by Zane Grey
When he stopped, Bud took up the refrain. It was not his horse, of course, but an unwritten law of the range had been broken, and that was any honest rider’s affair. Besides, Bill was a pal of Bud’s. “Hangin’s too good for ’im, whoever done it,” he finished vindictively. “I’d lay low, if I was you, Bill. Mebby he’ll git into the habit, and you kin ketch ’im at it.”
“I aim to lay low, all right. And I aim to come up a-shootin’ if the—”
“Yore dead right, Bill. Night-ridin’ ’s bad enough when a feller rides his own hawse. It’d need some darn smooth explainin’ then. But when a man takes an’ saddles up another feller’s hawse—”
“I kin see his objeck in that,” Bill said. “He had a long trail to foller, an’ he tuk the hawse that’d git ’im there and back the quickest. Now what I’d admire to know is, who was the rider, an’ where was he goin’ to? D’ you happen to miss anybody las’ night, Bud?”
“Me? Thunder! Bill, you know damn well I wouldn’t miss my own beddin’ roll if it was drug out from under me!”
“Same here,” mourned Bill. “Ridin’ bronks shore does make a feller ready for the hay. Me, I died soon as my head hit my piller.”
“Mary V, she musta hit out plumb early this morning,” Bud observed gropingly. “She was saddled and gone when I come to the c’rel at sun-up. Yuh might ast her if she seen anybody, Bill. Chances is she wouldn’t, but they’s no harm askin’.”
“I will,” Bill said sourly. “Any devilment that’s goin’ on around this outfit, Mary V’s either doin’ it er gettin’ next to it so’s she kin hold a club over whoever done it. She mebby mighta saw him—if she was a mind to tell.”
“Yeah—that shore is Mary V,” Bud agreed heartily. “Bawl yuh out quick enough if they’s anything yuh want kep’ under cover, and then turnin’ right around and makin’ a clam ashamed of itself for a mouthy cuss if yuh want to know anything right bad. Bound she’d go with us getherin’ hosses when she wasn’t needed nor wanted, and now when we’re short-handed, she ain’t able to see us no more a-tall when we start off. You’ll have to git upon ’er blind side some way, Bill, er she won’t tell, if she does know who rode Jake.”
“Blind side?” Bill snorted. “Mary V ain’t got no blind side ’t I ever seen.”
“And that’s right too. Ain’t it the truth! I don’t guess, Bill, yuh better let on to Mary V nothin’ about it. Then they’s a chance she may tell yuh jest to spite the other feller, if she does happen to know. A slim chance—but still she might.”
“Slim chance is right!” Bill stated with feeling.
During this colloquy Mary V’s ears might have burned, had Mary V not been too thoroughly engrossed with her own emotions to be sensitive to the emotions of others.
Mary V was pounding along toward Black Ridge—or Snake Ridge, as some preferred to call it. She was tired, of course. Her head ached, and more than once she slowed Tango to a walk while she debated with herself whether it was really worth while to wear herself completely out in the cause of righteousness.
Mary V did not in the least suspect just how righteous was the cause. How could she know, for instance, that Rolling R horses were being selected just as carefully on the southern range as they were to the north, since even that shrewd range man, her father, certainly had no suspicion that the revolutionists farther to the east in Mexico would presently begin to ride fresh mounts with freshly blotched brands? He had vaguely feared a raid, perhaps, but even that fear was not strong enough to impel him to keep more than one man at Sinkhole.
Sudden was not the man to overlook a sure profit while he guarded against a possible danger. He needed all the riders he had, or could get, to break horses for the buyers that were beginning to make regular trips through the country. He knew, too, that it would take more than two or three men at Sinkhole to stand off a raid, and that one man with a telephone and a rifle and six-shooter could do as much to protect his herds as three or four men, and with less personal risk. Sudden banked rather heavily on that telephone. He was prepared, at any alarming silence, to send the boys down there posthaste to investigate. But so long as Johnny reported every evening that all was well, the horse-breaking would go on.
It is a pity that he had not impressed these facts more deeply upon Johnny. A pity, too, that he had not confided in Mary V. Because Mary V might have had a little information for her dad, if she had understood the situation more thoroughly. As thoroughly as Tex understood it, for instance.
Tex knew that any suspicion on the part of the line rider at Sinkhole, or any failure on his part to report every evening, would be the signal for Sudden to sweep the Sinkhole range clean of Rolling R horses. He had worried a good deal because he had forgotten to tell his confederates that they must remember to take care of the telephone somehow, in case Johnny was lured away after the airplane. It had been that worry which had sent him out in the night to find them and tell them—and to learn just what was taking place, and how many horses they had got. When a man is supposed to receive a commission on each horse that is stolen successfully, he may be expected to exhibit some anxiety over the truth of the tally. You will see why it was necessary to the peace and prosperity of Tex that the surface should be kept very smooth and unruffled.
Tex, of course, overlooked one detail. He should have worried over Mary V and her industrious gathering of “Desert Glimpses,” lest she glimpse something she was not wanted to see. I suppose it never occurred to Tex that Mary V’s peregrinations would take her within sight of Sinkhole, or that she would recognize a suspicious circumstance if she met it face to face. Mary V was still looked upon as a spoiled kid by the Rolling R boys, and she had not attained the distinction of being taken seriously by anyone save Johnny Jewel. Which may explain, in a roundabout way, why her interest had settled upon him, though Johnny’s good looks and his peppery disposition may have had something to do with it too.
Mary V, having climbed to the top of Black Ridge, adjusted her field glasses and swept every bit of Sinkhole country that lay in sight. Almost immediately she saw a suspicious circumstance, and she straightway recognized it as such. Away over to the east of Sinkhole camp she saw two horsemen jogging along, just as the Rolling R boys jogged homeward after a hard day’s work at the round-up. She could not recognize them, the distance was so great. She therefore believed that one of them might be Johnny Jewel, and the suspicion made her head ache worse than before. He had no business to be away at night, and then to go riding off somewhere with someone else so early in the morning, and she stamped her foot at him and declared that she would like to shake him.
She watched those two until they were hidden in one of the million or so of little “draws” or arroyos that wrinkle the face of the range west. When she finally gave up hope of seeing them again, she moved the glasses slowly to the west. Midway of the arc, she saw something that was more than suspicious; it was out-and-out mysterious.
She saw something—what it was she could not guess—moving slowly in the direction of Sinkhole Camp,—something wide and queer looking, with a horseman on either side and with a team pulling. Here again the distance was too great to reveal details. She strained her eyes, changed the focus hopefully, blurred the image, and slowly turned the little focusing wheel back again. She had just one more clear glimpse of the thing before it, too, disappeared.
Mary V waited and waited, and watched the place. If it was crossing a gully, it would climb out again, of course. When it did not do so she lost all patience and was putting the glasses in their case when she saw a speck crawling along a level bit, half a mile or so to the left of where she had been watching.
“Darn!” said Mary V, and hastened to readjust the glasses. But she had no more than seen that it was the very same mysterious object, only now it was not wide at all, but very long—when it crawled behind a ridge like a caterpillar disappearing behind a rock. Mary V wa
ited awhile, but it did not show itself. So she cried with vexation and nervous exhaustion, stamped her foot, and made the emphatic assertion that she felt like shooting Johnny Jewel for making her come all this long way to be driven raving distracted.
After a little, when the mysterious thing still failed to reappear anywhere on the face of the gray-mottled plain, she ate what was left of her lunch and rode home, too tired to sit up straight in the saddle.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THIEVES RIDE BOLDLY
Johnny Jewel heaved his weary bones off his bed and went stiffly to answer the ’phone. Reluctantly as well, for he had not yet succeeded in formulating an excuse for his absence that he dared try on old Sudden Selmer. Excuses had seemed so much less important when temptation was plucking at his sleeve that almost any reason had seemed good enough. But now when the bell was jingling at him, no excuse seemed worth the breath to utter it. So Johnny’s face was doleful, and Johnny’s red-rimmed eyes were big and solemn.
And then, when he had braced himself for the news that he was jobless, all he heard was this:
“Hello! How’s everything?”
“All right,” he answered dully to that. So far as he knew, everything was all right—save himself.
“Feed holding out all right in the pasture?” came next. And when Johnny said that it was: “Well, say! If you get time, you might ride up and get one or two of these half-broke bronks and ride ’em a little. The boys have got a few here now that’s pretty well gentled, and they’re workin’ on a fresh bunch. The quieter they are, the better price they’ll bring, and they won’t have time to ride ’em all. You can handle one or two all right, can’t yuh?”
“Yes, I guess I can,” said Johnny, still waiting for the blow to fall.
“Well, how many will the pasture feed, do yuh think? You can turn out one of the couple you’ve got.”
“Oh, there’s food enough for three, all right, I guess—”
“Well, all right—there’s a couple of good ones I’d like to have gentled down. Cold’s better, ay?”
“I—why, I guess so.” Johnny just said that from force of habit. His mind refused to react to a question which to him was meaningless. Johnny could not remember when he had last had a cold.
“Well, all right—tomorrow or next day, maybe. I’ll have the boys keep up the two I want rode regular. If everything’s running along smooth, you better come up and get ’em. And when they’re bridlewise and all, you can bring ’em in and get more. These boys won’t have time to get more ’n the rough edge off.…”
When he had hung up the receiver, Johnny sat down on a box, took his jaws between his two capable palms and thought, staring fixedly at the floor while he did so.
It took him a full twenty minutes to settle two obvious facts comfortably in his brain, but he did it at last and crawled into his bed with a long sigh of thankfulness, though his conscience hovered dubiously over those facts like a hen that has hatched out goslings and doesn’t know what to do about them. One fact—the big, important one—was that Johnny still had his job, and that it looked as secure and permanent as any job can look in this uncertain world. The other fact—the little, teasingly mysterious one—was that Sudden evidently did not know of Johnny’s two-day absence from camp, and foolishly believed Johnny the victim of a cold.
But Johnny’s conscience was too much a boy’s resilient fear of consequences to cluck very long over what was, on the face of it, a piece of good luck. It permitted Johnny to sleep and to dream happily all night, and it did not pester him when he awoke at daylight.
Just because it became a habit with him, I shall tell you what was the first thing Johnny did after he crawled into his clothes. He went out hastily and saddled his horse and rode to the rock-faced bluff, turned into a niche and rode back to the farther end, then swung sharply to the left.
It was there. Dusty, desert-whipped, one wing drooping sharply at the end, the flat tire accentuating the tilt; with its tail perked sidewise like a fish frozen in the act of flipping; reared up on its landing gear with its little, radiatored nose crossed rakishly by the gravel-scarred propeller, that looked as though mice had nibbled the edges of its blades, it thrilled him as it had never thrilled him before.
It was his own, bought and paid for in money, and the sweat of long, toil-filled miles. It looked bigger in that niche than it had looked out on the desert with nothing but the immensity of earth and sky to measure it by. It looked bigger, more powerful—a mechanical miracle which still seemed more dream than reality. And it was his, absolutely the sole property of Johnny Jewel, who had retrieved it from a foreign country—his prize.
“Boy! I sure do wish she was ready to take the air,” Johnny said under his breath to Sandy, who merely threw up his head and stared at the thing with sophisticated disapproval.
Johnny got down and went up to it, laid a hand on the propeller, where its varnish was still smooth. Through a rift in the rock wall a bright yellow beam of sunlight slid kindly along the padded rim of the pilot’s pit; touched Johnny’s face, too, in passing.
Johnny sighed, stood back and looked long at the whole great sweep of the planes, pulled the smile out of his lips and went back to the cabin. He wouldn’t have time to work on her today, he told himself very firmly. He would have to ride the fences like a son-of-a-gun to make up for lost time. And look over the horses, too, and ride past that boggy place in the willows. It would keep him on the jump until sundown. He wouldn’t even have a chance to go over his lessons and blue prints, to see just what he’d have to send for to repair the plane. He didn’t even know the name of some of the parts, he confessed to himself.
He hated to leave the place unguarded while he made his long tour of the fence and the range within. He did not trust the brother of Tomaso, who had been too easily jewed down in his price, Johnny thought. He believed old Sudden was right in having nothing to do with Mexicans, in forbidding them free access to his domain. Johnny thought it would be a good idea to do likewise. Tomaso was to bring back the pliers, hammer, and whatever other tools they had taken, but after that they would have to keep off. He would tell Tomaso so very plainly. The prejudices of the Rolling R were well enough known to need no explanation, surely.
So Johnny ate a hurried breakfast, caught his fresh horse out of the pasture, and rode off to do in one day enough work to atone for the two he had filched from the Rolling R. He covered a good deal of ground, so far as that went. He rode to the very spot where fifteen Rolling R horses had been driven through the fence and across the border, but since his thoughts were given to the fine art of repairing a somewhat battered airplane, he did not observe where the staples had been pulled from three posts, the wires laid flat and weighted down with rocks, so that the horses and several horsemen could pass, and the wires afterward fastened in place with new staples. It is true that the signs were not glaring, yet he might have noticed that the wires there were nailed too high on the posts. And if he had noticed that, he could not have failed to see where the old staples had been drawn and new ones substituted. The significance of that would have pried Johnny’s mind loose from even so fascinating a subject as the amount of fabric and “dope” he would need to buy, and what would be their probable cost, “laid down” in Agua Dulce, which was the nearest railroad point.
As it was, he rode over tracks and traces and bits of sinister evidence here and there, and because the fence did not lie flat on the ground, and because many horses were scattered in the creek bottom and the draws and dry arroyos, he returned to camp satisfied that all was well on the Sinkhole range. He passed the cabin by and headed straight for his secret hangar, gloated and touched and patted and planned until the shadows crept in so thick he could not see, and then remembered how hungry he was. He returned to the cabin, turned his tired horse loose in the pasture, with Sandy standing disconsolately beside the wire gate, his haltered he
ad drooping in the dusk and his mind visioning heat and sand and sweaty saddle blankets for the morrow.
Dark had painted out the opal tints of the afterglow. The desert lay quiet, empty, lonesome under the first stars. Johnny’s eyes strained to see the ridge that held close his treasure. He had a nervous fear that something might happen to it in the night, and he fought a desire to take his blankets and sleep over there in that niche. Tomaso’s brother knew where it was, and the Mexican who had driven the mules that hauled it there. What if they tried to steal it, or something?
That night, before he went to bed, he saddled Sandy and rode over to make sure that the airplane was still there. He carried a lantern because he feared the moon would not shine in where it was. It was there, just as he had placed it, but Johnny could not convince himself that it was safe. He had an uneasy feeling that thieves were abroad that night, and he stayed on guard for an hour or more before he finally consoled himself with the remembrance of the difficulties to be surmounted before even the most persistent of thieves could despoil him.
After that he rode back to the cabin and studied his blue prints and his typed lessons, and made a tentative list of the materials for repairs, and hunted diligently through certain magazine advertisements, hoping to find some firm to which he might logically address the order.
Obstacles loomed large in the path of research. The Instructions for Repairing an Airplane (Lesson XVII) were vague as to costs and quantities and such details, and Johnny’s judgment and experience were even more vague than the instructions. He gnawed all the rubber off his pencil before he hit upon the happy expedient of sending a check for all he could afford to spend for repairs, explaining just what damage had been wrought to his plane, and casting himself upon the experience, honesty and mercy of the supply house. Remained only the problem of discovering the name and address of the firm to be so trusted, but that took him far past midnight.