by COLE JACKSON
“Thanks for the advice,” Hatfield said quietly, “I’m not taking it.”
The hunchback smiled.
“I did not think you would,” he admitted, “but I felt it my duty to warn you. Well, if you are going to stay in the district, I’ll make my offer. As I said, when I saw you in action tonight it came to me that I was watching the man who could handle the situation here if anybody could. If you’ll take the job, I’ll hire you to run down the thieves who are robbing me. I’ll pay double what you could get on a ranch, and if you are successful, there’ll be a substantial bonus for you.”
“And what do I get if I’m not successful?” Hatfield asked with the suspicion of a smile quirking the corners of his stern mouth.
Amado Capistrano did not smile and there was no jest in his voice when he replied:
“The chances are, a six-foot pine box!”
“That would be rather close quarters,” Hatfield grinned. “I’m six-foot-four. I’ll take the job!”
CHAPTER 7
CAPISTRANO summoned a waiter and the latter brought him pen, ink and paper. He wrote steadily for a moment or two, and as he wrote, the Lone Wolf watched him with slightly narrowed eyes and a deepening of the concentration furrow between his black brows.
“Here,” Capistrano said, handing him the note, “this will introduce you to Bowers, my superintendent at the mine, and to Fuentes at the mill. They will cooperate with you to the fullest extent. You have freedom to act as you see fit.”
“Let me be the one to tell these two fellows about our agreement,” suggested Hatfield.
Capistrano nodded.
“I have the fullest confidence in Bowers and Fuentes,” he replied, “but I will follow your suggestion. Now let’s have a drink to seal the bargain.”
The glasses were filled and they were just raising them to their lips when the swinging doors crashed open and a man strode into the room. It was John Chadwick and he was in a furious temper.
The uproar hushed as the tall cattle king glared about the room, his flashing eyes finally fixing on Amado Capistrano. Lips drawn back from his teeth, he headed for the table at which the hunchback sat. Men and women made way for him, but Chadwick did not appear to notice them. At the table he halted, his face working with anger.
“Capistrano,” he barked, “there was another raid on my ranch this afternoon. Two of my men killed and a couple of hundred head of cattle widelooped. And they went across your spread!”
The hunchback gazed calmly into Chadwick’s blazing eyes. In his silvery voice he spoke one word.
“Well?”
Chadwick fairly choked with rage.
“Well!” he mimicked, his voice hoarse with passion. “Well, I’ve stood about all I’m going to stand, that’s what. Those thieving killers cut across your spread and into greaserland. Then when my men started after them, your paid cutthroats held them up at your fence and wouldn’t let them go through!”
“What proof have you that the rustlers went across my land?” Capistrano asked calmly.
“Proof!” sputtered Chadwick, “Proof! What other way could they go? What other way would they go except by Huachuca Trail? And it runs across your spread, doesn’t it?”
“Then you are just surmising they crossed my land? You really do not know?”
“I know this much!” raged Chadwick. “I know one greaser always stands up for another!”
Even Jim Hatfield was not prepared for the speed with which the apparently awkward hunchback moved. Capistrano’s amazingly long arms shot across the table, his slim hands gripped Chadwick’s elbows. One mighty heave of his great shoulders and the ranch owner hurtled through the air. He landed on his back with a crash a dozen feet distant, rolled over, writhed for an instant and surged erect, right hand flashing to his left armpit.
“Hold it!”
John Chadwick tensed rigid, the butt of the half-drawn gun gripped in his hand, the long barrel still in the shoulder holster. Face working with anger, he glared at the tall Ranger.
Jim Hatfield’s hands had moved with blinding speed, sliding his big Colts from their carefully worked and oiled cut-out holsters in a blurred flicker of motion. The black muzzles yawned toward Chadwick. The Lone Wolf’s voice smashed at him.
“Cut your wolf loose in the right way, Chadwick, and it’s okay, but this fellow isn’t heeled — you can see that. It isn’t just the correct thing to throw down on a man who isn’t carrying a gun.”
Slowly Chadwick let the gun slide back into its sheath. His contorted features smoothed out. He nodded agreement.
“Right,” he said. “You’ve got a head on your shoulders, stranger, but maybe if you’d just been pitched clean through yourself and out the other side, you’d be sort of off balance, too. As for you, Capistrano — ”
Crash!
Just in time Jim Hatfield had caught the flicker of steel across the room. He fired over his right arm with his left-hand gun and a man reeled back against the bar, clutching a blood-spouting shoulder. The gun he had furtively drawn clattered to the floor. Hatfield peered through the wisping smoke, sweeping the crowd with his cold eyes.
Outside sounded the thud of running feet. The swinging doors crashed open and men boiled into the room — lean, capable-appearing men, a half dozen of them. Hatfield tensed, the big Colts clamped rigidly against his sinewy thighs. The tight group paused just inside the door, hands hovering over their gun butts, eyes sweeping the room.
One, a rangy, rawboned individual with a drooping moustache, took a long stride forward, his eyes fixed on John Chadwick.
“Yuh all right, Boss?” he called. “We heerd shootin’.”
“All right, Edwards,” Chadwick called back. “Just a little misunderstanding.”
The lanky Edwards, Chadwick’s foreman, glanced suspiciously at Jim Hatfield, who had holstered his guns and was lounging easily against the table.
“That big feller shot Bill Thompson, Ed,” a voice shouted.
Edwards stiffened, but Chadwick’s voice cut at him.
“Bill had it coming,” the ranch owner said, “he’s always going off half-cocked. He meant all right but he used bad judgment.”
“Shore ‘pears he did,” grunted Edwards, turning and striding toward the group that had laid the wounded man on a table and were attending to his injury.
“He ain’t hurt bad,” somebody offered. “High up through the shoulder. Didn’t bust the bone.”
Chadwick addressed the hunchback.
“I apologize for calling you a greaser, Capistrano,” he said in a level tone. “That was out of turn and I shouldn’t have done it. But that’s the only thing I’m taking back,” he added, his voice hardening, “and I’m warning you — the next time my men start across your spread they’re going across. They’re not going to be stopped!”
“When they have a legitimate reason for crossing, they are welcome to do so,” the hunchback replied quietly, “but I don’t intend to have another barn burned nor another water hole poisoned.”
Chadwick glared at him, his gray eyes flashing. Then he strode straight across the room and out the door. His men, two of them supporting the wounded Thompson, followed.
Hatfield and the hunchback sat down to their unfinished drink. Business in the saloon went on as usual. The roulette wheels spun merrily, cards slithered, dice rattled. The bartenders sloshed drinks into glasses. The orchestra blared out a rollicking tune; boots thumped and dainty French heels clicked. Somebody began bellowing a song.
Capistrano leaned forward and smiled into the Ranger’s eyes.
“Relative to what I said a few moments ago about your leaving this section,” he said, “I now repeat the warning, more earnestly than ever. Leave Helidoro at once, tonight!”
Hatfield stared at him in astonishment.
“I thought we’d settled that,” he remarked.
Capistrano smiled again.
“That was before the little incident which just occurred,” he said. “That was before y
ou made an enemy a thousand times more dangerous than Pedro Cartina could ever be. You bitterly offended the most powerful man in the Tamarra Valley, one of the most powerful in the entire state, in fact. John Chadwick will never forget what you did tonight.”
“Chadwick doesn’t strike me as the sort who would play the game the Cartina way,” Hatfield remarked.
“Oh, no, nothing so crude as that,” Capistrano shrugged with Latin expressiveness. “Chadwick’s methods are more subtle, but just as deadly. It is strange, but men who offend or thwart him seem to have much bad luck. Some suffer unexplainable accidents, due, apparently, to natural causes. Others are convicted of surprising crimes and are now serving long terms in the state prison. Others, wealthy and influential, suffer disastrous business reverses and become ruined men. Strange, but true.”
“Chadwick has always had a good reputation, as far as I ever heard,” the Ranger said.
Capistrano shrugged again.
“Excellent,” he admitted. “He always stays within the law. But a smart man with great wealth and great influence can sometimes find the law remarkably elastic. Oh, yes, John Chadwick is a good citizen. No one could be more industrious in the running down of such petty outlaws as Alfredo Zorrilla and El Zopilote and others of their ilk. Crooked gamblers, gunmen, robbers and such on this side the Line have also felt the weight of his hand. John Chadwick upholds the Law. John Chadwick, in fact, is the Law!”
“You don’t seem in awe of him,” Hatfield commented dryly.
Capistrano shrugged deprecatingly.
“Chadwick hates me,” he replied. “I do not agree with his notions as to how a district, or a state, should be governed. That is enough to earn his dislike. Then not long ago I managed to acquire a piece of property he had his heart set on. Also, I am a candidate for the office of sheriff, on a platform somewhat opposed to that on which his friend, Sheriff Branch Horton, is running. The election is but a short time off and Chadwick is using every means available to insure my defeat. He considers me an outlander with no right to hold office.
“Really, Señor Hatfield,” he added, smiling his charming, melancholy smile, “I am forced to believe that at the bottom John Chadwick is an honest man. He truly believes what he believes. He feels that he is divinely appointed to control the destinies of his fellowmen and that anyone who opposes him should be ruthlessly crushed. It is an attitude developed and fostered by the great landowners. My ancestors, some of them at least, held much the same attitude. If they considered a thing right, it, of necessity, must be right because they believed it was. John Chadwick is of the same breed.”
Hatfield nodded his understanding. He too had encountered this attitude on the part of the barons of the open range. Accustomed to ruling with an iron hand, they were intolerant of any interference and willing to go to desperate lengths to maintain the prerogatives they honestly believed should be theirs.
Chadwick, one of the really large owners of the state, doubtless was subject to his feeling in a marked degree and would bitterly resent anything that might be construed as an encroachment upon what he considered his rights and privileges. He surrounded himself with men of his own kind, who saw eye to eye with him and were ready at all times to uphold him.
“Those rannies of his who barged in here are a salty lot,” Hatfield mused as he sipped his drink. “They’re not the kind to take water from anybody and they’re all set to back their boss up in anything he says. Maybe Chadwick isn’t altogether a bad fellow, but he belongs to the breed that has to be taken down a peg every now and then. Can’t get it through their heads that this country is for everybody and not just for a few big toads who’re liable to slop all the water out of the puddle if they keep on swelling themselves up.”
Flintlock Horner had a spare room over the livery stable and he rented it to Hatfield for the night. Before lying down, the Ranger sat on the edge of the little built-in bunk and smoked a final cigarette. His face was very thoughtful and there was a speculative light in his gray eyes.
He was thinking, in fact, not of the stirring events of the past twenty-four hours, but of a commonplace incident that, ordinarily, would have been of little interest. He was visioning Amado Capistrano writing that note of introduction to his mine superintendent — writing with his left hand!
Then he dismissed the matter with a shrug and stretched out to relax in slumber, resolutely putting puzzles out of his mind. In a moment he was asleep.
CHAPTER 8
IN MEN who for long periods of time ride stirrup to stirrup with deadly danger, there develops an eerie sixth sense that oft-times warns of approaching peril. Many a time during his adventurous years as a Ranger, Jim Hatfield had felt death’s stealthy approach. Many a time this strange premonition of evil had saved him. He had learned to respect the seemingly inexplicable and to accept the warnings when they came.
Thus, when he suddenly awoke with every nerve tingling and every muscle tense, he did not dismiss the alarming manifestations as figments of an overwrought imagination. Silent, motionless he lay, ready for instant action, listening with keen ears, endeavoring to pierce the quiet dark of the little room.
From the other side of town came the monotonous rumble of the stamp mills. In the livery stable below a horse pawed impatiently Another stamped in his stall. A strain of music drifted faintly from some still active dance hall. Otherwise the night was silent.
And yet — the thick dark was acrawl with menace. Hatfield could feel it, a stealthy, furtive, deadly thing that drew closer and closer. Waiting there in the black shadow, the palms of his hands grew moist, his muscles ached with strain. The weird premonition fairly screamed its warning in his ears. Hollow-eyed murder was abroad in the night; was approaching the cot in the little room.
Slowly, quietly, the Ranger stretched his hands toward the heavy Colts always within easy reach. He gripped the black butts, drew the big guns from their sheaths and lithely slipped over the foot of the cot. Crouched against the end wall of the room, he watched the opaque blot that was the door.
A crack split the intense dark, a dimly luminous crack that widened by almost imperceptible degrees. A tiny creaking filtered through the silence; the glowing crack remained stationary for a long moment. Then again it began to widen, slowly, steadily as the door opened and the feeble beams from the lantern hanging in the stable below seeped through the dark.
The clean edges of the widening crack of light abruptly blurred as a grotesque shadow absorbed the glow. Jim Hatfield, tense against the wall, saw a man slip into the room. Another followed him, and another. They merged with the shadows thronging the room.
The crack of light now stretched across the room and faintly illumined the bunk built against the wall. It fell on the tumbled blankets from under which the Ranger had slipped, and in the illusive gleam the bedding took on the shape of a huddled human form. The indistinct shape was suddenly blotted out by the shadow of a man who leaned over the cot.
There was a flashing glitter, then the sodden ripping blows of a knife that slashed the blankets to ribbons. Instantly there followed a startled curse.
“Hell’s fire! There ain’t nobody here! He’s — look out!”
With a rattling crash, both the Ranger’s guns let go. The knife wielder screamed shrilly, whirled sideways and thudded to the floor. The walls of the little room seemed to reel and bulge to the roar of six-shooters.
Hatfield, pouring lead at the two shadowy figures, ducked and weaved, sliding back and forth along the wall as bullets hammered the boards. He heard another yell, snapped a shot at a fleeing shadow and hurled his body to the floor as fire streamed through the dark.
Feet were thudding on the stairs. They hit the landing just as the two remaining killers hurtled through the door. With a terrific roar, a shotgun let go. Then there was another deafening crash as a cursing, clawing, fighting knot of men whirled end-over-end down the narrow stairs.
Hatfield reached the door just as the shotgun bellowed a second time. He saw a
slight, dark man literally blown across the stable, his face a bloody smear of buckshot-riddled flesh. He saw the grim, rage-distorted face of lanky Flintlock Horner glaring through the shotgun smoke, and for the briefest instant he glimpsed another face as a tall, broad-shouldered man bounded across the stable toward the outer door — just a fleeting glimpse of a weatherbeaten face with flashing black eyes and a lean, hard jaw.
For an instant he thought the fleeing man might be Pedro Cartina, but as instantly discarded the thought. The man was taller, broader, and his skin was tanned, not swarthy.
All this Hatfield noted in the split second before he lined sights on the fleeing man and pulled trigger. The hammers of his guns fell with a chilly double-click on empty cartridges.
Ejecting the empties and jamming loaded shells into one gun, he bounded down the stairs. Flintlock flung up the reloaded shotgun, but Hatfield roared a warning in the nick of time. Getting the gun down threw Horner off-balance, however, and he barged smack into the racing Ranger. The two hit the floor in a wild tangle. By the time they scrambled to their feet and shot out the door, the fleeing man was nowhere in sight.
“I told you somebody’d try to steal that yaller hoss!” bawled Flintlock. “A yaller hoss and a red-haided woman! They means trouble all the time! The only thing what’s wuss’n either of ‘em is both!”
The stable keeper was a sight. One eye was rapidly closing, a bleeding nose had already swelled to twice its normal proportions, and his face was otherwise scratched and battered. He held the ten-gauge shotgun at full cock and brandished it wildly. Hatfield looked into the yawning black muzzles and hastily stepped aside. Horner hammered the butt of the gun on the floor to lend emphasis to his shouts and both barrels went off with a roar like the crack of doom.
The blast reeled and startled Flintlock into a stall, and a mule promptly kicked him out again. He scrambled to his feet, rubbing the seat of his trousers, and resumed his yelling where he had left off. Hatfield got the shotgun and shoved it out of sight behind a feed barrel.