The Sixth Western Novel

by Jackson Gregory

  “Hoi’ on a shake,” called Curly O’Connor. “Bill ain’t short nary a teamster. I’m ridin’ with you, Bud.”

  The two lounged back for a farewell drink of buttermilk. Rounding the house, like one man, they hitched up their belts, cocked their over-sized sombreros and did their damnedest to catch a glimpse through an open window of the girl about whom already the whole countryside was talking.

  “She’s a peacherino,” proclaimed Bud Williams as they rode away, Liberty-bound.

  “I’d even marry her, if that’s the only way to make her happy,” said Curly O’Connor.

  Out in the yard Bill Dorn settled down on his heels again and with the other heel-squatters talked for a solid hour; Lorna began to wonder if all their legs hadn’t gone to sleep. Then Dorn brought his friends into the house, to introduce them to her. Again she was wearing that crisp, cool little blue frock; again he wondered where in thunder she had found it. Cap’n Jinks could have told him what a resourceful girl could do with needle and thread, a big pair of scissors and an old blue dress of Mrs. Kent’s.

  “These boys,” he explained, “are throwing in with us. They’re friends of mine and have been for years; they’re friends of yours from now on. Stock Morgan and Johnnie Sharp and Clem Middleton are chipping in with some money, and money is what we’re going to need a lot of! Duke Jones and Ken Fairchild are short of cash because what they used to have is jingling in Mike Bundy’s pockets now, along with their acres and cows. Just the same, one way or another, they’re our crowd. Do you think Josefa can feed the hungry bunch of us?”

  “I’ll see!” said Lorna and fled the room.

  In the kitchen Lorna said: “Josefa! There are a million men in there and they’re as hungry as a pack of wolves! What can we feed them?”

  A complacent Indian smile spread itself across Josefa’s face like melted butter over a baked potato. “Vamos a ver, Señorita,” she said and went her slowly moving, competent way.

  The men ate and looked at Lorna when they safely could; a good long look at her was better than dessert. Then they said good night and went away. Bill Dorn remained.

  “They’re aces,” he told her, “every damn one of them, and you can bank on them until the cows come home. That’s our nucleus; that’s our hard, tight little wedge that’s going to split Mike Bundy wide open. Believe it if you can or don’t believe it, now that they’re your pardners every man of them would go to hell roaring for you.”

  “What are we going to do now?” she asked, meaning to keep both her tingling impatient little feet on the solid earth. It was so easy to swing heavenward on daydreams! But what were they going to do to keep something in the pot for Josefa to cook?

  “First,” said Dorn, “we’re going to guard you as though you were a jewel of great price.” And Lorna thought, “He might have used the same idea and made it quite nice!” Her thoughts, however, and his were far apart. He continued soberly: “You happen to be the one joker in Bundy’s deck. If he could wipe you out, if he could snatch you out of here and throw you back across the border to stand trial down there for killing One Eye, he’d laugh up his sleeve. As long as you keep on being Lorna Kent and Nellie Kent’s heiress he is hog-tied. So I’ve got those two boys working out here, Hopper and Kenyon; they’re washouts doing ranch work but they could shoot the eye out of a needle a mile away in the dark, and they’re your watch dogs.”

  She shivered. She couldn’t help it. But then she asked, quite matter of fact. “And next?”

  “The ball opens at daylight. Our teams start hauling from Liberty to Blue Smokes. Good old Cap Jinks will have them off at the crack of the whip. You’ll see that they’re taken care of here; Josefa and the two new hands will be on the job. I’m off to gather in an extra string of horses; we’re going to need ’em.”

  “The teamsters will need a place to eat and rest and maybe sleep,” said Lorna. “There’s no room for all our men in the house here. We’ll have to arrange for that.”

  “You do it, won’t you?” he demanded, thinking of other things. “Suppose you figure that out; it will keep you from getting bored!”

  She stretched out her hand, palm up.

  “I’m going to require funds, Mr. Blind Bull Bill!”

  Out of his pocket, exactly like a stage magician extracting a white rabbit from a silk hat, he pulled a fat roll of bank notes. He began peeling them off; he handed her an amazing sum.

  “Also you’ve got to keep books for us,” he said. “I’m’ no hand at that. For both our sakes I hope you are.”

  He got up and went away. Lorna looked at what she held, then apprehensively at the unshuttered window. Five hundred dollars! She had never had five hundred dollars in her possession at one time in all her life. She jumped up and ran to the kitchen; it was there that she had left her pencil and paper. She came back to make her plans—on the red and white squared tablecloth! Visions grew up from it like mushrooms in a fatly fertile soil.

  * * * *

  These were times in which Bill Dorn counted himself living luxuriously if he slept six hours a night. Next door to cradled in the saddle, he was in luck for the hard-riding endurance it gave him. He changed horses when he could, but kept the same old faithful saddle, the same legs. How many miles he had covered in the last ten days he didn’t know.

  He rode that night to Rancho Villaga; that, he thought, was his one best bet when horse-buying bent, and the Villagas were only fifteen miles away. Also they would put him up over night, and a man needed a good bed once in a while. And then there was Diana.

  White moonlight was flooding the whitewashed walls of the old home. Don Francisco was sitting still and meditative over a glowing cigar in the patio—the placita, they called it. He was a little man no bigger than your thumb, or anyhow he gave you that impression. But all there was of him, some five feet six inches perhaps, counting his tall-heeled boots, was fine courtesy and hospitality. He jumped up and embraced Don Bill and patted him on the back.

  Then the two sat in the moonlit stillness of the placita, a place of enchantment, and talked.

  The Hacienda Villaga, along with Don Francisco in his hand-carved boots and snowy hair and imperial and stiff starched white shirt, looked like a million dollars. Yet it remained that Don Francisco’s pockets were empty, and so was Don Francisco’s patrician stomach. Just now he had been brooding miserably. During the late afternoon his eyes had fixed themselves on a butter-fat young steer wearing the Villaga brand—and he dared not call out to one of his many vaqueros to have the thing butchered! For it, along with the last Villaga pig and crowing rooster, was mortgaged to Michael Bundy.

  Bill Dorn had to laugh, but smothered his laughter. It was funny; man, it was funny! Yet pathetic, too. And it was far worse than just pathetic. For Don Francisco was saying complainingly, though he patted his compadre’s arm while he said it: “And it was you, amigo mio, who told me to go ahead. You who said to me that with Señor Bundy I could not lose anything, that instead I would refill the Villaga empty pockets! And now, what shall I do? Must I go out and eat the grasshopper like an Indian?”

  “I want to buy a string of horses,” said Dorn.

  Old Villaga waved his white hands.

  “I would sell you my soul for fifty centavos, pero, Señor, it and everything else is under chattel mortgage to Don Michael! I cannot even eat chicken for dinner without peeping out of my eyes to see if he is looking at me eat his chicken!”

  Diana came in like something out of a dream. She had dressed as though she knew someone was coming—and how rarely did visitors come here to the far away rancho!

  Ay, que lastima! All in black, lacy, low cut over her lovely bosom, a Spanish shawl over her smooth white shoulders with the satiny gleam of pearls through it, a high Spanish comb in that jet black yet Burgundy-tinted hair of hers, the amazingly luxuriant hair of New Mexico, she came sweeping in, startling in her beauty like the n
ight. And she was all smiles, all melting graciousness. As was habit with her she put out both hands, not gauntleted this time, bare white hands heavy with rings—heirlooms, these, too sacred to sell though one starved—and squeezed them into Dorn’s.

  “Don Beel! You are welcome, like a nice cool rain on a sultry hot summer day.” She whirled, polished high red heels flashing, full skirt billowing, to face her father. “Papa-cito! You may now have your cigar in perfect peace. I am going to take Don Beel away with me under the fig trees and flirt ever so madly with him.”

  “Bless you, my children,” sighed Don Francisco, and returned his fuzzy thoughts to his own particular olla podrida of scrambled finances and gastronomical problems.

  “Look here, Diana,” said Don Bill on the green bench under the figs. “I want to know the truth. What’s come over you lately? You’re different; you’re always acting a part. What you said the other night down at Palm Ranch—was that the truth? When you said that the girl there was not Lorna Kent but a fake?”

  “You think she is very, very nice, no?” demanded Señorita Villaga.

  “Never mind what I think. You answer me.”

  While he sat she pirouetted before him. She seemed to enjoy making her full skirts billow. She stooped forward suddenly, pretending that she was going to bite him. She laughed gaily at him, and he saw that her big midnight eyes were terribly serious.

  “You tell me about Don Michael!” She was in dead earnest and no longer made pretenses. “He is a conqueror; among men he is a king; he is a rajah among women, that I know. But—shall I trust him, Don Beel?”

  “You poor little devil,” grunted Don Bill. “You are in love with him.”

  Her eyes blazed at him; then they melted into tears. She dabbed furiously with her lacy handkerchief. Then she laughed and snapped her fingers and again twirled in front of him like a ballerina as she became very gay. Too gay in fact. She was very young, not much over nineteen, and very emotional and of course very foolish.

  “You won’t tell me?” he asked. “The truth? About Lorna Kent.”

  “Uf! You are a man, and a man does not understand what a girl is, a girl like me. You men are the toads and we girls, the fine ones, are the butterflies. Yet we drop down to the earth, and we flutter our pretty wings and we walk in the dust in front of you. And you, with your eyes of a toad—Oh, I would like to be nice and dead!”

  That was an answer for any man, toad or not. It made Bill Dorn tremendously uncomfortable because he didn’t know what to do about it, what to say. Her lashes, longer than they had any right to be, had tears on them like dew-drops. Of course she was in love with Mike Bundy. Equally of course Bundy was using her as he used everything else that came his way, treading her down in his forward march.

  “Diana,” said Dorn soberly, “we all know now, since Bundy has had to come out in the open a bit, that he has been too slick for the lot of us. You ought to know best whether he’d in the least help you making a mess of your life. If somehow he has persuaded you to tell a string of tall stories about that girl down at the Kent Ranch, saying she isn’t Lorna Kent when maybe you don’t know a thing about it one way or the other—” Both heard crunching footsteps and made out someone coming through the garden toward them.

  “It’s that old sheriff always nosing around,” exclaimed Diana petulantly. “Before he gets here I’ll tell you just one little thing, Don Beel. That girl down there! Puf! You go back to her and you say this: ‘Me, I know who you are! You are not a Kent at all; you are Lorna Brown, that’s what!’ And then you see what color her face gets, Señor!”

  Diana with one of her Spanish shrugs turned to greet the oncoming figure.

  “Buenas tardes, Señor” she called out. “Here we are. Don Beel and I looking at the moon. It’s a nice moon tonight and Don Beel wants to make love to me.”

  “Hello, Diana,” said the sheriff. “Hello, Bill. What are you doing up this way?”

  “Thought I might buy a few horses from Don Francisco. What have you lost around here?”

  “Lost? Lots of time; a good bit of sleep, too.” MacArthur eased himself down to the green bench, sitting beside Dorn while Diana elected to remain standing before them in the moonlight. “Things moving along all right, Bill?”

  “As far as I know. What’s on your mind.”

  “Nothing. Same as usual.” He started rolling one of his cigarettes which took so long in the making. “So you’re out to break Bundy, are you, Bill? He’s got a lot of money, so they say. Where’s yours?”

  “I’m out to get back a little if I can and to see if things maybe won’t work out so that my friends get back some of theirs.”

  “Never can tell till you try,” agreed MacArthur. He seemed to meditate. Suddenly he observed, “You’re looking fine tonight, Diana.”

  She laughed at him. “How can you tell? In the night you can’t see me.”

  “There’s a moon. Anyhow a man would see you in the dark like a candle. Say, Bill!”

  “I knew there was something on your mind,” grunted Dorn.

  “Thrown your luck in, horns, hoof and hide, with the Palm Ranch outfit, haven’t you? Things are kind of funny down around there, ain’t they?”

  “Fire ahead, amigo! You didn’t use to be so tongue-tied.”

  “I got to wondering what old lady Kent died of so sudden like. There were only two people on the ranch with her at the time, the half breed that did the chores and a ranch hand. They said that she fell off the porch head first when she was leaning far out to water a pet flower and the railing broke; that they didn’t see her fall but found her there dead. They buried her. Then they went away.”

  “Well? I guess they didn’t go too far to tell you about it, did they?”

  “No,” said MacArthur, “not too far. Only they couldn’t tell me much. She generally had an Indian woman to do the housework, but she was always hiring and firing the inside help. So there were only the two outside boys and both were off hauling wood when it happened. So they didn’t know anything except what they found when they came back to the ranch late that afternoon. But somehow—”

  Dorn looked at him sharply. The sheriff’s hat was pulled forward; a black shadow hid most of his face.

  “This here is between you and me and Diana,” MacArthur continued slowly. “Last night late I did a mite of grave opening, lawful about it of course. I wanted a look at the body and, after I talked to him, so did the coroner. Seems like we didn’t get around to it fast enough. There didn’t happen to be a body there to look at.”

  “Good Lord!” gasped Bill Dorn, and Diana Villaga murmured a shocked, “Virgin Santisima!”

  “It’s murder then?” demanded Dorn.

  “How should I know? I only tell you things are sort of funny at that ranch. Am I right? Here’s something else. There’s that girl that says she’s Lorna Kent. Well, down at the Parker House Hotel in Liberty, looking scared to death and saying she’s scared to come out to the ranch because of things she has heard, is another girl, and she says she’s Lorna Kent. Makes a man take notice, don’t it?”

  Bill Dorn, sadly perplexed, didn’t have a word to say. Diana exclaimed triumphantly: “You see! I told you! This one is Lorna Brown, a nasty little impostor!” As for the sheriff he smoked reflectively, but watched both Dorn and Diana like a cat trying to keep an eye on two mice at the same time.

  CHAPTER XI

  So Sudden Bill Dorn did not stay under the Villaga roof that night after all. He grew restless; he wanted to get off by himself and think things over; he felt also an urge to move along to the new camp on Silver Creek. Despite the warm invitation from Don Francisco and the romantic supplications of Diana, who whispered, “Ooh, but I am so lonely!” he got promptly away. But not alone, since the sheriff decided to ride with him.

  The first things Dorn and the Sheriff saw when they rode quietly into the sleeping ravine—too
small and narrow a place to be termed properly a valley—were the four high-piled freight wagons which Dorn knew were his own. His, and that girl’s, the one back there at Palm Ranch. They must have arrived here long after dark; two of them were canvas-covered, the other two stood out stark with their raw lumber, material for sheds, shacks, houses even.

  But the human eye, hungry and predatory always and never satisfied with its first feeding, keeps on prowling in search of what it may pounce upon. Thus both men were quick to see what looked like a little white ghostly mist. Now there was no sense in a mist along Silver Creek tonight, a warm, balmy evening as dry as you please. It curled upward from the rear wagon. And just then they saw a bright, hot flare sprouting up under the front wagon.

  “Fire, dammit!” yelled Dorn. “They’re firing the wagons!”

  Two or three or four dark forms broke away from the wagon train and started running. One couldn’t be sure how many they were, couldn’t quite be sure of anything about them except that, surprised at their incendiarism, they ran headlong toward the camp of sleeping men.

  The sheriff lifted his voice, roaring out at the top of his lungs a command to stop running or he’d shoot. For answer the runners ran all the livelier, dodging through the small pines, and both Dorn and the sheriff unlimbered after them, emptying their guns. A few wild shots came back in answer, venomous enough but doing no damage whatever.

  There followed an instant of silence, then the entire camp came alive like a swarm of bees into whose hive a rock has been hurled. Men in various degrees of undress and stupefaction began yelling questions. When they saw the flames spurting up from all four wagons, they came running. A hundred willing hands were lent before any questions got answered; what with all this assistance, Dorn and MacArthur had no very great trouble extinguishing the fires before any real harm was done. Whole they were still hard at their task the two canvas covers were thrown back and two blinking-eyed, sleep-groggy teamsters came tumbling out of their cozy beds. They were Curly O’Connor and Bud Williams, freight line teamsters since yesterday. When they came thoroughly awake, as they did when their bootless feet struck ground, a more irate pair of mule skinners couldn’t have been found in a good long walk up and down the world.