A heavy hand tried the doorknob. Marshal Chessman’s authoritative demand made the door tremble. “Who locked this door? Stand back, damn it—” In that moment Doug Redding made his decision. His law badge was clutched in his taut fist; he stepped across the room now and thrust the silver star deep in the Rickaree Kid’s hip pocket.
Chessman’s gun bellowed out in the hallway, and a shaft of lamplight penciled, in through the shattered wreckage of the mortise lock. Doug Redding faded through the balcony door and got it closed behind him just as the marshal’s beefy shoulder knocked the hall entry open.
Out on the balcony, Redding heard the sharp suction of breath which told him Chessman had spotted the dead man on the cot. It would be but a matter of seconds before the marshal deduced that the balcony was the only possible exit for whoever had locked the corridor door from the inside. The man who, evidence would irrevocably point, had shot the Rickaree Kid.
Redding took advantage of this interval to climb the outer balcony railing and shinny up the corner pillar to reach the edge of the shingled roof. A moment later he had hoisted himself onto the eaves and was crawling swiftly up the gentle slope of the roof.
Beneath him he heard pandemonium break as the town marshal and morbid onlookers gathered around the Rickaree Kid. Redding used that covering noise to gain the ridgepole.
An overcast drifting off the Navajadas toward the warm floor of the desert blotted out the stars, concealing Redding’s flattened body from the view of anyone on the main street. But to remain on this roof peak for any period of time would be fatal. Sooner or later Dorf Chessman would have men out on the balcony investigating.
Redding scuttled along the ridgepole until he reached the valley formed by the right-angle ell of the annex. Saloon lights shed a faint glow on the far angle of the roof facing the side street. This was enough to force Redding to cling to the ridge with his fingers and hunch his hips along the dark inner pitch of the annex roof.
It was his intention to reach the far end of the ell and somehow make his way to the ground. The sudden appearance of men crowding the balcony outside Room B caused Redding to freeze, knowing he was in the full view of those hunters.
“Whoever ’twas had to make his getaway through here.” The marshal was expounding his theories. “Dick, fetch a lantern and have a look at the roof. Harry Fox, you and Bob Hill check the yard below this balcony for sign. Hardly likely a man could have dropped from the railin’ to the ground without bustin’ a laig.”
Panting like a lizard against the steep slant of the annex roof, Doug Redding had his bad moment. A few minutes would see men with lanterns exploring both roof and patio. In any event the marshal, if he were any kind of a strategist, would fling an armed cordon around this building.
Directly below him was the flatter jut of another balcony’s roof. On the theory that Foothill House itself would be his safest sanctuary while this hunt was in full cry, Redding dug his spur shanks into the shingles to check his momentum and skidded jerkily down to the balcony roof.
Clinging to its edge, he peered over the side and was relieved to note that the room facing this balcony was dark. Those on either side had lamplight shining behind shaded windows.
Redding bellied over the lip of the eave and locked his legs around a weather-beaten pillar which supported the corner. Shadows were curd-thick under the projecting awning; he slid down the post and felt his boots make solid purchase on the balcony’s rail without raising an alarm from any of the men who still formed a group on the Room B balcony not fifty feet across the courtyard.
Redding lowered himself to the floor of the balcony, crawled to the door, and found the knob. This door was locked. He told himself this was standard procedure for an untenanted room. If it were occupied, this door would be open for ventilation on a sweltering night such as this.
Removing his Stetson, Redding balled a fist inside the felt crown and, holding the hat against a windowpane, smashed out a section of glass without undue noise. He paused a moment, ears keening the room inside that window. Hearing nothing to indicate it was occupied, he reached an arm through the aperture and unfastened the sash latch.
He ran up the window inch by inch, lest the rattle of pig-iron weights or the squeak of sash-cord pulleys reach hostile ears. When the window was open he paused a moment, one leg over the sill, as his nostrils caught a scent of a woman’s perfume coming from this room.
If this room had a tenant, she was either asleep or had gone out to investigate the excitement in the main building. The question of whether or not to enter the window was taken out of his hands a moment later when a man with a lantern came out on the balcony of Room B and put its glare over the courtyard below.
Forking the sill, Redding was straightening up to reach for the window to close it when he felt the hard thrust of a pistol barrel ream his ribs, and a whisper broke the unnatural stillness of the room.
“Don’t move or I’ll pull this trigger.”
CHAPTER SIX
Joyce Melrose’s Story
The command was backed by the dry metallic click of a gun hammer thumbed to full cock. Panic stormed through Redding, believing this was finish. Then a match blazed in his face, and he saw that the gun was held by a girl wearing a plum-colored quilted robe.
He gasped out, “Hold it, ma’am. I’m Doug Redding.”
His quick whisper checked the girl’s impulse to scream for help. As the match sputtered out in her fingers, Redding felt a swift wash of admiration for her self-control. Her whisper reached him above the clatter of feet passing to and fro in the corridor outside. “You—you know who I am?”
“Joyce Melrose?”
“Yes.”
“I saw you leaving Keaton’s store tonight.”
He felt the gun muzzle relax its pressure on his ribs as the girl from Crowfoot Ranch stepped back. He heard her fumbling in a matchbox on the chiffonier, and a moment later a second light bloomed in her left hand.
Her eyes were searching his vest, as if looking for a lawman’s star, eyes of a blue which reminded Redding of a glacial pond he had come across once in the high Absarokas. Her hair, shoulder-long, cascaded in chestnut waves against the shirred collar of her robe.
“Can you prove you’re an SPA man?”
Redding, keeping his arms well away from gunstocks, lifted the globe from a hobnail lamp on the dresser and waited until Joyce, using only her left hand, had lighted it. Then he drew the window blind.
“I don’t carry a star,” he said, “but I have a letter here.”
The girl’s right elbow was pressed against her hip to steady the cocked Bisley which still covered Redding. She remained wary as a doe with a stalker’s scent in its nostrils, alert as a coiled spring, as Redding reached carefully under his vest and drew out Colonel Regis’s envelope. He flipped open the letter and handed it to her.
He waited with hands again at hatbrim height while she scanned the message written on the official letterhead of the Territorial Stockmen’s Protective Association. It appeared to satisfy her, for she uncocked her gun and lowered it.
“All right, Mr. Redding,” she said. “Isn’t this a rather irregular way of contacting me?”
Redding grinned for the first time in several hours. In the lamp’s soft glow, it was hard to keep his eyes from following the lines her body made under the quilted fabric of the robe, the firm uplift of high breasts, the provocative curve of hip and waist.
Joyce was not far past twenty, he judged, and he knew an obscure sensation of regret when he noted the flash of the diamond on her left ring finger and remembered that this girl was engaged to marry the man named Darkin who had followed her across the mountain range tonight.
“I’m not accustomed to barging into young ladies’ boudoirs this way,” he admitted dryly, “but I was sort of crowded out of my own stall, across the court yonder. I came over the roof.”
“That shooting which has aroused the house—are you in trouble already, Mr. Redding?”
His shoulders stirred. “A peck of it. I pulled one of Blackwine’s mustangers out of a tight in a saloon tonight. Let him hide in my room. Somebody bushwhacked him—while I was out on my balcony getting a sniff of fresh air.” Joyce Melrose slumped down on a bed which, Redding noted, she had not as yet turned down.
“Whoever fired the shot thought he was shooting me,” Redding continued. “He called my name just before he pulled trigger.”
The girl regarded him with a horrified intensity. “Because—you are a range detective?”
“Probably. It’s a hazard for men in my line.”
“Then I’m indirectly responsible—”
“Not at all. To throw the marshal off the scent, though, I planted my badge on the dead man. Which accounts for my not being able to show it to you now, Miss Melrose.”
He saw a troubled intelligence deepen in her eyes. “You don’t think I betrayed the fact I was meeting you in Paloverde to anyone, do you, Mr. Redding?”
“Did you?”
“No. I can swear to that. I told no one, no one whatsoever, that I was coming here. There—there are things I want to talk to you about, about my father’s murder, before you reach the Basin, before you even agree to accept the case.”
Redding plumbed his vest pocket for tobacco and papers. “You wear a diamond,” he said casually. “Surely your fiancé knew you were coming to Paloverde?”
She lowered her eyes at the directness of his question. “No, not even he. Anyway, Teague Darkin is on the other side of the mountains. He is Crowfoot’s foreman. I didn’t tell him I’d decided to call on the SPA for help. He’s just like the Trailfork sheriff—passing off Dad’s killing as just another of Blaze Tondro’s bushwhackings. I—I’m not so sure.”
Hearing this girl mention the name of Blaze Tondro reminded Redding sharply of his own personal tragedy, his own gun-smoke crusade. Cementing his smoke with a swipe of his tongue and lighting up over the lamp chimney, he forced himself back to another line of thought.
“This Teague Darkin—he didn’t come to Paloverde with you?”
“No. I told you that calling on the Protective was my idea alone. I have no way of knowing but what Tondro has spies planted in my own bunkhouse, the way riders come and go, go and come. It’s hard to hire men to work for a hoodoo ranch like mine, Mr. Redding. So I didn’t let Teague know about this deal of ours.”
Redding thought, But Darkin’s in town tonight—Aloud he said, “Does this man you aim to marry—does he have black hair with a white stripe down the center?”
A faint glint of humor touched the girl’s mouth. “What a gruesome picture! No. Teague is a redhead. Why?”
“Does this man with the streak in his pelt fit any Basin rider you know of?”
She shook her head after a moment’s reflection. “Why do you ask?”
He flicked cigarette ash into a saucer of fly poison on the chiffonier, taking his time about answering that one.
“It was Mr. Skunk Stripe who shot the man in Room B, ma’am.”
She came to her feet with the surprise of it. “Are you hinting that my fiancé would want you killed, Mr. Redding?”
He scowled thoughtfully. “No-o. But if the word got around that you were meeting a range detective secretly in Paloverde, someone might have followed your stage tonight, found out I was registered here at Foothill House—and tried to make certain I wouldn’t show up in the Basin to investigate your father’s murder.”
Outside the girl’s room, the corridor was no longer noisy with the tramp and thud of feet. Stepping to the window, Redding tipped back the shade and had a long look at the activity going on in Room-B, its window blazing across the court. Two men were up on the roof, exploring with lanterns. Another group swarmed in the yard below, looking for sign.
Redding took advantage of this diversion to debate whether he should tell this girl that Teague Darkin was in town tonight. But until he knew something more of the ramifications over on Crowfoot, he decided against it. As the stable hostler had theorized, perhaps the Crowfoot ramrod, getting wind of Joyce’s visit here, had trailed her over the Pass for her own protection.
“You’ll work on this case, won’t you, Mr. Redding?” The girl’s query pulled him back to reality.
He turned to face her. “I’m already working on it, Miss Melrose. I have reasons of my own for wanting to track down Tondro. If he murdered your father—”
She broke in. “I’m not sure—I can’t be sure Dad was killed by the Tondro bunch, Mr. Redding. That’s the main thing I wanted to talk over with you. It’s common knowledge that Tondro hides out in the Navajadas, where the country is too rough for the law to penetrate.”
Redding remained silent, remembering the letter from his brother now reposing in his shirt pocket; a letter confirming the fact that Tondro’s den was in the Navajada malpais east of Lavarim Basin.
“You see,” the girl went on, “Dad wanted to sell our beef to the Pedregosa Indian Reservation this fall. That’s on the northwest side of the Basin, across the mountains. Year after year, the Wagonwheel Ranch wins the bid on that government beef issue. Wagonwheel is owned by an English cattle syndicate with its home office overseas. Dad—and the other Basin ranchers—thought it was high time a Territorial outfit got the Reservation business.”
Redding scowled, wondering what all this had to do with the murder of Crowfoot’s owner. “A simple matter of underbidding Wagonwheel,” he suggested.
“So Dad thought,” Joyce agreed. “Dad left Crowfoot on his way to interview the purchasing agent over at the Reservation. That is northwest of the Basin—remember that carefully. When a week passed and Dad didn’t return, I telegraphed the Agency.”
“And your father hadn’t arrived there?”
A storm of emotion kept the girl silent for a moment. When she had recovered, she continued in a taut whisper. “No. I was frantic. I called my crew off the range, had them start a search. Three days later Teague Darkin brought my father in. A bullet in his chest. Teague saw buzzards wheeling over a ridge—”
“Your foreman found your father?”
“Yes. Lying off the trail which crosses the east range toward Paloverde, Mr. Redding. Fifty miles from the Indian Reservation road, in the opposite direction. His horse had been shot, too.”
Redding picked this information over in his head, as he would do many times in the days ahead. “In other words,” he said, “it would seem your father didn’t head for the Indian Reservation at all, but turned southeast into Blaze Tondro’s country instead.”
She nodded, looking up at him with a little girl’s soulful entreaty in her eyes. “So it would seem, Mr. Redding—but it doesn’t make sense. It isn’t a thing Dad would do, without telling me beforehand. I told Teague as much, but he laughed at me for imagining things. He said it was obviously a Tondro ambush. That—that’s when I decided to call on the Association for an investigation.”
Redding pinched out his cigarette, knowing it was time to terminate this discussion. Joyce Melrose, sensing his restlessness, went on quickly. “Teague thinks I went to Sage City to shop. He will meet my stage at Trailfork day after tomorrow to take me back to the ranch. You understand I’m not being intentionally disloyal to my future husband when I ask you not to—”
Redding reached for his Stetson. “Sure,” he cut in. “Suppose I show up at Crowfoot in a few days. Is there any chance of hiring on as a cowhand?”
She answered eagerly, “Yes, there is. Our beef gather is coming up. Teague and I will be picking up extra riders in Trailfork, as we always do at this season of the year. If you’re there, I’ll make certain you’re put on Crowfoot’s payroll.”
He gripped her hand. “I’ll see you in Trailfork da
y after tomorrow, then,” he said, and stepped to the door. “Right now, I’d best be on my way yonderward, ma’am, before the marshal takes a notion to make a room-to-room hunt of this hotel.”
Looking out into the hallway, he found it deserted. A flight of stairs led down to the dining-room under the annex, and Redding headed that way, not once looking back at Joyce Melrose’s room.
He crossed the darkened dining-room and let himself out on the Agave Street side, fully expecting to be challenged by the guards Marshal Chessman should have posted around the hotel by now. He was surprised and relieved to find none on duty.
Cutting through the night toward Colburn’s barn, Redding reached it to find the game-legged hostler nowhere about. Doubtlessly the man had been drawn uptown by tonight’s excitement at the Crossed Sabers Saloon.
Ten minutes later Redding was fording the Rio Coyotero downstream from the bridge, on the off-chance that the marshal might have posted guards there to check outgoing riders.
Ahead of him loomed the dark, mysterious notch of Cloudcap Pass, where the stage road looped over the Navajadas on its way to Trailfork, the next county seat west.
Avoiding that road, Redding put his big roan along a game trail on the south flank of the Pass, in the direction of Lavarim Basin and Tondro’s domain.
CHAPTER SEVEN
To Identify a Corpse
Marshall Dorf Chessman dragged a blanket over the dead man on the cot and chewed thoughtfully at his cigar. He had already formed his conclusions as to how this man had died, and he took a certain detached satisfaction in the memory that this was the salty kid who had insulted his dignity over at the stockyards at sundown; the same Blackwiner who had caused the ruckus at the Crossed Sabers a little later.
Chessman was alone in Room B at the moment. A burly Army sergeant had been pressed into duty to keep the morbid ones out of the way. The door opened now and Laury Church, the night clerk, entered with the Foothill House register under his arm.
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