by Lauran Paine
“That’s far enough, stranger!”
Ray reined up. He felt no startlement or apprehension. Years back he had stopped others from approaching the ranch in the identical fashion. He looped his reins, kept both hands in plain sight, looked around and waited for the rider to cross out of the forest to him. Then the surprise came. He had not been stopped by a cowboy at all; it was a woman—a girl. She rode tall in the saddle without once looking away from him. She had no carbine and the holstered gun she wore was not even loosened. He could see the tie thong still secured in place holding the little pistol firmly in its holster.
“Who are you, mister, and what do you want up in here?”
He considered her for a long moment before replying. She was very handsome, much too handsome to be old Joe Mitchell’s wife, and, since Joe had no children, she could not be his daughter. He relaxed, leaning a little in the saddle, his bold, steady gaze holding powerfully to her face.
“Going on to the ranch,” he said, and stopped, admiring her beauty and the way midday sunlight touched her coppery hair, burnishing it to a red-gold color.
“Why?”
He made a very faint smile. “What’s the difference? All you got to do is draw that little pop-gun and drive me up there, and, if I got no business there, Joe’ll do the rest, won’t he?”
Anger showed down around her mouth. “All right,” she told him. “Ride on.”
He waited for her to enforce the order, and, when she made no move toward the holstered pistol, he said: “Lady, you’re going to look kind of foolish herding in a prisoner without a gun in your hand, aren’t you?”
“No, mister, I don’t think I will.” She regarded Ray somberly a moment longer, then raised her voice to call out. “Carter, push your carbine out where he can see it!” She saw Ray’s eyes locate the gun and grow still. “Now ride on,” she said evenly, “and I hope you’ve got business in here.” There was no mistaking her antagonism.
Ray took up his reins and moved out. He heard the second horse man lope up behind him but did not look around. It did not annoy him being taken like this; what bothered him was the reflection that this strikingly handsome girl was riding out with some run-of-the-mill cowhand.
They cut into the wagon ruts again less than a mile from the buildings, and here, with no shade, the heat was oppressive. Farther out lay shadows made by the rugged mountains easterly of the road and on both sides of the road were grazing cattle. They looked good, Ray noted, dark red with fat color, shiny as new money, a sight to please any range man whether he was an owner or simply a rider.
Occasionally, when an animal stood sideways, a big scarred rib brand—JM—stood out plain to sight. Where a hurrying creek bisected the valley and the roadway dipped to cross it, drifting cattle were strongly in evidence, either going down to drink and moving away in the tanked-up sluggish fashion of range animals returning to feed, or standing stockstill, watching the riders.
Ahead, bulking large, was the main ranch building. Around it seeming at random were sheds, shops, barns, and the out houses found in every ranch yard. Someone was shaping metal over an anvil; each sledged blow fluted musically into the mountain air, echoing endlessly.
It was familiar to Ray, every foot of it. He headed for a stud ring bolted to a cottonwood tree near the main house, swung down, made his livery animal fast, and turned, thumbs hooked in shell belt, to gaze again at the tall girl. Her companion, about Ray’s own age, was a whipcord-wiry man, lanky and free-moving, with an open and freckled face that looked across at Ray with none of the girl’s obvious antagonism.
“Go on in!” the rider called to Ray. “Joe’s either in there or somewhere around. I’ll see if he’s out here some place.” It was said in a conversational manner, not as though the cowboy was suspicious of Ray.
The girl looped her reins and moved across the yard, her spurs stirring snakeheads of dun-colored dust. “What’s your name?” she asked in the same impersonal, inflectionless, cold tone.
Ray turned deliberately away from her without answering and bent a long stare upon Joe Mitchell’s old log ranch house that stretched, long and low, across the yard. Behind him the girl’s indrawn breath, knife-like with quick hot anger, sounded distinctly.
Ray crossed the porch and struck the door with his fist. Beyond, somewhere within, came sounds of movement, then the panel flung back and a short, compact grizzled man peered up at Ray from a face as eroded as the mountains around that weathered log house.
“Hello, Joe.”
“Well…hell! Well…I’ll be a…Ray Kelly! Son, come on in here!”
Ray was literally jerked into the house and at once its smoky odors touched him, bringing up nostalgia. He freed his hand finally from the older man’s grip and wiggled the fingers ruefully. Joe Mitchell’s strength was legendary in the mountains. So were his hospitality, his generosity, and his temper. Equally as legendary were his principles; no one in the mountains, or down around Welton, either, for that matter, had such elusive principles, and Ray had never doubted but that old Joe Mitchell shipped short year-lings from time to time whose blotched JM brands covered older marks. But a young cowboy imbued only with love of life and excitement could laugh at something like that; it was knowledge to keep a man warm during chilly nights and to amuse him during days of sweat, dust, and swearing, when trail boredom and roundup ennui would otherwise have sparked the restlessness that prompted riders to move on. But a man nearing thirty did not laugh so readily over rustling, particularly a man who had just spent five years in prison because of it.
“Damn, boy, but you look good.” Mitchell’s little probing eyes danced; his face threatened to split wide open from smiling.
“You haven’t changed any, Joe.”
“Ah,” the cowman said, pointing to a chair. “When a feller crowds sixty, he can’t change a whole lot…unless it’s to up and die. Nature’s put about all the lines in this face there’s room for.”
Ray sat. His heart warmed to Mitchell in spite of something in the back of his mind. He began thoughtfully to twist up a cigarette. Not because he felt the need, but to cover up a very faint uneasiness that had accompanied him into the house.
“Want a drink, son?” Mitchell called out in his booming voice.
“No thanks, Joe.”
Ray smoked with his hat on the back of his head. Nothing in the room had changed—those wide black smoke stains on the front of the huge fireplace; the bedraggled Indian feathers on a moth-eaten old war-bonnet hanging in a corner; the dust and dirt that obscured details in a framed picture of U.S. Grant.
“You figured I’d come back, didn’t you, Joe?”
“Sure, kid, sure. I knew that as sure as I knew anything. I got a place for you, too. You knew I’d keep a bunk waiting.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah?”
“For five years I’ve wanted to ask you just one question.”
Mitchell stared fully at Ray and began nodding his head. The levity died away, the heartiness. His tone turned steely, and this was the Joe Mitchell that Ray remembered best, the smiling, steady-gazing Joe Mitchell who would spit in a mountain lion’s eye using this brisk voice, or who could laugh uproariously at a practical joke in a cow camp across the mountains. This was the Joe Mitchell who stole cattle or went into a gunfight; this was the real Joe Mitchell, the man who really lived behind that bluffness, that heartiness and raffish smile. You didn’t work for a man twelve months, eating out of the same cooking tin with him every day, and not know what was behind the mask of his face.
“I’m waitin’, Ray.”
“Did you rustle those cattle from Mort Salter they sent me to prison over?”
“No, son, I didn’t.”
They exchanged long stares and beyond the house, muted now by log walls, the sounds of a struck anvil rang out. Then Ray removed his cigarette, crushed it out, and smiled.
“Sure good to be back,” he said simply.
Mitchell arose. “Come on. I want to show you ’r
ound the place. Five years is a long time. Things’ve changed a heap on the ranch.”
Ray got up. “Joe, a girl got the drop on me a mile out and brought me in like I used to do. Who is she?”
Mitchell’s tawny gaze flicked upward in a twinkling look. “Son, that’s Grace Fenwick. You’re fixin’ to meet her pa. He’s my foreman now. Been on the place little over two years.”
“You’re softening up,” Ray said, still not moving. “You used to say a cow outfit was no place for women.”
“Getting old.” Joe chuckled. “Come along. I want you to meet George Fenwick…her pa. He’s a widower, and, when he come along with the girl…well, hell…you know me, son. I hire a good man when I see one.” Mitchell opened the front door and lounged in the opening. “Ray, men live an’ learn. The trouble is some things you learn too late. Like havin’ women around a ranch. Grace keeps the boys spruced up. You’ll see at suppertime…no spurs in the house, no guns wore at the table, no shaggy whiskers. Even clean shirts once a week.” The raffish eyes turned sly. “Pretty as a picture, too, isn’t she?”
“She sure is.”
“Well, son…you’re last in line.”
“I’m not even in the line,” Ray drawled, recalling the girl’s look of pure dislike and taking up his hat to follow Joe Mitchell out into the sun blast.
Chapter Three
It was George Fenwick in the blacksmith shop, shaping up shoes for a big, wise-looking, raw-boned chestnut gelding, who was banging on the anvil. He stopped to draw back and wipe his hands on the leather apron when Joe and Ray entered, and Ray saw immediately where the girl got her height, her auburn-copper hair, and her wide gray eyes. Joe Mitchell introduced them and Fenwick’s grip was solidly powerful. He did not smile, though, and listened gravely as Joe explained who Ray Kelly was. Finally he said—“Yes, I’ve heard about you.”—and that was all.
This, Ray thought privately, is a man no one gets close to, and he accordingly was as sparse of words as the foreman was.
“Grace brung him in,” Joe said, grinning from ear to ear.
“Not exactly,” Ray corrected him. “There was a rider with her. Someone named Carter. He backed her up with a carbine.”
The big man near the anvil lifted one half of the split apron he wore and finished wiping his hands upon it. Ray thought, just for a second, a shadow passed over Fenwick’s face.
“Carter Wilson,” Mitchell said, and to Ray Kelly who knew Joe well, it seemed that Joe was not fully at ease in his own blacksmith shop. Then the moment passed and Fenwick was speaking.
“Well, I’m glad to have met you, Ray.” He glanced at the patiently waiting horse. “Now I’ve got to finish this job….” He waited, and, when Joe said nothing, he nodded brusquely, and turned his back.
Out in the yard again, Ray said carefully: “Joe, what ever happened to Duncan Holt who used to be foreman when I worked for you?”
Mitchell’s gaze muddied a bit, and, when he answered, he ignored the question completely. “When you get to know George, he’s not a bad feller. He’s not a man who makes a good impression right off, but he grows on folks. You’ll see, son.” He touched Ray’s arm, turning him. “Come on over to the bunk house. We’ll stake out your bed.”
Here, in the log-insulated coolness of the one room above all others on a cow ranch riders remembered most clearly in after years, nostalgia hit Ray hardest. When Joe pointed to an empty lower bunk and said—“That’s yours.”—Ray recalled without effort the shock-headed, good-natured man who had formerly occupied that bed.
“Tower Houston used to bed down there,” he said.
Mitchell nodded, gazing downward. “Tower’s gone, kid. Got killed in a brawl over at Tularosa couple years ago.”
Ray counted the war bags tied to each bunk. “You got only five riders now, Joe?” he asked, thinking that in other days the Mitchel Ranch had employed ten full-time men and during drives and roundups had hired an additional five riders temporarily.
“Don’t have as many critters any more,” stated Mitchell, passing back out into sunlight. When Ray caught up, Joe was smiling again, but it was not a spontaneous or even a pleasant smile although it tried to be.
“Joe….”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I’d better not work for you again.”
Mitchell was clearly not surprised by this and had not yet come to a conclusion in his mind about something, for now he said: “Plenty of time to go into that later, Ray. Look after your livery barn critter and wash up, if you’re a mind to, and sort of amble ’round the place. I’ll see you at supper. Afterward we’ll talk.”
Ray watched the older man move off toward the main house. Something is wrong here, he told himself. Something has cut some ground out from under Joe Mitchell. This intrigued him, for to his knowledge there was no better cowman in the whole Southwest than Joe Mitchell, and there was no trickier character, either. If something was getting the better of JM’s founder, it had to be something other than another man. At least, Ray thought, heading for his horse, it had to be something other than an ordinary man.
He put up the animal, forked it a bait of mountain hay, and strolled down to the creek. Behind him afternoon sunlight slanted down across Mitchell Meadow, reflected backward from the saw-toothed easterly mountain range, and there was a great depth of silence over everything.
Nailed to a tree was the warped old washstand he sought. Some things never change, he thought, taking up the basin, dipping low, scooping it full from the creek, and bending forward to wash. He could almost hear the catcalls and laughter of riders crowding up around this spot after long days under the summer sun. Tower Houston, he remembered particularly, because he was now dead. Duncan Holt, Cuff Wayne, Jack Martin, Rick Richards…. He pulled out his shirt tail and dried his face, blinked ahead, and grew very still. Fifteen feet away the girl, Grace Fenwick, was watering her horse below the washstand and boldly studying him. He pushed the shirt tail back into his waistband and returned her look.
“You could have told me who you were,” she said.
He nodded. “I could have. I guess I really should have, ma’am.”
“But you wanted to put on an act.”
“No, ma’am, it wasn’t that.” He finished with the shirt, combed his hair with bent fingers, and replaced his hat. “You see, a long time ago I used to bring strangers in just like you fetched me along. It kind of tickled me…being brought in that way myself. And another thing, ma’am, when you’ve been gone a long time, you ride along remembering things. Your mind’s not exactly cheerful.”
“Five years,” she said. “My father told me.”
He rummaged her face for reaction to the knowledge that he had been in prison. There was nothing to be read there; she was totally impassive except for her eyes. They were entirely impersonal; she might have been regarding a new horse or an earmarked but unbranded calf, something out of the ordinary but of no immediate importance.
“For rustling,” he said, driving the words out.
“I reckon Joe told you things’ve changed at JM since you went away.”
He thought there was an undercurrent to her tone and withheld his reply, turned cautious by her steady gaze. “We talked a little,” he admitted. “Joe seems about the same, though.”
“He isn’t. Not like he was when you worked here.”
“Meaning, ma’am?”
“My name is Grace. Everyone calls me that.”
“All right, Grace. My name is Ray Kelly. Folks call me Ray. About Joe…?”
“He can tell you. It’s his business, not mine.”
He eased forward to sit upon the washstand with one leg dangling. “Joe and I’ve been friends a long time, Grace. We’ve done a few things together.”
“I can imagine,” she murmured dryly.
He ignored that. “He used to have a good bunch riding for him, too. No ’punchers who hid in the trees while girls rode out to challenge strangers.”
“That was my idea, not Cart
er’s!”
“Doesn’t change anything, Grace.” He began working up a cigarette. “I guess things have changed around JM.” He lit up and inhaled. “Doesn’t seem to me like they’ve changed for the better, though.”
Anger showed in her eyes and her voice was swift when she spoke again. “Ray, I think you’d better ride back where you came from.” Her voice was cold. “There’s no room on JM for your kind any more.”
“No?”
“No! And I’ll make sure you do ride on, too!”
“How, ma’am, with that little gun?”
She stood rooted a moment longer, then wheeled, pulled the horse around with her, and strode quickly back toward the yard.
Ray continued to sit on the washstand, smoking, while she was still in sight. She was uncommonly handsome even in anger. Or maybe more so because she was angry. His thoughts returned to their conversation. Something was wrong all right and, whatever it was, was right here on JM, too. He turned a little, somberly watching the creek rush past, clear as newly spun glass with scurrying, erratic trout minnows in it and the gravelly bottom glistening.
“Mister….”
He turned. It was Grace’s father. He no longer wore the shoeing apron but his sleeves were still rolled up disclosing heavily corded tanned forearms.