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X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
SUDDEN BILL DORN, by Jackson Gregory
Copyright © 1936 by Jackson Gregory.
CHAPTER 1
If Bill Dorn had ever doubted that the sheriff was a true friend he would never doubt again. Dorn rose slowly from his table, littered with papers, and stepped to his open door, his face dead white, the muscles corded along his lean jaws, his dark eyes burning ominously. For a time, motionless and silent, he stared out across the billowing grazing lands sloping gradually up to the far pine-timbered mountains, yet saw nothing of the wide expanse. The sheriff watched him shrewdly, never batting an eye. Nothing of the rigidity of the still form escaped him, nor did the scarcely perceptible tensing and stiffening of the broad shoulders.
When Bill Dorn spoke it was tonelessly, almost under his breath and without turning.
“You’ve been mighty square with me, Bart,” he said. “I’ll be apt to remember.”
The sheriff, relaxing nothing of his vigilance, asked bluntly:
“Well? What are you going to do, Dorn?”
The rancher made no immediate answer. After a while, when he faced about, his eyelids drooped so low that he looked sleepy, but the sheriff, still seated, saw and read aright the hot flash of his eyes. Bill Dorn, about to speak, thought better of it; instead he filled his lungs slowly to a deep intake of air, then crossed the rude plank floor, bare save for its scattering of local Indian rugs, passing out of sight in an adjoining room. He returned almost immediately wearing his coat and broad-brimmed old black hat. Sheriff Barton MacArthur, not the man at most times to overlook details, certainly not today, marked the bulge under the coat at Bill Dorn’s hip.
“So that’s the answer, is it?” he demanded. As he stood up he gathered the papers from the table, snapped a rubber band about them and put them into his wallet.
Dorn glanced at the clock on its shelf over the fireplace.
“I’ve got me some riding to do, MacArthur,” he said casually. “The afternoon’s half gone and I’d better be on my way.”
“You said just now I’d treated you white, Bill Dorn,” said the sheriff. His own eyes narrowed and the lines about his mouth hardened. “You said you’d be apt to remember.” He shrugged heavily. “Buckling on your gun now and starting for a ride—well, it ain’t going to make things any easier for me, is it?”
“I guess we’ve about talked this thing out, Bart,” said Dorn. “I’m on my way.”
“Into Nacional?” demanded MacArthur. “Have it your way, you hot-headed fool. I’m riding with you.”
“No. I’m riding alone this time. Tomorrow, if you want me, or maybe tonight, I’ll take orders. I’ll never pull a gun on you, Sheriff, and you know it. But for a few hours I am my own boss.”
Under one of the big live oaks was a saddled horse, its reins grounded, its dark hide stained with travel. Bill Dorn passed it on his way to the corral, selected one of the half dozen animals there and led it into the barn to saddle up. When he rode out into the open, ducking his head through the doorway, the sheriff had already mounted the horse under the oak.
“You’d do well to take anyhow a day to think things over, Bill,” he called, and for the first time sounded angry.
“Thinking won’t mend matters now,” returned Dorn. “So long, Bart.”
He struck into the dusty road leading south, heading, as the sheriff had expected, to Nacional just over the Mexican border. Already the sun was dipping westward; the shadows ran out from the little hills making an early dusk in the barancas. It would be sundown by the time he reached the Mexican border town.
At first he rode with his head down, brooding, his hat drawn low, his somber eyes taking no stock of the country through which he rode. He did not glance back to see whether the sheriff followed; it would make scant difference what MacArthur chose to do. But presently he straightened in the saddle and swept the wide landscape with eyes which, still hard and bleak, yet were no longer unseeing.
“Wonder if I’ll ever come back to it?” he asked himself.
Here was a spot which he loved, one that had held him in rich contentment for the greater part of his life. The wide grassy valleys, the narrow, shady passes through the hills, the black, pine-clad slopes in the north and the silver-gray, sage-mantled reaches in the south and west—all this constituted an eternal, living, ever changing familiar scene which had come to mean very much in Bill Dorn’s life. He looked at it now as a man might regard a friend at time of a last handclasp. But it was for only an instant that his eyes softened; again they grew hard with the bitterness within him.
Only when two or three miles from the ranch house, as he rode up into the first low line of brushy hills, did he turn to look back. The sheriff was nowhere in sight; evidently he had gone on about his business, leaving Bill Dorn to his own affair, even to carrying it out in whatever way he chose. After all a sheriff’s work generally began only after the other fellow had said his say.
He struck into a dim trail affording a short cut through the hills and for the first time noticed a flock of buzzards wheeling low, dipping almost to the ground; the whoosh of their great wings was loud in his ears. He saw two or three of the ugly scavengers already on the ground; at his approach they eyed him balefully, took their few awkward hops and rose into the air with flapping wings, grown graceful only when sailing aloft, circling with their companions. They’d wait now with their desert-bred patience until the man moved on.
Any man would have tarried to discover what it was that had invited the red-headed nauseous birds down to their ghoulish feast. Despite the grim nature of Dorn’s errand, despite its obvious urgency, he forced a snorting, rebellious horse down into the brushy hollow where he expected to find a dead coyote, shot by some cowboy, or perha
ps an old pensioner of a horse which had stretched out here for the last time. Instead he saw through a thin screening of sage brush that it was a man’s body lying there.
Dorn withdrew a hundred yards or so to a small scrub oak, tethered his horse and returned on foot. The man was but recently dead; the cause of his death was written clear; his hat was off, lying within reach of outflung fingers, and in his forehead, dead center, was the bullet hole.
“It’s Jake Fanning,” muttered Dorn. “You’d almost say he killed himself; anyhow the gun was shoved right up close to his head.”
But he knew that Fanning never carried any weapon except his old double-barreled shotgun, and neither was this a shotgun wound nor was the weapon anywhere in evidence. Nor were Fanning’s horse and pack mule. Their scuffed tracks were at hand all right; they had brought him this far, had gone on, heading toward the road.
Bill Dorn squatted on his high heels and pondered. Jake Fanning, a man for whom he had never had any use, had been an ugly devil in life, and death had done nothing to beautify him. One of a special breed in the wide Southwest that harbors so many types, he was a desert rat, a shiftless prospector, a border town bum when in funds, a beggar or a thief when down to his last silver dollar. Maybe he deserved killing? Dorn was not concerned with that. The question was what to do with him now? Circling shadows still drifted over the ground when the black wings sailed low against the westering sun.
Bill Dorn, impatient to be on his way, regretted that he hadn’t let MacArthur accompany him; here was another job for an already overworked sheriff. In the end he shrugged heavily, got up and gathered the dead man into his arms. His horse was going to make a terrible fuss over it, but you couldn’t very well go off and leave even a dead Jake Fanning like this. Had there been a shovel, had there even been a blanket or tarpaulin—There was no house within miles, other than his own ranch house; so, when he had subdued his blue roan, desperate as the beast was with terror, he heaved his unlovely burden up across the saddle, roped him there and started back on foot.
“Funny thing,” he thought somberly. “Here I set out to find Michael Bundy; here dead Jake stops me, and Michael was the last man that ever grubstaked Jake. It’s as bad as if he’d hired a dead man to hold me up for a spell.”
He found no one at the ranch house, but looking off across the ranch to the north where the cursed oil derricks lifted their dirty skeletons against the clean backdrop of the mountains—derricks which had started all the trouble, which had ruined something very fine, which had smashed a sort of dream and had made mockery of an ideal of friendship—he saw two home-drifting cowboys and with his old sombrero waved them the command to step along. They came racing in, wondering what the boss wanted.
“What did yuh kill him for, Bill?” they wanted to know. “An’ why drag him home with yuh?”
They carried dead Jake Fanning into the house, stretching him out on the floor with an old sheet over him.
“Seen the sheriff, either of you boys?” Dorn asked. They shook their heads. “One of you come along with me then; I’ll show you where I played it low on the turkey buzzards today—”
“Me, I’d think yuh done ’em a favor,” grunted one of his hearers, young Bud Williams, who like most others had small liking for the late Jake Fanning.
“Later you can look up the sheriff, if I don’t run into him in Nacional, and can show him the spot; there’s a chance, though mighty small, he might do some tracking from there. Somebody after killing Jake led his livestock off.—By the way, boys, I guess you’re not working for me any longer.”
They stared incredulously; slowly both tanned faces reddened and the eyes bent so frowningly on him hardened. “Fired, huh? Jest like that! Why, damn your eyes—”
“Not exactly fired,” said Bill Dorn coolly. “I’m off for a ride and it looks as though I’d not be riding back here.”
“What about Mike Bundy? Where’s he at?”
“I’m not sure, but hope to see him real soon.”
“Say, Bill! Yuh ain’t sold out to that—”
“That what, Bud?”
Bud shrugged and spat as he led the way outside.
“Sold out to him, have yuh?”
“Not exactly. But in effect I’d say it’s the same thing.” He swung up into the saddle of the blue roan, more eager than ever to be on his way. Bud Williams, frowning, was kicking up dust with the toe of his boot. He exclaimed, “Here, what’s this?” and stooped for something lying close to the threshold. Dorn turned, wondering what it was that the cowboy peered at so intently. “Quartz rock, by thunder, all shot full o’ gold!” exclaimed Bud. “Say, where’d it come from?”
No one knew whence it came. Spilled from Jake Fanning’s coat pocket as they dragged him down from the saddle? Quien sabe?
“Tell the sheriff about that, too,” said Dorn. “He’s the man hired to do all the tall guesswork, times like this. Let’s go.”
He had lost upward of an hour because of Jake Fanning, and long before coming to the Mexican village, blossoming like a noxious flower on the international border line, he was riding in a violet twilight. Down into old Mexico the sun sank, flaring up a hot red before it melted into the low bank of clouds, then vanishing in a fanfare of colors. Thereafter came the purple night, far mountains swimming mistily and dissolving into the dark, the first big white stars flaring out across the white miles of desert between the southernmost confines of the erstwhile Dorn Ranch and the north rim of Mexico. A ridge of low-lying hills drew the line pretty fairly between a region of good stock land and one of aridity. Behind him was a grassy country; he rode now through vast sweeps given over to cactus and greasewood. Being a man not without imagination he wondered whether this sort of progress might be symbolic.
He crossed the border long before he came to the village, slipping from one country to another in a bit of rugged terrain which, some years before, when smuggling Chinese into the States went merrily on, had come to be called La Puerta de los Chinos. By now the sky was all purply-black velvet with brilliant stars strewn across it for glittering spangles, and the earth beneath was a silver-gray sea, lonely, untenanted save by himself, and without a beacon light anywhere. Then at last he rode up out of a hollow where desert willows grew higher than his head, and mounted a gentle rise of land; suddenly the few lights of that mad, bad little lost town of Nacional flared out at him, beckoning impudently through the big shady cottonwoods.
Now, Nacional drowsed in its shade through most days of the year, like a lean, hungry coyote keeping a low-lidded eye just enough open to be ready to leap and attack and rend at the proper moment; and though it stirred and awoke from its lethargy a little after sundown, still it went for the most part on padded feet, did its murdering with a quiet knife in a dark alley, and was outwardly inert until late enough for men to get drunk on as bad liquor as even a border town ever poured blisteringly down its ravening red throat. Tonight, however, early as it was, Bill Dorn heard the beast’s growl almost as soon as he saw its eyes. Something out of the ordinary was afoot. But then there was the old saying which, translated from the Spanish, avers: “In little Nacional it is the usual thing for the unusual to happen.”
But whatever it was that Nacional was bestirring itself about did not in any way interest Bill Dorn. His eyes and ears told him that more men were in town than was usual, and that they gave the impression of being in some sort of gala mood; his thoughts, however, did not bite into the fact. An earthquake or a conflagration, though forcing themselves on his notice, would not have concerned him. He was here looking for Michael Bundy. Nothing on earth mattered except the one consideration: He was going to find Bundy and kill him.
He left his horse at the stable, the first building at the end of the street, when one rode in, as he did, from the east. Then, walking with purposeful long strides, his boot heels echoing on the board sidewalks, he made his way between the two rows of squat adobe
houses, headed for the nerve center of this place—what they called the Plaza, a mere irregular widening in the road with a drinking fountain and a flagpole in the middle of it—looked out upon by the doors and windows and balconies of half a dozen two-storied adobe saloons and gambling hells. If Bundy were in town, Bill Dorn would find him somewhere along the Plaza. If Bundy were not here, some word might be had of him. So Dorn moved swiftly along, peering to right and left, seeing the men who thronged the street but making nothing of them save that so far none of them was Michael Bundy.
Before he had gone two squares, which is to say half the journey from Ramiro’s stable to the Plaza, a dozen men had accosted him. His responses were curt, indifferent; he scarcely noted the men themselves beyond realizing each time, “That’s not Bundy.” As he drew nearer the Plaza he began shouldering his way, and even then he did not so much as ask himself what it could be that had caused the crowd to gather. Here were not only the scant handful of denizens of Nacional which housed scarcely more than seven hundred swarthy, lower class Mexicans and Indians, but men from ranches and mines and other settlements on both sides of the dividing line. There swelled in front of him, in a compact mass, a churning eddy of sombreros, blue jeans, hairy chaparejos, serapes. He, taller than most, looked over their heads for another taller, bulkier man, a big blond, handsome, dynamic, roistering man whom the border for five hundred miles knew as Mike Bundy.
Bill Dorn began to lose some of the paradoxically calm quality of his murderous rage, which had been somehow like a queer cold flame steady within him. It irritated him that today of all days of the year so many men should clutter the street of Nacional and so make difficult the simple task of finding a wanted man here. When someone whom he knew caught his arm and said excitedly: “Say, Bill! What’s the inside dope? You’ve got it, ain’t you?” Dorn shoved him away so violently that he crashed into the thick of the crowd from which he had emerged. Other men, spotting him, followed him; they asked him questions which were like stinging flies plaguing his impatience. All these fellows seemed to take it for granted that he knew something that they would have given their ears to know. Some, seeking to be tactful, invited: “Hi, Bill! Come have a drink.” He muttered at them; he lifted his shoulders at them; he shook his head; and before he was done he damned them out of his way. He didn’t take the trouble to try to figure out what they had in their minds. At every step he hoped to come on Bundy.
The Sixth Western Novel Page 2