Then he drew her to him with an eager gesture and had her locked in his arms. He bent his head and kissed her, and her mouth was firm for a moment. And then the firmness went out of her lips under the urgency of his kiss, and her two arms found their way around his back. For one brief moment he felt the clinging softness of her, and then it was over.
She was out of his arms, staring at him as though she had never seen him before. Then she turned and ran out of the room without a backward glance, and he stood and listened to the tap of her heels as she ran up the stairway.
Woodbine was shaken, and he wanted to get outside into the darkness alone so that he could examine himself and see what had happened to him. He picked his hat up off the table and strode out the front door and into the moonlight, heading for his horse.
Bob caught up with him before he had got the reins untied from the rail. The old foreman tactfully ignored the unsettling event, and talked of other matters.
“How’d you make out with Enos?” he asked.
“No good! He’s going to sit tight in a neutral seat, and you can’t blame him, old as he is. Looks like I’m going to have to ride just about a hundred percent alone in this. I even tackled Ambler.”
“Ambler should have come in with you,” Bob said. “He’s got bottomland grass he’d ought to want to protect.”
“That’s not his main idea,” Woodbine answered. Then he told Burnham about his conversation with the little-known man from across the creek. “So,” he said when he had finished, “it looks like we’ve got a neighbor that might be interesting.”
“You don’t say,” Old Bob said thoughtfully. Then he filled his pipe and lit it while he was deep in thought. “You know, that might tie in with something Virginia said at supper. I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time because I had my mind on this other business. Virginia’s aunt told her that Hugh Ambler was well known over at Deerlick. She said that he has a ranch near there, and he’s understood there to have another big ranch over here. They say he drives a lot of his stock from this ranch over to his other ranch at Deer-lick to fatten off before shipping time. Way I get it, those folks allow this is his big ranch, and the Deerlick place just a kind of subsidiary. Kinda funny, ain’t it?”
Woodbine turned this puzzling information over in his mind and tried to fit it into the picture he had just got of Ambler. When he had it in place he said, “He hasn’t got enough stock of his own here to stock any kind of a feeder lot in Deerlick. And besides, his stock usually shows about the usual increase every round-up time, which it sure couldn’t do if he was driving any quantity of it out. So—where’s he getting all this stock he’s throwing into his Deerlick place?”
“Only one thing he could be doing,” Bob said. “Branding sleepers. Plenty of men have got their start that way, and it would be a cinch here in this wooded creek bottom and back in the wooded hills. A man could comb these woods every day with a running iron and stand little chance of getting caught in the act of putting it on a calf and chowsing the calf over to his own side of the creek and throwing it in with his own stuff.”
“Yeah,” Woodbine agreed, “and as long as he had sense enough not to get so greedy that our herds didn’t show up too small an increase, and as long as he had another ranch clear on the other side of the mountains to drive them to, nobody would ever suspect him.”
“That must be the answer to him, then,” Bob reckoned. “But it’s only a suspicion. All you got to actually go on is him flying off the handle and exposing the kind of critter he is.”
“We’ve got enough to base our suspicions on,” Woodbine said. “If he’s stocking another ranch with cattle that he claims he’s raised in this little shirt-tail spread of his here, then we know he’s lying. And we know he’s not buying the stuff here. He’s getting it from somebody, and our stuff is right under his nose. So, now we know where he stands.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I can’t do anything until I can nail him down in something crooked. And I haven’t got time to work on that now. I’ve got my hands full.”
“You have that, all right. Know just about where you stand?”
“Exactly. I stand by myself, with only five riding hands that I can depend on, and ten hired gun-hands that’ll stick as long as it suits ’em and I’ve got the money to pay them. And against me I’ve got Noble Fry with about twenty gun-hands, and all the ranchers that want to live off of the Woodbine and Sterling grass. Also Moody Shay who’s playing along with Fry for reasons I don’t know, but who also is a backshooter and has a personal grudge against me for what he suspects I know about him. Also ready to pounce on me is Hugh Ambler if he can see any way to cash in on my trouble.”
“And Virginia?” the old man asked oddly. “You figured her against you before.”
“She doesn’t count. She’s just an obstinate kid that’s got the wrong idea.”
“She might have been a kid before, but she quit being that about ten minutes ago,” the old foreman observed sagely.
“What do you mean?” Woodbine asked, and felt a confusion within him even as he spoke.
“Don’t be a fool, Jim.” The old man tapped out his pipe on the heel of his boot. “So,” he said, changing the subject abruptly. “What are you going to do now? Wait for the pack to get together and bear down on you?”
“No, I can’t get help, so I’m doing it alone. And I’m starting now—with Moody Shay.”
“Why Moody? He’s just a little fish.”
“You think so? I think he’s a kind of keystone. If I can pry him loose I believe I can break up the combination against me so I can handle the bunch separately.”
“You got anything on him?”
Jim Woodbine pondered this a moment, then came to a decision. “Did it ever occur to you that Virginia’s dad was murdered?”
Old Bob was quiet a moment, then he said, “Why, Jim, how can you figger that? We was all deer hunting together. You and me and Noble Fry was in sight of each other when we heard the shot, and old Ab wasn’t five hundred yards from us when his gun went off.”
“We thought his gun went off. When we got to him he was lying by the barbed wire fence and unconscious, and his gun had a fired shell in it. Any set-up like that would just naturally make anybody think he’d accidentally shot himself trying to get through a fence with a loaded gun, because so many people get shot with their own guns that way.”
“Naturally, but why should we think any different about Ab’s case? I never even imagined you suspected Noble of killing him.”
“I don’t suspect Noble of firing the shot. I was practically in sight of Noble when it happened, and Noble couldn’t have shot him. I had my suspicions quite a while, but I couldn’t figger out any motive for Ab being murdered. Now I can, and I’m going to do something about it. I think Moody Shay shot Ab Sterling!”
“How do you figger that?”
“Remember we took Ab back to camp and sent for a doctor. I helped the doctor cut the bullet out. Ab was carrying a Winchester rifle. But the bullet that the doctor cut out of him wasn’t a Winchester steel-jacketed bullet such as he was using. It was a big lead slug that must have come out of an old Krag. It couldn’t have been fired from Ab’s gun, so somebody else must have fired it. And I have seen Moody Shay hunting deer with an old Krag. So have you!”
Old Bob Burnham was stunned into silence a moment, then he muttered as though to himself. “And I remember Moody saying in town that he’d been across the state for a week when the accident happened. He had probably been hiding out waiting for Fry to get his trap set. Then he shot Ab, slipped up and ejected a live shell from Ab’s gun and replaced it with a fired one. He probably did it just as Ab started to crawl through the fence, and made it look like it was just another hunting accident. But why?”
“That, I’m not sure. But remember it was Noble Fry’s idea for us to all go
up there deer hunting, when we could have got deer a lot closer home?”
“Jim,” Bob Burnham said tensely. “If we’d saved that bullet for proof, I’d go with you right now to face Moody Shay with it.”
Jim Woodbine pulled the bullet out of his pocket and held it in his hand in the moonlight. “Here it is. I’ve saved that bullet for a long time, Bob. To-night I’m going to match it with Moody Shay’s old rifle. Are you going with me?”
“Wait till I saddle up and get my gun,” the old man said, and turned his steps towards the corral. “You done dragged me into this in spite of what Virginia says.”
CHAPTER 6
The Bullet with a Name On It
Moody Shay’s cabin was up in the hills to the west of Sterling’s, and Woodbine and Burnham approached it on foot after they had tied their horses a safe distance from the clearing in which it sat.
“You say Moody wasn’t with Fry at the meeting?” Woodbine repeated.
“No. He could be here, or he could be somewhere else.”
“If he’s not here, I’m going to take a look for that rifle of his anyway. It might not be right—”
“Who cares about that under these circumstances?” Bob snorted. “That hombre ain’t got no rights, to my way of thinking. I never heard of him making an honest dollar since he’s been in these parts.”
When they reached the clearing, Shay’s cabin was an unlighted dark blob under a big oak tree. “He might be there asleep, and he might not,” Woodbine said. “You take the back door and I’ll take the front.”
Their precautions were unnecessary, for the men entered the two doors without hearing sounds of life. Woodbine kept his gun at ready and struck a match with his left hand.
“Not here,” Burnham said.
Woodbine lit the oil lamp on the table, and they closed the door and began a search for the man’s deer rifle. They found the old weapon lying flat on top of a ceiling beam, and Woodbine took possession of it. They took the weapon out with them and rode a mile in the direction of town before they stopped to examine it.
The gun had four shells in the chamber—and the lead bullets in the shells matched the lead bullet which had killed Virginia Sterling’s father, and which Woodbine had carried with him ever since the old man’s death, waiting for the break which would help him prove that his old friend had been murdered.
“That does it,” old Bob swore. “The dirty skunk. If I’d known this before I’d have come up here and killed him myself. Wonder where we could find him, you reckon?”
“He’s not with Fry. He’s the kind of hombre that can smell out excitement like a buzzard smells carrion, and there’s likely to be excitement in town to-night. People are going to be milling around guessing what’s coming next.”
“Let’s go, then,” the old man snapped, slapping his horse with his reins. “I just want to get one good look at that hombre in front of my sights for about two seconds.”
“Hold up, Bob,” Woodbine said, keeping his pacing animal alongside the old man. “That would spoil the whole business.”
“How come? The quicker he’s dead the better it is for every one.”
“No! Why do you reckon he killed Ab and set it up to look like an accident?”
“I don’t know. But what difference does it make why he done it? He done it, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but personally I can’t think of a reason in the world for him doing it. I’ve got to find out from him why he killed Ab, and I can’t find that out from a dead man.”
“Why’ve you got to find that out?”
“Because if he didn’t have a reason of his own for killing Ab, then he must have done the job for somebody who did have a reason. Doesn’t that make sense?”
Bob rode in silence turning this over in his mind for some while before he answered. Then he said, “That must be the answer. He connects up with somebody else. But how’re you going to make him tell you what you want to know? You can’t hurt him with less than a sledge hammer on his skull, or a bullet in his heart. How are you going to make him talk?”
“I don’t know,” Woodbine admitted. “I wish I did, but I don’t. All I know is that I’ve got to do it, and so he’s got to stay alive.”
“Son,” Bob said, “you bite off the biggest chews of any young feller I ever knew. One of ’em is going to choke you one of these days.”
“I’m choking already,” Woodbine said. “I haven’t got much more to lose.”
They speculated on possible connections between the elements which had opposed Woodbine until at last they cantered into the darkened town and pulled up at the Elite Livery and turned their animals over to Race Greer. Greer looked at them queerly as Woodbine cradled Shay’s old rifle in his arm and gave orders. “Don’t unsaddle ’em. Just water them and take the bits out of their mouths.”
Greer twitched his nose nervously and said, “All right, Jim.” The man was practically bursting with tension, but he remembered how Woodbine had cut him short when he had started meddling in the morning, and he managed to hold his tongue.
Bob asked, “Who’s in town, Race?”
The question was like puncturing a balloon, and the wind started whistling out. “Fry’s men came in earlier and are down at the Parisian, and some of them new men o’ Jim’s is at the Rattlesnake. Ain’t nothing happened yet.”
Woodbine’s face cracked into a cold smile. “Expecting something to happen, Race?”
“With all them guns lined up agin each other?” Greer answered, surprised. “How could it keep from it?”
“That’s simple, Race. If those men are paid gun-hands like you say, then they’re not going to start throwing lead at each other just for the fun of it on their own time, are they? They’d most likely be satisfied to draw their wages and not have to pop any shells at all, wouldn’t they? How would you feel if you were in their boots?”
“I never looked at it that way,” Greer admitted. “Still and all, folks is kinda worried.”
As they walked up the darkened street, Bob said, “Everybody in this town is wound up tighter’n the spring of a dollar watch. The sound of a Fourth of July firecracker going off would bounce half the town out of its beds right this minute.”
The street was dark except for a few dimmed lights in three or four frame houses, and the lighted windows and batwing doors of the two saloons. They passed Merle Roberson’s store and Woodbine stopped. There was a dim light in the office at the rear, and Merle Roberson was working over some papers.
Woodbine reached into his pocket and brought out the lead bullet. “You take this and that rifle of Shay’s, and go in and give it to Merle for safe keeping. Tell him everything I’ve told you up to now.”
“How come?” Bob asked suspiciously.
“I’m going down to the Parisian and see Shay.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not. There might be some fireworks.”
“That’s why I was going. A man could get hurt in a roomful of flying bullets.”
“That’s why you’re not going. We both might get hurt, and then who would there be left to see that Moody got what’s coming to him? Merle knows what I suspected, and if he’s got the evidence, he could get a bunch of decent people together and handle Moody, even if we got shot up. Go on.”
“That ain’t right,” Bob argued.
“Do you remember that Virginia told you to keep out of this?” Woodbine asked. “Who’d look after her? And besides, this is personal between me and Moody. I’m depending on you to get that evidence into Merle’s hands safely. See you later.”
Woodbine turned abruptly and walked on down towards the Parisian Bar, leaving the old man grumbling to himself on the sidewalk. Finally Bob turned and went into Roberson’s.
Woodbine did not let his steps lag, but walked directly down to the Parisian and pushed inward thro
ugh the swing doors. He stepped inside and slid his back to the wall while his eyes adjusted to the light.
The Parisian was a long, low-ceilinged place filled with smoke and the smell of stale beer. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and the tables and chairs were stained dark and in bad repair. The bartender was leaning over the bar talking to a pair of Fry’s gunnies. A few townsmen were scattered about at the bar and tables, and a dozen or more of Fry’s men were among them and at the poker tables, all armed. One of the gunnies strolled to the door and disappeared through it.
Woodbine got his eyesight cleared at about the time everybody in the saloon recognized him. He walked to the bar. The buzz in the room died so completely that only the ticking of the big clock and the tap of Woodbine’s boot-heels was heard. He stopped at the bar, and his gaze went around the room. He spotted one of his new gun-hands sitting at a table drinking with a couple of Fry’s men, and he spoke to the man.
“What are you doing here, Shoat?” he asked.
The lean man with one drooping eye grinned back at Woodbine. “Just run into a couple of old friends of mine. Why?”
“You’re not working for me any more. Ride out in the morning and get your warbag and your pay.”
The man merely grinned back at him, and Woodbine turned to the bar. “I’m looking for Moody Shay.”
“He ain’t here.” The bartender sucked a gold tooth and grinned.
“Where is he?”
“Did you try the Rattlesnake?” There was a hidden taunt in the answer, as though the bartender were gloating over the idea of Moody Shay invading the bar that was Woodbine territory. “He said he was going to drop in there for a few drinks.”
Woodbine looked around and saw a few smirking faces, and he kept his eyes on them until the smirks faded. Then he turned his back to them and went out and walked down to the Rattlesnake and went in.
The Rattlesnake was a larger and much cleaner place, and like the Parisian, it had its quota of townsmen curious enough to be out on a night like this, and a sprinkling of his own paid gun-hands. Woodbine did not like the idea of gun-hands, but he had no other recourse in the face of Fry’s army.
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