Drag Harlan

by Seltzer, Charles Alden

  “About a year ago I found some gold in the Cisco Mountains near the ranch. It was nugget gold—only a pocket. I packed it home, lettin’ nobody see me doin’ it; an’ I got it all hid in the house, except the last batch, before anybody knowed anything about it. Then, comin’ home with the last of it, the damned bottom had to bust out of the bag right near the corral gate, where Meeder Lawson, my foreman, was standin’ watchin’ me.

  “It turned out that he’d been watchin’ me for a long time. I never liked the cuss, but he’s a good cowman, an’ I had to hold onto him. When he saw the gold droppin’ out an’ hittin’ the ground like big hailstones, he grinned that chessie-cat grin he’s got, an’ wanted to know if I was through totin’ it home.

  “I wanted to know how he knowed there was more of it, an’ he said he’d been keepin’ an eye on me, an’ knowed there was a heap more of it somewhere around.

  “I fired him on the spot. There’d have been gunplay, but I got the drop on him an’ he had to slope. Well, the next mornin’ Luke Deveny rode up to where I was saddlin’, an’ told me I’d have to take Lawson back.

  “I done so, for I knowed there’d be trouble with the outlaws if I didn’t. I ain’t never been able to get any of that gold to the assayer. They’ve been watchin’ me like buzzards on a limb over some carrion. I don’t get out of their sight.

  “An’ now they’ve finally got me. I’ve got a little of the gold in my pocket now—here it is.” He drew out a small buckskin bag and passed it to Harlan, who took it and held it loosely in his hands, not taking his gaze from Morgan.

  “Keep a-goin’,” suggested Harlan.

  “Interested, eh?” grinned Morgan; “I knowed you’d be. Well, here I am—I didn’t get to the assay office at Pardo; an’ I’ll never get there now.” He paused and then went on:

  “Now they’re after Barbara, my daughter. Deveny—an’ Strom Rogers, an’ some more—all of them, I reckon. I ought to have got out long ago. But it’s too late now, I reckon.

  “That damned Deveny—he’s a wolf with women. Handsome as hell, with ways that take with most any woman that meets him. An’ he’s as smooth an’ cold an’ heartless as the devil himself. He ain’t got no pity for nobody or nothin’. An’ Strom Rogers runs him a close second. An’ there’s more of them almost as bad.

  “They watch every trail that runs from the Rancho Seco to—to anywhere. If I ride north there’s someone watchin’ me. If I ride south there’s a man on my trail. If I go east or west I run into a man or two who’s takin’ interest in me. When I go to Lamo, there’ll be half a dozen men strike town about the same time.

  “I can’t prove they are Deveny’s men—but I know it, for they’re always around. An’ it’s the same way with Barbara—she can’t go anywhere without Deveny, or Rogers—or some of them—ain’t trailin’ her.

  “As I said, the sheriff can’t do anything—or he won’t. He looks worried when I meet him, an’ gets out of my way, for fear I’ll ask him to do somethin’.

  “That’s the way it stands. An’ now Barbara will have to play it a lone hand against them. Bill Morgan—that’s my son—ain’t home. He’s gallivantin’ around the country, doin’ some secret work for the governor. Somethin’ about rustlers an’ outlaws. He ought to be home now, to protect Barbara. But instead he’s wastin’ his time somewheres else when he ought to be here—in Lamo—where’s there’s plenty of the kind of guys he’s lookin’ for.

  “There’s only one man in the country I trust. He’s John Haydon, of the Star ranch—about fifteen miles west of the Rancho Seco. Seems to me that Haydon’s square. He’s an upstandin’ man of about thirty, an’ he’s dead stuck on Barbara. Seems to me that if it wasn’t for Haydon, Deveny, or Lawson, or Rogers, or some of them scum would have run off with Barbara long ago.

  “You see how she shapes up?” he queried as he watched Harlan’s face.

  “Looks bad for Barbara,” said Harlan slowly.

  Morgan writhed and was silent for a time.

  “Look here, Harlan,” he finally said; “you’re considered to be a hell-raiser yourself, but I can see in your eyes that you ain’t takin’ advantage of women. An’ Harlan”—Morgan’s voice quavered—“there’s my little Barbara all alone to take care of herself with that gang of wolves around. I’m wantin’ you to go to the Rancho Seco an’ look around. My wife died last year. There’s mebbe two or three guys around the ranch would stick to Barbara, but that’s all. Take a look at John Haydon, an’ if you think he’s on the level—an’ you want to drift on—turn things over to him.”

  Morgan shuddered, and was silent for a time, his lips tight-shut, his face whitening in the dusk as he fought the pain that racked him. When he at last spoke again his voice was so weak that Harlan had to kneel and lean close to him to hear the low-spoken words that issued from between his quavering lips:

  “Harlan—you’re white; you’ve got to be white—to Barbara! That paper I was tryin’ to stuff into my gun—when you come around the rock. You take it. It’ll tell you where the gold is. You’ll find my will—in my desk in my office—off the patio. Everything goes to Barbara. Everybody knows that. Haydon knows it—Deveny’s found it out. You can’t get me back—it’s too far. Plant me here—an’ tell Barbara.” He laughed hollowly. “I reckon that’s all.” He felt for one of Harlan’s hands, found it, and gripped it with all his remaining strength. His voice was hoarse, quavering:

  “You won’t refuse, Harlan? You can’t refuse! Why, my little Barbara will be all alone, man! What a damned fool I’ve been not to look out for her!”

  Night had come, and Morgan could not see Harlan’s face. But he was conscious of the firm grip of Harlan’s hands, and he laughed lowly and thankfully.

  “You’ll do it—for Barbara—won’t you? Say you will, man! Let me hear you say it—now!”

  “I’m givin’ you my word,” returned Harlan slowly. And now he leaned still closer to the dying man and whispered long to him.

  When he concluded Morgan fought hard to raise himself to a sitting posture; he strained, dragging himself in the sand in an effort to see Harlan’s face. But the black desert night had settled over them, and all Morgan could see of Harlan was the dim outlines of his head.

  “Say it again, man! Say it again, an’ light a match so’s I can see you while you’re sayin’ it!”

  There was a pause. Then a match flared its light revealing Harlan’s face, set in serious lines.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you—now—Morgan,” he said; “I’m goin’ to the Lamo country to bust up Deveny’s gang.”

  Morgan stared hard at the other while the flickering light lasted with a strained intensity that transfigured his face, suffusing it with a glow that could not have been more eloquent with happiness had the supreme Master of the universe drawn back the mysterious veil of life to permit him to look upon the great secret.

  When the match flickered and went out, and the darkness of the desert reigned again, Morgan sank back with a tremulous, satisfied sigh.

  “I’m goin’ now,” he said; “I’m goin’—knowin’ God has been good to me.” He breathed fast, gaspingly. And for a moment he spoke hurriedly, as though fearful he would not be given time to say what he wanted to say:

  “Someone plugged me—last night while I was sleepin’. Shot me in the chest—here. Didn’t give me no chance. There was three of them. My fire had gone out an’ I couldn’t see their faces. Likely Laskar an’ Dolver was two. The other one must have sloped. It was him shot me. Tried to knife me, too; but I fought him, an’ he broke away. It happened behind a rock—off to the left—a red boulder.

  “I grabbed at him an’ caught somethin’. What it was busted. I couldn’t wait to find out what it was. I’m hopin’ it’s somethin’ that’ll help you to find out who the man was. I ain’t goin’ to be mean—just when I’m dyin’; but if you was to look for that thing, find it, an’ could tell who the man is, mebbe some day you’d find it agreeable to pay him for what he done to me.”

/>   He became silent; no sound except his fast, labored breathing broke the dead calm of the desert night.

  “Somethin’ more than the gold an’ Barbara back of it all,” he muttered thickly, seeming to lapse into a state of semiconsciousness in which the burden that was upon his mind took the form of involuntary speech: “Somethin’ big back of it—somethin’ they ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about. But Harlan—he’ll take care of—” He paused; then his voice leaped. “Why, there’s Barbara now! Why, honey, I thought—I—why——”

  His voice broke, trailing off into incoherence.

  After a while Harlan rose to his feet. An hour later he found the red rock Morgan had spoken of—and with a flaming bunch of mesquite in hand he searched the vicinity.

  In a little depression caused by the heel of a boot he came upon a glittering object, which he examined in the light of the flaming mesquite, which he had thrown into the sand after picking up the glittering object. Kneeling beside the dying flame he discovered that the glittering trifle he had found was a two- or three-inch section of gold watch chain of peculiar pattern. He tucked it into a pocket of his trousers.

  Later, he mounted Purgatory and fled into the appalling blackness, heading westward—the big black horse loping easily.

  The first streaks of dawn found Purgatory drinking deeply from the green-streaked moisture of Kelso’s water-hole. And when the sun stuck a glowing rim over the desert’s horizon, to resume his rule over the baked and blighted land, the big black horse and his rider were traveling steadily, the only life visible in the wide area of desolation—a moving blot, an atom behind which was death and the eternal, whispered promise of death.

  * * *

  CHAPTER III

  A GIRL WAITS

  Lamo, sprawling on a sun-baked plain perhaps a mile from the edge of the desert, was one of those towns which owed its existence to the instinct of men to foregather. It also was indebted for its existence to the greed of a certain swarthy-faced saloon-keeper named Joel Ladron, who, anticipating the edict of a certain town marshal of another town that shall not be mentioned, had piled his effects into a prairie schooner—building and goods—and had taken the south trail—which would lead him wherever he wanted to stop.

  It had chanced that he had stopped at the present site of Lamo. Ladron saw a trail winding over the desert, vanishing into the eastern distance; and he knew that where trails led there were sure to be thirsty men who would be eager to look upon his wares.

  Ladron’s history is not interesting. As time fled to the monotonous clink of coins over the bar he set up in the frame shack that faced the desert trail, Ladron’s importance in Lamo was divided by six.

  The other dispensers had not come together; they had appeared as the needs of the population seemed to demand—and all had flourished.

  Lamo’s other buildings had appeared without ostentation. There were twenty of them. A dozen of the twenty, for one reason or another, need receive no further mention. Of the remaining few, one was occupied by Sheriff Gage; two others by stores; one answered as an office and storage-room for the stage company; and still another was distinguished by a crude sign which ran across its weather-beaten front, bearing the legend: “Lamo Eating-House.” The others were private residences.

  Lamo’s buildings made some pretense of aping the architecture of buildings in other towns. The eating-house was a two-story structure, with an outside stairway leading to its upper floor. It had a flat roof and an adobe chimney. Its second floor had been subdivided into lodging-rooms. Its windows were small, grimy.

  Not one of Lamo’s buildings knew paint. The structures, garish husks of squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked the serene majesty of nature.

  For, beginning at the edge of “town,” a contrast to the desert was presented by nature. It was a mere step, figuratively, from that land from which came the whisper of death, to a wild, virgin section where the hills, the green-brown ridges, the wide sweeps of plain, and the cool shadows of timber clumps breathed of the promise, the existence, of life.

  To Barbara Morgan, seated at one of the east windows of the Lamo Eating-House—in the second story, where she could look far out into the desert—the contrast between the vivid color westward and the dun and dead flatness eastward, was startling. For she knew her father had entered the desert on his way to Pardo, on some business he had not mentioned; and the whispered threat that the desert carried was borne to her ears as she watched.

  On a morning, two days before, Morgan had left the Rancho Seco for Pardo. The girl had watched him go with a feeling—almost a conviction—that she should have kept him at home. She had not mentioned to him that she had a presentiment of evil, for she assured herself that she should have outgrown those puerile impulses of the senses. And yet, having watched him depart, she passed a sleepless night, and early the next morning had saddled her horse to ride to Lamo, there to await her father’s return.

  It was late in the afternoon when she reached Lamo; and she had gone directly to the Eating-House, where she had passed another restless night—spending most of her time sitting at the window, where she was at this minute.

  Of course it was a three-day trip to Pardo, and she had no reason to expect Morgan to return until the end of the sixth day, at the very earliest. And yet some force sent her to the window at frequent intervals, where she would sit, as now, her chin resting in her hands, her eyes searching the vast waste land with an anxious light.

  An attaché of the Eating-House had put her horse away—where, she did not know; and her meals had been brought to her by a middle-aged slattern, whose probing, suspicion-laden glances had been full of mocking significance. She had heard the woman speak of her to other female employees of the place—and once she had overheard the woman refer to her as “that stuck-up Morgan heifer.”

  Their coarse laughter and coarser language had disgusted the girl, and she had avoided them all as much as possible.

  It was the first time she had remained overnight in the Eating-House lodging-rooms, though she had seen the building many times during her visits to Lamo. It wasn’t what she was accustomed to at the Rancho Seco, nor was it all that a lodging-house might be—but it provided shelter for her while she waited.

  The girl felt—as she looked—decidedly out of place in the shabby room. Many times during her vigil she had shuddered when looking at the dirty, threadbare ingrain carpet on the floor of the room; oftener, when her gaze went to the one picture that adorned the unpapered walls, she shrank back, her soul filled with repugnance.

  Art, as here represented, was a cheap lithograph in vivid colors, of an Indian—an Apache, judging from his trappings—scalping a white man. In the foreground, beside the man, was a woman, her hair disheveled, wild appeal in her eyes, gazing at the Indian, who was grinning at her.

  A cheap bureau, unadorned, with a broken mirror swinging in a rickety frame; one chair, and the bed in which she had tried to sleep, were the only articles of furniture in the room.

  The girl, arrayed in a neat riding habit; her hair arranged in graceful coils; her slender, lissom figure denoting youth and vigor; the clear, smooth skin of her face—slightly tanned—indicating health—was as foreign to her present surroundings as life is foreign to the desert. In her direct eyes was the glow of sturdy honesty that had instantly antagonized the slattern who had attended her.

  That glow was not so pronounced now—it was dulled by anxiety as she looked out of the window, watching the desert light fade as twilight came, blotting the hot sand from her sight, erasing the straight, unfeatured horizon, and creating a black void which pulsed with mystery.

  She sighed when at last she could no longer penetrate the wall of darkness; got up and moved her chair to one of the front windows, from where she could look down into Lamo’s one street.

  Lamo’s lights began to flicker; from the town’s buildings sounds began to issue—multisonous, carrying the message of ribaldry unrestrained.

  From a poin
t not very far away came the hideous screeching of a fiddle, accompanied by a discordant, monotonous wail, as of someone singing a song unfamiliar to him; from across the street floated a medley of other noises, above which could be heard the jangling music of a heavily drummed piano. There came to her ears coarse oaths and the maudlin laughter of women.

  She had heard it all the night before; but tonight it seemed that something had been added to the volume of it. And as on the night before, she sat at the window, watching—for it was all new and strange to her—even if unattractive. But at last the horror of it again seized her, and she closed the window, determined to endure the increased heat.

  Half an hour later, lying, fully dressed, on the bed, she heard a voice in the hallway beyond the closed door of her room—a man’s voice.

  “It isn’t what one might call elegant,” said the voice; “but if it’s the best you’ve got—why, of course, it will have to do.”

  The girl sat straight up in bed, breathless, her face paling.

  “It’s Luke Deveny!” she gasped in a suffocating whisper.

  The man’s voice was answered by a woman’s—low, mirthful. The girl in the room could not distinguish the words. But the man spoke again—in a whisper which carried through the thin board partition to the girl:

  “Barbara Morgan is in there—eh?” he said and the girl could almost see him nodding toward her room.

  This time the girl heard the woman’s voice—and her words:

  “Yes she’s there, the stuck-up hussy!”

  The voice was that of the slattern.

  The man laughed jeeringly.

  “Jealous, eh?” he said. “Well, she is a mighty good-looking girl, for a fact!”