by Jonas Ward
“Ride out like you were told to, mister. Rangers ain’t no special breed to Gibbons’ Militia.”
Keroon sighed, turned back to Gibbons.
“I arrest you in the name of the people of Texas,” he said and reached for the warrant. Some gunman thought he was going for a breast gun. He drew and fired, the slug catching the lawman in the small of the back. Four more times he was hit in that many seconds, the bullets driving him lifeless from the saddle.
“You foul cowards!” Mulchay cried at them. “You miserable butchers—” Apgar raised his gun high, brought it down with sickening force on the man’s head. Mulchay went to his knees, fell head down and lay there.
The door at Gibbons’ back swung open and Rosemarie stepped onto the porch, dressed again and wide-eyed with terror. Her glance took in the murdered man and the crumpled figure of Mulchay, but when she would have gone to him, Gibbons’ arm circled her waist and held her back.
“What have you done?” she demanded brokenly. “What have you done?”
“Get your things together, missy. We’re traveling fast ...”
“No! I won’t go with you!”
“You will—or you can stand here and watch Mulchay take a bullet in the back of his head!”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Apgar, at the count of three finish the old meddler. One! Two—” The stolid Apgar thumbed the hammer back.
“No, no!”
“Get packed in three minutes,” Gibbons ordered, and the girl re-entered the house. Gibbons then had the dead man and the unconscious one tied across their saddles. Rosemarie came down the steps, carrying a small duffle bag, and a horse from the small remuda was made ready for her. Leaving one man behind to take Lauren MacKay into custody, the strange party rode off.
Twelve
It was Angus Mulchay’s nature to speak and to act impetuously—and on the morning that he had taken it into his mind to ride off to Austin for help, the man had done so without informing any of his friends what he was up to. Naturally, those cronies wondered about him—it was all they talked about during the first few days of his disappearance—but when two weeks had passed without a word, Hamlin, Macintosh et al were of the opinion that a delegation of Gibbons’ hard case army had put the fear of God into him and packed him off.
“He’ll be back in the country soon,” they told each other confidently.
“Ay, and denyin’ that Gibbons was the cause.”
And when they gathered at the Glasgow this hot Tuesday evening they had no idea that Mulchay had, indeed, come back. But there were other things to talk about tonight, for the families of the Tompkins, the Alreds and the Bryans were in town lock, stock and barrel, and the three heads of those families were hopping mad about it.
“Load up your wagon, you’re moving,’ this dirty-faced, gunman tells me,” Jock Bryan reported to the assemblage in the saloon. “
“And why am I moving?’ I asks him. ‘Because you’re in a battle zone,’ he tells me in that surly voice. Imagine! The land I’ve ranched for twenty-five years is a battle zone!”
“The same as they did to me,” Cy Tompkins added. “Only I was told it was for the safety of my family. So I said I’d decide about the safety of my family, as I’ve always done—and he says, no, Captain Gibbons does all the deciding in the Big Bend for everyone.”
“Well?” the big-chested Alex Aired demanded. “What are we going to do about Captain High-and-Mighty Gibbons?”
“Turn him and his rascals out!” shouted the usually retiring Bryan. “I’m a God-fearing man, and violence offends me—but there comes a first time for everyone!”
“Ay!”
“Gibbons has gone too far! I say we elect a captain of our own. My vote goes to Cy Tompkins.”
Alex Aired was the last speaker, and it was not until he had made his nomination that he was aware he was talking into a dead silence. All the excited clamor in the big room had vanished into thin air, and the puzzled man turned slowly around to stare at a trio of militiamen inside the doorway.
“Who is Cy Tompkins?” Lou Kersh asked Aired. “Trot him out here.”
“This is a private meeting,” Ken Hamlin said.
“It’s going to be, as soon as every Mex-lover in the place pulls stakes.”
“We’re getting a little tired of that,” Hamlin countered. “All opposed to Gibbons get tarred with the same old brush.”
“As soon as every Mex-lover pulls stakes,” Kersh said again, as if the other man hadn’t spoken. “Clears out of the country. Now, which one is Cy Tompkins?”
There was a pause, then the man cleared his throat nervously and stepped forward. “My name is Tompkins,” he said.
“Do you accept the nomination?”
“What?”
“For captain of the home guard, mister. Are you number one here?”
“Give the fellow some peace,” Hamlin protested. “You’ve already done enough for one day.”
“You’re the big talker,” Kersh told him. “Maybe you’re the one they want to rep them.”
“Hamlin is not concerned in this. It’s my ranch you moved on to.” Tompkins walked three strides closer to the three gunmen. “If my friends want me,” he said, “I’m their captain.”
“All his friends raise their hands,” Kersh said, and they all did. Kersh laughed. “Some friends,” he said to the other pair and they laughed, too. “All right, Tompkins, let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To the calabozo! Where the hell did you think? As of sundown this town’s under martial law, and you’re looking at the provost marshal.”
“But what’s Tompkins done?” demanded Macintosh, outraged.
“What hasn’t he done? Aiding and abetting an enemy of the State of Texas, inciting to riot, illegal assembly—Tompkins, you’re a dangerous character to be running around loose. Let’s go!”
The other two shifted position, gave each other arm room, and there was something not quite sane in the face of Lou Kersh, at least. He wanted them to force his hand., “I’ll go with you,” Cy Tompkins said.
“Then take me as well,” Jock Bryan volunteered. Alex Aired came forward at the same time.
Kersh shook his head.
“Just one criminal at a time,” he said. “But if you’re still here rabble-rousing when we get back, the rest will be accommodated.”
The three of them left with Tompkins between them.
Thirteen
Jack Gibbons’ strong point was his talent for improvising. Where another man might have been badly rattled by the unexpected and thoroughly unwanted turn of events at the MacKay ranch, Gibbons had a resilience of mind, a military man’s inborn ability to go ice-calm in moments of stress, to think on the spot and by the very confidence he felt in himself quell the fears of others.
For there had been fear there in MacKay’s yard, a real anxiety in the hearts of all those who had helped kill a Ranger. Gibbons had sensed it, and reacted with precision and poise. His somewhat remarkable decision was to pretend that the whole thing had never happened, that he and the men had never ridden this way; he had not so much as laid eyes on the girl; Mulchay had never arrived and there was no such person as Seth Keroon.
So he cleared them all out and headed the party west to Mulchay’s range, for the same thought process that produced this solution also included the basic proposition that here was the land Malcolm Lord had hired him to usurp.
And always—in all ways—he had the threat of the Mexican invaders.
At Mulchay’s house his riders continued to obey his crisply spoken orders, though they had no idea what the purpose was. First they strung up the bullet-riddled body to the same eaves where the four Mexicans had been lynched fifteen days ago. Then the paint Gibbons wanted was found, and he himself got down on hands and knees and swashed the single word on the porch floor beneath the hanging man.
Venganza! it read, each letter crudely stroked, foreign-looking. Revenge. Even the dull-witted Harley coul
d spell that out, get the inference that he hadn’t pumped a bullet into the Ranger at all. It was those damn Mexicans. But some others, like Apgar, wondered about the eyewitnesses to the actual affair. What was their fast-thinking boss going to do about the unconscious, but still alive Mulchay? And the girl?
Jack Gibbons knew that a little explanation, like knowledge, was a dangerous thing. So he told them what to do.
At sundown Apgar was to set out for the Overlord spread. He should push his horse every minute of the way. He would find Gibbons at the ranch with Malcolm Lord, and excitedly report an invasion of Mulchay’s place from across the river. So much for Apgar.
Riker was to stage the “raid” here. He was to watch the passage of time carefully—and one hour after Apgar started off he was to set fire to the outbuildings, and when they were ablaze put the torch to the main house.
“Cato,” Gibbons said then, keeping his voice unemotional, tactical—”Cato, your work is the blabbermouth. You still pack those Mex blades in your saddlebag?” Cato, a lean and hungry-looking man, nodded.
“Then use one you can part with. Wait until the house is on fire, then drag him out beyond the porch. Leave the knife sticking in his heart where we can all see it.” Cato nodded again.
“After that all four of you clear out. We’ll rendezvous at the MacKay ranch. Any questions?”
“That’s the Ranger, the house, and the old man,” Apgar said. “There’s one other.”
“She’s my problem,” Gibbons told him. “You and everybody else forget about her.”
He said that with the same assurance he’d said everything else, turned away from them before they could read the troubled indecision in his eyes. For Rosemarie certainly was his problem, and a mind-torturing one to solve under this kind of pressure. His coldly practical half demanded she be left here with Cato, warned him over and over that she was his damnation. But pride and passion bent him the other way, fed his hungry ego. The woman is yours, their strong voice insisted. A prize of war. Then, when he wavered again: What are you afraid of? You do run things. Or do you?
His thoughts had carried him to the back of the house, where Harley was standing guard over Rosemarie, and the girl in her turn was making Mulchay as comfortable as she could.
As soon as she saw him she stood up, almost by reflex action, and it was the defiance in her, the pure loathing for him that pushed Gibbons into his decision.
“You and I are leaving,” he said to her.
“Fm staying with Angus ...”
His fingers clamped on her upper arm, painfully, and he swung her around and half-dragged her out the rear door.
“You’re going to learn one thing,” Gibbons promised. “You’re going to learn to jump when I tell you to.”
He forced her to ride ahead of him along the river, to a line camp Mulchay and his neighbor Bryan shared for their common roundup. Rosemarie was ushered into the small, clapboard shack.
“See you tonight,” Gibbons said. “By the light of the silvery moon.” He closed the door and bolted it, and rode for Scotstown, there to instruct Lou Kersh about invoking the martial law, then on to Overlord to set the scene for the “invasion” of Mulchay’s ranch.
Fourteen
Lauren McKay was a round, bustling, blue-eyed man who always had a great many important affairs to attend to—tomorrow—and what kept him busy today was avoiding doing those things he had spoken of to Rosemarie yesterday. Each morning he arose with the sun, ordered his favorite breakfast of flapjacks and boiled beef, and after the third cup of coffee studiously wrote out a list of chores that was invariably the same as the list he threw away the night before. Then he left the house, looking purposeful, and perhaps his eye would notice that a board was coming loose in the steps. The loose board immediately went on the list—first thing tomorrow—and he would continue his inspection of the ranch.
And that was the man’s real occupation, riding endlessly over the six hundred acres he owned. It stunned his imagination, all this grass, filled him with so much awe of the size of it that he couldn’t begin to think where he should start working it. But he was going to start—tomorrow—start perhaps with a loan. That way he could increase his herd to, say, five hundred head. And with that much beef he’d have to hire half a dozen, punchers, a wrangler and a full-time Mex cook to help his niece with her work. In a year, maybe less, he’d be drawing level with Malcolm Lord—and wouldn’t that be something, pestering Lord to buy him out instead of vice versa? Rosemarie, of course, would have to stop working in the saloon and learn to live like a girl with the richest uncle in the Big Bend.
He’d get on it tomorrow, first thing, but by now it was: nearly noon, time to head for his favorite spot by the river, where he had the jug cooling and the cottonwoods made a siesta the next best thing to heaven. That’s where he was when Jack Gibbons was violating the privacy of his: home, and the gunfire that followed startled him awake.
MacKay’s first thought, to give the man his due, was for his niece’s safety. But his second was for his own, perhaps only natural for a bachelor of fifty-five, and damn providential, and instead of dashing pell-mell toward the house he went that way circuitously, keeping to the dense grove of cypress. All he saw, when he finally had the house in view, was Gibbons’ departing group, Rosemarie amongst them and two figures draped over their saddles.. It never occurred to him to go to the house now, thereby negating Gibbons’ plan to take him in tow. Instead he took up pursuit of the men with his niece.
This, too, he did with caution, just keeping their dust in view along the primitive road toward Mulchay’s: spread. And when they arrived at Mulchay’s, MacKay took cover in the trees again, biding his time to do he knew not what.
Then, obligingly, Rosemarie and Gibbons emerged from the house, and even at this distance MacKay was dismayed to recognize the rough treatment the girl was receiving. MacKay followed along again, watched her imprisonment—and with maddening precaution waited the better part of twenty minutes before venturing forth to unbolt the door.
And as he slid the bar back—in all fairness to MacKay: the harmless old do-nothing considered it a simple enough business he was engaged in, rather foolish, in fact—but should he live among the angels through eternity the man would never again be on the receiving end of such a look as Rosemarie gave him when he opened that cabin to daylight.
For she had spent every second of those twenty minutes futilely searching a way out of the gloomy little place. Twenty minutes is a large slice of life under those conditions, when even something as drastic as suicide is denied a person, and had the door opened four hours after Gibbons had thrown her in there she could not have felt so heart-burstingly happy to see whose face it was peering in and asking, “What you doin’ in there, lass? Come on out.”
She couldn’t answer, only fly to him, hold onto him as if she needed the feel of his bewhiskered face against hers, the touch of his rough shirt beneath her fingers to make sure this was no dream.
MacKay had no idea what it was all about.
“You better quit that job in Terhune’s,” he said parentally. “I don’t approve the company you meet there.”
“I will, Uncle Lauren, I will. But Mr. Mulchay’s in trouble. He’s bad hurt. We have to help him.”
“I’ve known Angus Mulchay for twenty years. He’s forever in trouble.”
“But this time it’s awful. They mean to kill him off.”
“Who does?”
“Those gunmen Gibbons left behind.”
“Gibbons? The feller that’s massacreein’ the poor Mexicans?”
“The same. Come on, Uncle, we’ve got to help.”
MacKay spread his arms. “How?” he asked.
How? Rosemarie heard the question echo in her mind and she came back to hard reality, saw her mild-faced, uncle for the lovable but still woefully ineffective man he; was.
“What can we do?” MacKay asked, reading her dismay.
“Ride with me back to our place,” the gir
l said.
“Why?”
“So you’ll be safe, and I can borrow your horse.”
“And do what?” he asked, suspicious of her tone. “Nothing foolish, now!”
She shook her head. “Nothing foolish.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Climb up there,” she told him, looking toward the mountain.
“Climb the Negras? And whatever for?”
“For a man,” she said. “Now let’s be off, both of us.”
Fifteen
“What day did you say this was?” Fargo asked.
“Tuesday.”
“Still June?”
“July the second. The year is eighteen fifty-seven.”
“Don’t have to bite a man’s head off. Hell, I know what year it is.”
“I’m not so damn sure.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, that’s so. And I’m not so damn sure about something else.”
“And what might that be, Mr. Grouchbag Buchanan?”
“All right, Fargo. Fm a grouchbag and Fm gripin’—but, dammit, tell me one thing: Have you ever in your life mined gold before?”
“You can bet your wasted life I have! Man, I was cashin’ nuggets big as California plums ten years before the big strike!”
“Out of a goddam mountain?”
“Well, no. My specialty heretofore was placer minin’. But when I won this here map in a poker game over to El Centro ...” Fargo’s voice trailed away guiltily and he pretended trouble with his full-glowing pipe. The silence dragged on and Buchanan let him fry in his own fat. Finally he turned to look at him.
“You mean the map the old Spanish don gave your granddaddy in seventeen-eighty?” he asked softly. “”The one that’d been in the family vault for so long, but because Grandpa saved the don’s daughter from drowning herself in the Conchos he handed over the most fabulous treasure in all history? That map?”