s sake let Shaw take and question Dick and Hughes. If your son comes to trial, I’ll defend him myself, and clear him, too! But for the time being, you’ve got to hand him over.

  There was an unsteadiness in old Major’s voice as he answered, “I’d as leave kill him with my own gun.”

  “But you damned old fool,” cried Sessions, his voice rising nervously for the first time, “what can you gain?”

  “Listen,” Major commanded. “Theron Replogle is a crook, and he’s got rich off the state—but he’s not equal to murder for common profit, and that’s what this is. Theron Replogle is blind to what’s happening here—he must be blind. I’ll stand and fight until he opens his eyes! And when he does, by God, you’ll see me sweep the Buckhorn, as I cleared it twice before!”

  Stephen Sessions threw up his hands. “I’v
e done all I can,” he said shortly. “What happens is on your own head now.”

  “What are you going to report to Governor Replogle?”

  “The only thing I can report: that the law here is functioning in a regular and legal way—and that an old fool who’s trying to live in the past will probably have to have the obstinacy knocked out of him.”

  “For God’s sake, Steve,” cried Oliver Major, “can’t you see what you’re doing?”

  “There’s no earthly use arguing with you,” Sessions turned away. “I may just as well be starting back.”

  Major’s voice was low again, but very bitter. “You guess you’ll leave, do you? You guess you’ll leave! For my part, I guess you won’t do anything of the kind. Not yet, you won’t!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re staying here, Sessions.”

  “Why, you can’t hold me here!”

  “I can’t? I’m doing it though! Governor’s observer, is it? By God, I’ll give you your belly full of observing. Hughes! See that this man doesn’t leave the house!”

  “Right,” said Hughes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  If Stephen Sessions was to remain at the Lazy M, there were others for whom Oliver Major had other plans. They had supposed that he would confront Alex Shaw’s posse with the entire personnel of the Lazy M; but it appeared now that this was not to be the case. José and the three or four other Mexicans were first to go, fired outright with a paternal warning to get out of the troubled range while the getting was good. They trailed off into the heat waves of the afternoon without complaint, the scanty belongings of each behind his saddle. This proved to be only the beginning, however.

  Major called his hands about him. “Maybe some of you boys aren’t going to like this,” he drawled. “Maybe some of you aren’t going to like it at all. No cowboy ever yet knew what was good for him, I suppose. You all heard the word that Walk Ross brought. Sometime between now and tomorrow noon hell is going to bust wide open, right here where we stand. Naturally, I don’t want Sally and Mona on hand for that. I’m going to send them across the Gunsight, then westwards and up-country across the state line. There’s a brand over there called the Pot Hook—just a little broke-down, two-man spread, but they’ll be with friends. Now, for all I know, the Shaw men have closed the Gunsight by now.”

  He hesitated. Hughes wondered if he was going to say what must be in his mind—that Mona, whose affair with Hugo Donnan had led Dick to threaten Donnan’s life, could certainly be made into a powerful witness against her brother, if ever her testimony could be drawn from her; and that the Bar S might be eager to hold her as such. Major made no mention of this, however, as he proceeded, talking slowly.

  “I’m sending enough of you boys with Sally and Mona to force that Pass, even if it’s closed. But when that’s done, I don’t want to see any of you come trailing back. You’re to go on with the girls to the state line. It’s a four day pack, more like five, but you have to go with them all the way.”

  There was a silence. “Who’s going?” Canfield asked at last.

  “I’m sending five men. Some of you I’m sending because they’re the best I have. I’m sending Bob Macumber; and you, Tom; and Harry Canfield and Jim Crawford; and while I’m at it, I’m sending Rowdy Lee.” The men whose names had been called off looked stunned, as if they could not believe that they had been read out of the fight they had waited for so long.

  “Why, Mr. Major—” said Tom Ireland at last, “Why, Mr. Major—it’ll be eight to ten days before we’re back!”

  “And what if it is?”

  “Why, the fight will be all over, settled and done, before ever we make it to the state line!”

  “I know,” said Major. “It’s the harder job, Tom, in a way. But it’s got to be done…”

  The five men who were to escort Mona and Sally over the Gunsight went about the assemblage of their packs and horses slowly, behaving more like doomed men than men reprieved. But if Major had met reluctance on the part of the men, he met open rebellion when it came to Sally Major. Mona, who continued to walk through the world as if she were no longer a part of it, assented listlessly; but Sally Major exploded in her father’s hands, flatly refusing to go.

  “It isn’t right, it isn’t fair,” she declared. “I belong here as much as anybody else does, and a whole lot more than some! I won’t go—you can’t make me go! How do I know that I’ll see you or Dick, or anybody else here, again?”

  “Sally, you’re going just the same.” In the end not even her tears moved the old range wolf’s decision a hair’s breadth. “If you won’t go willingly, you’ll go tied on your horse. Child, I’m asking you not to force me to that.”

  Thus, when shortly after dusk the trailing pack train pulled out of the Lazy M corral, Sally mounted with the rest. At the last moment Clay Hughes went forward to the stirrup of her pony. “Set easy,” he said, taking one of her hands from where they lay folded lifelessly upon the horn; “and I’ll be seeing you.” For a long moment she looked downward at him through the dusk. The nigh stirrup leather creaked as she swayed toward him, as if even yet she would swing down and refuse to go out with the pack train. But in the end she only gave his hand a quick pressure and turned away her face.

  Oliver Major, motionless as a gaunt, tall post, stood a long time watching the last slow dust of the plodding pack train, listening to the yip of Rowdy Lee as he rounded a pack horse that was trying to turn back. Far off in the dusk Clay Hughes saw Tom Ireland, trailing behind the others, turn his horse broadside, and sit looking back at the Lazy M for a space of long minutes. Hughes could not make out Ireland’s face; but he would not have been surprised to know that the man wept. To those cowboys the Buckhorn was their country, their range. It was a hard thing to drive them from it in the very hour in which they were most needed for its defense.

  Oliver Major snapped into motion again. “We’ll get fixed to hold the pump house,” he told the others. “We can’t hold the main house against a swarm like the Shaws will bring. They’d cut off our water, first thing. Gustafson, get back on top of the house and watch the road. Keep your ears open! The rest of us will move bed rolls, rations, and all the arms on the place to the pump house.”

  “How much grub you want?” Dick Major asked.

  “Not much. A few days. This game is going to turn one way or the other very soon. We’ll hold three—no, four ponies inside the pump house.”

  “There’s seven of us here,” Dick pointed out. “We’ll have room for a full string by putting the stock in the lean-to.”

  “The lean-to has got to be tore down; it won’t keep no bullets out, and it’s only in the way. We’ll pick up extra ponies easy enough, if we make a play. Put four good quiet cut horses in the pump house, and turn out all the rest of the stock… Who’s staying with Walk Ross?”

  “Dusty Rivers.”

  “Go tell him to put out the lights in that window. A man could put a rifle shot in there from pretty near a quarter mile.”

  They went about their work almost silently, dividing their tasks tacitly with the accord of self-sufficient men who are used to working together. The building that was now the pump house was very old, the oldest at the Lazy M. It had been Oliver Major’s own house when the Lazy M was new. Besides the shackling lean-to it had but two rooms, the larger of which was now occupied by the gasoline pump that lifted the Buckhorn water in dry season. In spite of its age, that first little house was very rugged and strong. Its three-foot walls of adobe had been washed over with cement in its later years, and thus protected the adobe stood against the weather like rock.

  The great mass of junk that had been stored in this building was now made to melt away, giving place to arms and supplies. The dozen gasoline drums that were kept here were rolled far off, lest a ricocheting bullet create hazard of fire and explosion. The lean-to was reduced to debris, which was in turn removed. It was a work of hours, but when it was done the adobe was a stubborn blockhouse, wel
l fitted to stand off a prolonged attack.

  As they moved through the big ranch house, gathering up by lantern light the last stray odds and ends of arms, it seemed to Hughes that he had never seen any habitation become so swiftly desolate and forsaken. The lanterns cast the shadows of the long-legged, slow-striding cowboys as monstrous, swaying shapes that seemed to lurch through cloisters long abandoned. The click of their high heels upon the tiles induced mournful echoes that Hughes had never noticed there before; and there was upon the whole place an odd brittle silence, so that men spoke with unconsciously lowered voices.

  Hughes wondered if Oliver Major, as he had added section after section to this commodious house that was to last through the years, had ever imagined that he would be driven to abandon it as he neared the end of his long trail, and return to that first little two-room adobe which he had set up beside the Buckhorn water first of all. It occurred to him that perhaps Oliver Major was going to end his Buckhorn career in the very spot where he had begun it—within the walls of the little adobe shanty which he and his brother had built so long ago, putting into it the labors of their own hands.

  “They’re liable to fire this house, Oliver,” said Bart Holt.

  It was very hard to imagine that by tomorrow night the place might be a smoke-blackened ruin. The suggestion made the enormity of their predicament suddenly harsh and real, though at the same time the harder to believe. This house, more than any tangible thing, represented the comprehensive dream of Oliver Major, built slowly and soundly through the years.

  Oliver Major’s voice was so hard and unsentimental as he answered that they did not notice several moments had elapsed before his reply. “Let ’em. The house will grow up again because there’s water under it. Nothing but the water counts… This valley should have kept its old Indian name.”