In the blistered mirror, Redding saw the girl’s flash of teeth as she made some bantering remark to Monte and wheeled artfully from under his pawing hand. An instant later Redding caught the subtle fragrance of perfume and felt the lightest of touches on his sleeve.
“You wish to dance with me, good-looking?”
Redding had his moment of wry self-appraisal, eyeing the reflection of his grubby beard, the deep pockets of fatigue under his eyes, the trail dust still making its thick veneer in the fibers of his Stetson.
He turned to meet the girl’s sparkling glance and professional smile. Instantly he saw her expression alter, her ripe ruby underlip sagging as she recoiled from him as if he had lifted a hand to strike her; and a single word was torn involuntarily from her.
“Matt!”
The bantering remark which Redding had been about to make died on his lips. He felt the scrape of her bracelets, as she withdrew her hand from his sleeve, and caught the blurred streak of the gold ring she wore.
“I—I reckon I will dance with you,” he said huskily, a voice somewhere in the recesses of his brain crying loudly, She mistook me for Matt—Matt must have worn a beard down in this country.
He forced a grin, meeting the girl’s eyes. “I’ll take a whole book of tickets, paloma mia.”
The girl started to turn back toward the dance-hall annex, and Redding stepped quickly to block her path. Pitching his voice low, he asked her, “You called me Matt. Why?”
This girl, whom the cowboy Monte had called Zedra, turned on a brassy smile intended to let a casual onlooker to this byplay know that this man was not molesting her with his attentions.
“It—it is nothing, señor. A mistake. You remind me—of a caballero I once knew. A man now dead. I must go now—”
He caught her wrist. “I’ve got to talk to you, señorita—”
A heavy fist grabbed Redding’s shirt and hauled him bodily around, and he caught the whisky-fouled breath of the cowboy Monte in his face.
“If Zedra Stiles don’t want to dance with yuh, stranger, ’at’s her privilege. You want to make something of it, step into the alley with ol’ Monte. Zedra’s m’ gal, savvy?”
Redding broke Monte’s grip on his shirt and turned, in time to see Zedra Stiles’s willowy back vanishing through the purple plush curtains of the dance hall.
He pushed his way through the ebb and flow of barroom traffic toward that door, his ears meeting a din of sound as the guitar orchestra struck up a lively fandango. He saw no trace of the girl he sought anywhere in this smoke-blued room. She was nowhere among the dancers.
A wench in a wine-red dress slithered up to Redding and linked an arm through his.
“Wanna dance, cowboy? Get your tickets from the cashier yonder. Dime a dance, twelve for a buck. I’m Flossie.”
Redding jerked his gaze away from the swirling couples on the floor to meet the invitation of this woman’s eyes.
“That girl Zedra, Zedra Stiles.”
“That mestiza?” Flossie pouted. “What’s she got that I—”
Redding thrust a gold coin into the girl’s palm. “I’ll match that if you bring Zedra out here, Flossie. Look in the dressing-rooms—wherever she might have gone. I’ll be waiting here.”
Flossie shrugged, appeared to be considering his proposition for a moment, and then was lost in the eddying semidarkness of the dance hall.
Ten interminable minutes dragged by before the woman in the red gown reappeared, extending a hand, rubbing thumb and forefinger together. Zedra Stiles was not with her.
“I said I’d pay you if you brought Zedra back with you.”
Flossie smirked. “She’s lit out, Mister, a-horseback. She’s gone. Vamoosed.”
“Where?”
Flossie shrugged again. “Quien sabe, as the spiks say. Her old man is a prospector out in the Navajadas somewhere. She spends a lot of time in the hills with him. This time she didn’t even bother to change her dress.”
Disappointment laid its impact on Redding’s facial muscles.
Before he could speak, Flossie went on in a conspiratorial whisper. “She left a note for you, Mister, if your moniker happens to be—you tell me first.”
He hesitated, then said, “Redding. Doug Redding.”
Flossie reached under the low neckline of her dress and drew out a tiny scrap of paper. “How much is it worth to you, cowboy?”
With a groan of exasperation, Redding fished another gold piece out of his pocket and received Flossie’s paper in exchange. Before he could unfold it the girl was gone, seeking a customer.
By the dim flare of a wall sconce, Redding looked at the message scrawled hastily on a bit of paper torn from a calendar sheet.
You will be Matt’s brother Doug. Matt told me about you. Do not try to find me. Matt is dead. I don’t want that to happen to you.
Redding made his way out of the Fandango, feeling the hot pound of blood in his temples.
Zedra had called him Matt at her first full glimpse of his face. Now she had fled Trailfork like a frightened quail.
Were it not for this hasty note by her hand, Doug Redding might have doubted the memory of the ring he had seen so fleetingly on her hand—a ring shaped in the design of a golden lizard, with a tiny seed pearl caught between its jaws.
CHAPTER NINE
Crowfoot Rider
Val Lennon was a sheriff aged ahead of his time by the responsibility of wearing a star in a border county well-known as a sinkhole of outlawry.
As he sat at his battered desk in the Trailfork jail office this morning, the bright sun pouring through the window at his back pointed up the premature white in his thinning hair, accentuated the deep wrinkles which seamed a weather-browned face and hands, revealed the resignation to his lot that had made him old and tired and stolidly wise.
Doug Redding’s golden lizard finger ring was in the cup of the sheriff’s palm. Studying it, the sheriff shook his head and looked up to meet the anxious stare of his bearded visitor.
“Can’t say as I’ve seen a duplicate of this ring, Redding. But you know how them fillies at the Fandango load themselves down with joolry. Zedra could have wore a sidewinder coiled around her neck without me paying any notice. I’m twenty years too old to notice a woman’s charms.”
Redding leaned back in his chair, taking back the ring and looping its rawhide thong once more around his neck.
“It’s a valid clue, Sheriff, even if I didn’t have the girl’s note to back it up. You saw from my brother’s letter that he aimed to marry some girl he’d given Ma’s ring to. Zedra Stiles is that girl—unless she stole or bought the ring from whoever Matt gave it to.”
Val Lennon shook his head. “Not Zedra. You needn’t be ashamed if your brother picked her out for branding, son. She dances at the Fandango, yes. But she don’t sleep with her customers like the others do.”
Redding started to shape a cigarette. “Who is she? And why should she have run away?”
Lennon laced his gnarled fingers over an up-drawn knee. “Reckon she had her reasons, son. As to who she is—I know she has a father back in the hills someplace. A prospector with a game lung. A gringo. Ferd Stiles. Was a medical doctor before he come West for his health. Her mother was pure Spanish. Long dead. Zedra’s got good blood in her, son.”
“Have you any idea how long she’ll be gone?”
“Hard to say. She takes off into the Navajadas ever so often with a wagonload of grub for her old man.”
“A wagon, you say?”
“Rented from O’Connor’s wagon yard here in town. Dancing is a side line with her. Gives her something to do. Attracts a better class of trade to the Fandango, her boss thinks.”
“Where is her father’s prospect?”
“Quien sabe? Somewhere in the Navajadas, a day’s ride off, mebbe more. Hills are full of old
mine workings, since the Spanish days.”
Redding tried another tack. “Do I bear any resemblance to anyone you have seen around town in the last year or two, Sheriff?”
Lennon grinned. “If you mean your brother, I couldn’t say. You admit yoreself you look like just another shaggy saddle bum.”
Redding said, “I want you to see me without this beard, but I doubt if that will tell you anything. Matt was ten years older than me, but we were often mistook for twins. Zedra saw some close resemblance, else she wouldn’t have known who I was. I got a hunch Matt let his whiskers grow, too.”
The sheriff reached for a fly swatter and flattened a bluebottle that had been annoying him. Lennon stared out of the window a moment, watching a lone man tool a buck-board into town, drawn by a pair of matched Morgans. The wagon driver swung in at the rack in front of the Wells Fargo stand opposite the jail and tied up.
“You were asking about Teague Darkin,” the sheriff said. “That’s him in front of the Express depot. Brought a buckboard down from Crowfoot to pick up Joyce Melrose, likely.”
Redding stepped quickly to the window for his first daylight look at the rider he had heard talking with the stable hand over in Paloverde two nights ago.
Joyce Melrose’s intended husband made a commanding figure as he angled across the side street toward the bank. He was wearing a brown town coat, full-skirted in the ranch-boss tradition, and his sixty-dollar Stetson, coffee-colored, rode his head at a jaunty jack-deuce angle.
The bulge of gun holsters showed under Darkin’s coat. He wore buckskin-foxed California pants tucked into shop-made Justin cow boots, giving him the over-all look of a prosperous ranch owner rather than a foreman.
As Joyce had told him the other night, Teague Darkin was a fiery redhead, with the ruddy complexion to match. He scaled around two hundred, without an ounce of excess fat, and Redding saw where a woman could find this swashbuckling man handsome.
“Darkin’s past forty,” Val Lennon volunteered, “and he’s been Major Melrose’s segundo since Joyce was a tomboy in pigtails. She showed up wearing his engagement ring just before the Major was bushwhacked. Natural enough that Darkin should fit in as Crowfoot’s new owner. The man knows cattle. He built up Crowfoot when the Major had it on the downhill grade. Professional soldiers got no business ranchin’.”
Darkin vanished into the vestibule of the bank. Redding turned slowly to face the sheriff.
“Joyce tells me you’ve written off the Major’s death as a closed case.”
Color stained the taut skin over the sheriffs cheekbones, although Redding had not intended his statement of fact to sound like an accusation.
“What else can I do? Darkin brought in the body, and he’s a citizen who carries weight in Basin County. Claimed he found it at aspen level due east of here—in territory known to be swarmin’ with Blaze Tondro’s gun hawks. Major Melrose has been fightin’ rustlers for thirty years. He should have known he would be bushwhack bait if he showed up alone in those hills.”
Redding said gently, “If you know where Tondro hangs out, if you know he hazes a good share of the Basin’s beef south of the border year in and year out, how come you haven’t smoked him out into the open?”
Lennon sighed patiently, in the manner of a man to whom this question was an oft-heard challenge. He gestured out the window toward the vista of terraced, canyon-corrugated Navajadas, a maze of light and shadow under the morning sun.
“Take another look at that country, boy. None of it surveyed as yet. A man could get lost forever if he wandered fifty yards off a trail. Old-time Apaches shunned it like the back yard of hell. You think I haven’t tried to locate Tondro’s den? You think I’d have been re-elected to this job if I hadn’t tried?”
Redding fired his cigarette and stared abstractly at the match in his fingers. “I grant it’s rough country,” he conceded. “Scouted the top side of it this summer with Blackwine’s mustangers. But Tondro’s hideout isn’t impossible to ferret out. Matt did it. I aim to do it.”
The sheriff grinned skeptically. “And where is your brother now? No, Redding. I doubt if a regiment of U. S cavalry could smoke Tondro out of cover, let alone a range dick workin’ solo. You ask my advice, Redding, I’d tell you to drop this assignment like a hot spud and tell your Colonel Regis to go to hell. It ain’t his skin he’s riskin’.”
This session with Trailfork’s sheriff was getting nowhere. Redding consulted the battered clock on Lennon’s desk, saw that he had less than an hour before Joyce Melrose’s stage was due from east of the mountains, and made his departure.
Thirty minutes in the barber’s chair and he emerged on the street looking like another man, the clean lines of a cleft chin and leathery cheeks exposed now, his flesh oddly bleached over the blue roots of his beard.
Leaving the barbershop, he met Sheriff Lennon coming down the street. The old lawman eyed him a moment, then shook his head. With a beard or without it, Lennon saw nothing to link Doug Redding up with any visit Matt might have made to this cow town.
At ten-thirty a feather of dust coming from the sectionline road from Cloudcap Pass resolved itself into a red-and-yellow Concord drawn by four Morgans. Nearing town the jehu whipped his team into a run and hit the main street in a great boil of dust, the stage lurching dramatically on its bullhide thorough braces.
Redding was standing in the shade of the Fandango Saloon porch as the Wells Fargo rig pulled up in front of the Express station immediately behind Teague Darkin’s wagon, the driver tossing his lines down to a stock tender and hauling mail sacks out of the boot to throw down to the waiting postmaster.
Teague Darkin emerged from the bank, as if he had been waiting there for the stage to arrive, and reached the coach in time to open the door for Joyce Melrose.
Alighting from the Concord, Joyce was wearing the gray bodice and traveling-skirt and the feathered hat Redding remembered from the girl’s visit to Alf Keaton’s store in Paloverde. She put her hands on Darkin’s shoulders and kissed the Crowfoot foreman on the cheek before he lifted her off the iron footstep.
Redding gave this scene his strictest attention. He heard Darkin say, “How’s Sage City?” and heard Joyce’s answer.
“Frightfully crowded. How can folks live all penned up that way? It’s good to be back, Teague.”
Darkin led the girl into the shade of the stage stand’s awning. This put the couple less than a dozen feet from the Fandango porch where Redding stood, idly rolling a cigarette; his eyes met her traveling glance and received no sign of recognition. He thought, Without the whiskers she might not know me, at that. Or else she’s a damned good actress.
Joyce’s next words told him it was the latter. “How about the roundup, Teague? Are we still shorthanded?”
Darkin appeared to remember something. He reached in his pocket and took out a square of pasteboard. “Forgot to post our notice,” he said. “There are plenty of drifters in town, I notice. Unless Crowfoot’s hoodoo rep has shied ’em off, we ought to round out the crew this morning.”
Darkin excused himself and headed past Doug Redding to mount the steps of the Fandango. A big bulletin board nailed to the side of this saloon evidently served as the cow town’s public forum; as Darkin approached the board he had to wait while a pot-bellied man in a Mormon hat and high-polished Hussar boots searched for extra thumbtacks and fixed a large official-looking poster to the collection of stud-horse bills, auction notices, and other bulletins there.
Redding heard Darkin and the Mormon-hatted man exchange greetings; then the latter went back into the barroom, and Darkin stuck his card to the board under a painted heading: Men Wanted.
A group of chap-clad cowhands got up from a bench farther along the porch and strolled up to read these latest signs. As Doug Redding joined them, turning his back as Darkin rejoined the girl at the stage stand, he heard a grizzled old range rider remark with a
wry humor, “Injun Reservation Agent callin’ for bids for fall beef again. Why tack up his notices here? That Limey outfit over to Wagonwheel will underbid the Basin outfits, nohow. Always does.”
Another rider grunted, “No Yankee would work for the pay them Britishers offer on Wagonwheel, is why.”
Peering over the shoulders of the gathering cowpunchers, Redding noted that the large poster which the Mormon-hatted man had just tacked up was an official government sign calling for bids for 1,000 head of prime steers to cover the fall beef issue at the Pedregosa Reservation, contract subject to delivery at the Agency holding pens on or before October 15th.
But Redding’s attention was centered on the cardboard square which Joyce Melrose’s ramrod had just posted.
COWHANDS WANTED
Apply Crowfoot Ranch, 15 miles north of Trailforlt, on Pass road. $30 a month and found. Fall beef gather. Riders experienced in brush-popping work preferred. No objection to Mexicans.
Teague Darkin Foreman
The garrulous oldster who had remarked on Wagonwheel’s certainty to garner the Indian contract had had his look at the Crowfoot advertisement by now. He drawled acidly at no one in particular, “Damned if I’d sign on with Darkin for a hundred a month and whisky six times a day.”
The oldster caught Redding’s curious eye on him.
“This Crowfoot outfit a Jonah, old-timer? I was thinkin’ of bracing this Darkin for a job.”
The oldster grunted. “Crowfoot’s range runs into the foothills where Blaze Tondro’s border hoppers draw most of their beef ever’ fall, stranger. Why pop a steer out of the brush and draw a slug where your suspenders cross before you’ve hazed the critter into the herd?”
Another waddy added, “It’s happened before, my friend. Shy clear o’ Crowfoot and grow up with the country.”
Redding thanked his informers and turned around to see Darkin removing Joyce’s carpetbag from the rear boot of the stage, the girl still standing under the Wells Fargo awning where her foreman had left her.
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