“You’ve got a nice car to look for work in,” she said.
“That’s part of the build-up. All of us cowboys ain’t bums. We seen ourselves in the pitchers, an’ we know better. Next time I’m going to be a straw boss, at least.”
She laughed.
“Seriously, what are you doing now?”
“You might call it vacationing. Wandering here and there, and seeing what may turn up. I haven’t a plan from one day to the next. But I love this country.”
“So do I,” she said. Then: “What do you think of doing right here?”
The Saint lighted a cigarette, taking his time.
Presently he said, “I thought I might do some hunting.”
It seemed to him that this might be a truthful way to put it, even though she would never guess what a deadly kind of quarry he was thinking of. Even though she might never know that the spoor he was following had been started months before when a certain Dr Ludwig Julius paddled out of his office on the Wilhelmstrasse and set off on an odyssey that had already taken him more than half-way around the world, by way of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, from Vladivostok to Yokohama, from Yokohama to San Francisco, and from San Francisco, after a pause at the Nazi consulate there, to the peaceful Arizona county where Simon Templar was on the trail of bigger game than his state hunting licence had ever been intended to include.
2
They sat on the porch of the ranch house after dinner, listening to the far-off yipping of coyotes and the nearer croaking of frogs down at the spring.
Simon had stayed, of course. He had always meant to stay, although he had put on a proper show of diffidence. In fact, he had taken quite a little trouble to make sure of becoming a welcome friend at the Circle Y. And with the insidious intimacy of dinner added to his acquaintance with Jean Morland, he was even more sure that it would be no hardship to spend the time that he expected to spend there.
“How much stock do you have here?” Simon asked.
It was one of those desultory conversations full of long pauses and random twists, but rich with warmth and contentment.
Morland said, “About five thousand head. Not very much, but not enough to be too big a headache.”
“Pretty good range?”
“Not so bad as you’d think. Eh, Hank?”
“We go back quite a ways into the hills,” said Hank Reefe. “They do pretty good back there. It’s handy havin’ the stream. They don’t ever need to go short of water.”
Reefe was the foreman. He sat in the fourth chair, on the other side of Jean, rocking himself gently, his long thin legs stretched out. He was probably not much more than thirty, but his weathered face was deeply carved with the lines that a man gets from staring into hot shimmering distances. He had good level eyes and the kind of long sinewy features that are an unmistakable inheritance from the stock that first fought its way through that untamed country.
“There’s no mining in these parts, is there?” Simon asked casually.
“Not right around here. Sometimes the prospectors’ll come through. But they’ll go anywhere.”
He had a slow, rather musical drawl, which to a sensitive ear was the same as a lapel badge would have been to the eye.
“You wouldn’t be a Texan, I suppose,” said the Saint.
“Yes, sir.” Reefe poured Bull Durham into a gutter of thin paper and spread it with his forefingers. “I heard Miss Jean say you worked in the Panhandle yourself.”
“A long time ago.”
The foreman’s deft fingers shaped and rolled. He sealed the cigarette with a flick of his tongue, and said, “Smoke?”
The sack of Bull Durham landed in Simon’s lap. Lazily Simon slid a paper out of the folder, curved it with thumb and fingers of one hand, poured tobacco, and rolled the cigarette while his other hand pulled the string of the sack against his teeth and tossed it back. His eyes met Reefe’s tranquilly over the match that the foreman leaned across with.
Neither of the Morlands would have realised that two men had measured each other, with challenge and answer, like two proud animals. And yet Jean Morland was very clearly a part of that watchful speculation, for Simon had seen something more in Hank Reefe’s manner towards her than the strictly dutiful respect to which her position as the boss’s daughter entitled her.
Reefe dragged on his own cigarette with an expressionless face, and said idly, “I was raised right around Hereford. Worked around two or three ranches up there ’fore I came west.” Smoke curled in the lamplight as he let it out through his nostrils. “There sure used to be some interestin’ characters around there.”
“Quite a few,” said the Saint.
“Was one feller I remember hearin’ about, came from England or somewhere. Everybody thought he was a dude. So when he asks for a job, first off, they put him on an outlaw horse for a laugh. Well, he was the guy who did most of the laughin’, because it turned out he could fork a bronc better ’n ’most any cowboy in that country, an’ he rode the horse out an’ kept him. After that they found out he could throw knives like somebody in a circus, an’ shoot the pips out of a six of spades just as fast as he could pull a trigger…I guess he couldn’t find anything wild enough for him around there, because later on he went south of the border an’ fought in one of those revolutions, an’ got to be a general or something. At least, so I heard. He was quite a young feller then, an’ I was only a kid myself, but I never forgot him because he had such a funny name for a chap like that. They called him the Saint.”
Simon Templar tilted his head back and blew leisured rings at the lamp.
“He must have been quite a guy.”
“Yeah…I’ve often wondered if he turned out to be the same Saint I’ve read about in the papers since. But I never met him myself, so I wouldn’t know.”
“I wonder what a man like that would be doing these days?” Morland said. “Fighting with the RAF or something like that, I suppose.”
“No,” said the girl. “That would be too conventional for him.” She hugged her knees and gazed out in to the dark. “He’d be rescuing prisoners from the Gestapo, or catching spies in London, or something of that sort.”
Simon looked at her thoughtfully.
“You mean, you really believe those stories about him?” he said teasingly, and again he had to encounter the disconcerting calm clearness of her eyes.
“I want to believe in a few things like that,” she said simply.
They went on looking at each other for a while, with the same quiet steadiness, and then Reefe’s chair creaked abruptly as he sat forward.
“Seems as though we have some late visitors,” he said.
The lights of a car were creeping up from the desert, two yellow eyes that quivered under the punishment of the road. They all watched them coming closer, twisting jerkily up the hillside, until the station wagon that carried them jolted to a stop in front of the porch.
The headlights went out and under the porch light Simon could read the words “J — B Ranch” on the door of the station wagon as it opened.
“Our neighbour,” Morland said.
The man who came clumping up the steps with the spurs jingling on his high-heeled boots was big and broad, and everything about him had a heavy swagger that was as aggressive as a clenched fist. Under the brim of his black hat he had thick black brows and a square dark jaw that looked as useful to hit as a chunk of granite. He was dressed with the curious contradictions of a man who liked his western fopperies and was still ready to do a day’s work with any of them. There were rubies and gold flowers in the buckle of his hat-band, ruby eyes in the longhorn steer’s head knotted in his scarf, jewels and gold inlay in the big silver buckle of his belt, but all of them had been smoothed and scarred with service, like the fancy leather trim on his dusty gaberdines. He showed a perfect set of white teeth and said, “Hullo ev’rybody.”
Unexpectedly, his voice was a soft tenor, not quite light enough to be effeminate, and yet ligh
t enough to strike a note that set the Saint’s delicate sense of menaces on edge.
Morland said pleasantly, “Hullo Max.” He made the only necessary introduction. “This is Mr…er…Templar. Mr Valmon.”
“Glad to know you, Mr Templar.”
Max Valmon’s grip was as hard as his voice was soft. Simon was expecting that. He smiled gently, and used some of the strength of his own right hand. It gave the encounter an air of rather excessive cordiality, and made Valmon’s eyes harden a little under his heavy brows.
“Glad to know you, Max,” said the Saint affably.
Valmon’s glance held another moment of suspicious calculation, and then he turned away and tossed his hat in to a chair. He sat on the arm of the chair and said, “Well, Don—got any news for me?”
Morland knocked out his pipe and began to refill it.
“I don’t think so. We haven’t done very much. Went into town this morning and got stuck with a blow-out coming home. Luckily Mr Templar came along, and—”
“I don’t mean that sort of news.”
“Well, really, there isn’t—”
“I mean, haven’t you made up your mind to accept my offer for the Circle Y?”
Morland blinked.
“Why no, Max. I told you the other day I wasn’t planning to sell. Jean and I like it here.”
“But I told you I was planning to buy.” Valmon’s voice was still soft and friendly. “I’m obstinate. And I was here first. Why don’t you face it? You don’t know much about this country, Don. It won’t feed both of us.”
The older man frowned in a sort of innocent puzzlement, his thumb poised over the bowl of his pipe. Reefe’s chair became still, as if chilled into suddenly watchful waiting, but Morland didn’t seem to be ready with a lead. It was as though he had just begun to sense something in Valmon’s undertones that was so foreign to his experience that he was afraid of being mistaken about it.
It was the Saint who hooked a leg over the arm of his chair and said diffidently, “Not that it’s particularly my business, but you make it sound like peculiar country. What makes it that way?”
Valmon turned with his flashing smile.
“Water,” he said. “I’ve got a spring on my side of the hills, but it goes dry every summer.”
“We do all right,” Reefe said quietly.
“I know.” Valmon’s smile was untouched. “But your stream rises on my land. Only it doesn’t stay there long enough to do me much good, especially when it runs low. To do any good, I’d have to blast a new channel—turn it around that shoulder up there, and let it run down my way to where I could build a dam. Of course, that’s the same as starving you out.”
“The law won’t let you do that,” Reefe said.
Valmon shrugged.
“I don’t know. The water comes from my property. The law couldn’t say much after I’d done it, and it wouldn’t take much doing. Just a few sticks of dynamite in the right places, and you’d be dry. Then I suppose you could go to court and try to get an order to make me blast it the other way again. But before you could do that, and make me do it, you wouldn’t have any stock. So where does it get you?”
He had divided his words between Reefe and Morland, and he was looking at Morland when he finished, but then his eyes went back to the Saint, as if somehow Simon was the only one that he was in doubt about. And curiously, the others seemed to wait for the Saint too, as though without any assertion he had become felt as the man who was the most natural match for Valmon.
And yet the Saint hadn’t moved. He only seemed to become longer and lazier in his chair as he lighted another cigarette with his eyes narrowed but still casual against the smoke.
“You make it all sound so much like the plot of any western picture,” he remarked, “that I can only think of what the answer would be in any western. If I were Don, I guess I’d just cut down your fence and drive my cattle right through to your beautiful new dam.”
“And you know what happens in westerns when somebody does that,” Valmon said in the same tone.
“I don’t want any fighting,” Morland said, with the slightest jerkiness in his voice. “If you’re really in trouble, and you come to me properly, we’ll see if we can work something out. Perhaps I could let you water your cattle over here. I just don’t like you pretending to threaten me.”
“It’s the ham in him,” murmured the Saint, so lightly that for a second he didn’t seem to have said anything, and then calmly, astonishingly, so unpredictably that somehow it was not instantly believable, he began to sing something to himself to the tune of “Home on the Range”:
“Oh give me a ham
With a lovely new dam
Where the skunks and the coyotes can play—”
Valmon snapped to his feet, and his smile was gone.
“All right,” he said. “I’ve made you a fair offer. I’ll give you just twenty-four hours to take it. You can come and tell me tomorrow night. If you think I’m pretending, don’t come. You’ll find out when I start blasting the next morning.”
Morland stood up also, more slowly, his face a little paler.
“I think you’d better go, Valmon,” he said tightly.
Valmon picked up his hat and clapped it on at an insolent slant.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll go—while there are three of you telling me. But I’ll be back here after you’ve gone. And then we’ll see who makes the funniest cracks.”
His voice was still soft and well-modulated, but instead of taking the sting out of his words, that incongruous dulcetness gave them the malignance of a snake’s hiss. It whipped a dull flush into Morland’s face, but his lip quivered with the uncertainty of a man unused to violence. Hank Reefe started forward with a low growl, but Simon caught his arm and stepped ahead of him. Very courteously the Saint bowed Valmon towards the steps.
“Good night, Maxie dear,” he cooed, and Valmon gave him a long stare.
“I’ll know more about you before that,” he said.
“Maybe.”
Simon leaned on the porch rail and concluded his improvisation while Valmon strode across to his car and slammed the door.
“Where nothing is heard
But the Razz and the Bird,
And the boss can make faces all day…”
The line ended in a vicious rasp of angrily meshed gears, and the station wagon’s engine roared as Valmon jarred in the clutch and pulled away.
Simon watched the lights bumping down the trail, and turned back with a little of the humorous mischief fading from his eyes.
“So,” he said slowly. “That seems to have done it.”
Jean Morland was hugging her father’s arm.
“Did you see?” she said wonderingly. “He looked really—wicked. Did you see, Daddy?”
“I’m afraid it’s my fault,” said the Saint. “I knew just how to get under his skin, and I couldn’t resist it. I’ve got an evil gift for that sort of thing. You’re right, Jean—he’s bad. But I suppose it still wasn’t my business. Now I’ve blown everything up for you. I’m sorry.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well,” Morland said quietly. “At least we’ve seen him in his true colours…I’ll go in to town tomorrow and see the sheriff, or whoever you have to see.”
The Saint shook his head slightly.
“You’re going to have trouble,” he said. “Maybe you’ll need some extra help. I kind of brought this to a head, so my offer still goes.”
Morland fumbled with his matches, trying to get his pipe going again. His hands were just a trifle clumsy, not quite so steady as they would otherwise have been.
“It’s very nice of you, but—we haven’t any right to bother you. I’m not going to worry.”
“But we can’t turn Mr Templar out at this hour of the night,” Jean said quickly. “At least we can find a bed for him.”
“We…we don’t have any room to offer him dear.”
Simon smiled at the girl.
“I can
put up with the bunkhouse,” he said, “if you can put up with me. I’d like to stay.”
“There’s a spare bed in my room,” Reefe said detachedly. “He’s welcome to that.”
Half an hour later Simon Templar sat on the spare bed in Hank Reefe’s room, pulling off his boots and watching the foreman silently roll another cigarette. With the smoke going, Reefe dug under his bed and pulled out a well-worn suitcase. Out of it he extracted an almost as well-worn cartridge belt, from which the holster hung heavy with a Colt .45. He took the revolver out, sprung out the cylinder and spun it, checking the load.
“At least you didn’t think I was kidding,” said the Saint.
Reefe looked at him with his lean poker face.
“I’ve seen trouble build up before,” he said. “My father saw a lot more of it, when he wore this belt all the time. Things don’t change very much, out here.”
Simon Templar peeled off his socks and sat rubbing one instep, developing his own estimates.
3
They were drinking coffee after breakfast at the long communal table outside the kitchen with the four cowboys, Jim and Smoky and Nails and Elmer, and Don Morland said, “How far can Valmon really go?”
Jim drained his cup and got up, hitching his belt, and as if he was the spokesman for the others he said, “Well, you can go as far as you like, an’ if he wants to fight we’ll be right there with you.”
The others nodded and grinned in the slow slight way of their kind, as they also got to their feet, and Nails said, “You bet.”
“Let’s git goin’,” said Jim, with the speechmaking finished.
Hank Reefe watched them go, dawdling to roll a cigarette.
“They’re good boys,” he said.
“But what can Valmon do?” Morland protested.
“He can do enough.”
“But there’s still some law and order here, isn’t there?” The older man seemed to be arguing with himself. “There must be something about water rights in the title to this property. Valmon can’t do just what he likes and get away with it.”
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 2