Winter Range

by Alan Lemay

  Bishop's voice stopped as sharply as if he had been struck, and he stood staring past Kentucky Jones.

  Spinning on his heel to follow Bishop's eyes, Kentucky saw that the foreman was staring at a forlorn dun horse which stood low-headed before the bars of one of the corrals. An arm's length of broken rein dangled from one side of its bridle, trailing on the ground; and it stood spreadlegged to avoid the chafe of a saddle that was no longer on its back, but under its belly.

  "So Zack is dead," said Lee Bishop slowly, at last.

  "His horse?"

  "Yes."

  THE SMOKY YEARS

  ALAN LEMAY

  CHAPTER ONE

  ENTUCKY JONES, independent livestock trader, plunger in cattle, whirled his light roadster into the main street of the little cow town of Waterman. The car skidded in the white ruts; he recovered it, and picked himself a parking place between a cowhorse and a Ford. The same wet snow that had fallen intermittently for three days was plastered on his windshield like mashed potatoes; but he jerked his broad black hat over one eye and peered through the clear segment his windshield wiper had made.

  Waterman was very full of people, for a Tuesday afternoon. Generally at this time of year the Wolf Bench cowmen were only to be found far scattered among the white-faces that perpetually lost themselves in the overpowering raggednesses of the rimrock, or haying winter-weakened cows in the long pole corrals. Today, though, either side of the street was lined with cars for three blocks; and between the automobiles stood saddled horses, dejected in the wet downpress of the snow.

  Wolf Bench was not home range to Kentucky Jones; but six months in the rimrock had acquainted him with most of its people. And now from where he sat he was able to recognize many a pony that had brought its rider a heavy eighteen, twenty-odd, even thirty miles through the raw smother. He swore under his breath. Those weary, frost-backed horses meant defiance of certain of the back country roads which the snow had made impassable to cars. To get here he had himself driven all night; but the half-understood circumstance which had brought him took on magnitude, and new dark aspects, at this evidence that the whole rimrock gave it a like importance.

  He turned up his sheepskin collar and stepped out into the snow, a tall, leanly lazy figure, his ordinarily humorous face relaxed in an unaccustomed gravity. It was a rocky face, made irregular by the uneven line of a nose that had been broken; but no one in the rimrock had ever seen it so austerely somber as it was now, as he turned into the restaurant known to all cowboys as the Greasy Spoon.

  As he entered, however, his face lightened somewhat. He kissed the girl at the counter absentmindedly, and helped himself to a wedge of pie. "Where's the inquest going to be?" he asked.

  "They're having it in the hall over Kerry's Store. It started nearly half an hour ago. They"

  "Good Lord!" He hurriedly pushed the pie wedge into the girl's hands. "Save this." He took to the street again at the trot.

  Kerry's Store itself was appropriately closed, but, by the huddled group which clustered under the wooden awning, he knew that the hall above was already full to overflowing. Here, upstairs, inquest was being held over the body of John Mason.

  It was hard to believe that John Mason was dead, his name had so long represented unassailable strength in the Wolf Bench rimrock. That he was head of the Waterman bank had been an index but not the key to his significance. He had been a cowman once; and up to the very end he had thought as a cowman, never losing touch with the farthest corners of the Wolf Bench range. He had been in the saddle on one of his long circuits of the range in the hour that he died. His uncommon understanding of both cows and money had made him more than the kingpin of Wolf Bench finance; almost he was the economic structure itself.

  Through the hard times which low beef prices had brought to Wolf Bench, Mason had managed to carry along many a weakened outfit where a nervous banker, or one less a cattleman, would have abandoned all hope. But with Mason dead the bank swayed precariously, teetering on the edge of a smash that might carry down with it half the outfits of the Bench. To many it seemed that only another Mason could avert disaster and there was no other.

  This was the man whose inquest jammed the little hall above Kerry's Store until the overflow filled the stairway, and left a milling bunch of the less aggressive in the street.

  Some of those at the foot of the stair spoke to Kentucky Jones as he came up.

  "Inquest got any place?" he asked.

  "Been running about twenty minutes," someone told him. "They're pushing it along pretty fast- judging by what word works down the stairs. Campo Ragland's been on already. He didn't know anything new."

  "Jean Ragland testified yet?"

  "Uh huh. She just said that her and her father was away."

  "Thanks." Kentucky moved upward, exchanging monosyllables here and there as he wormed his way toward the room above. Waterman's hall was not a big one; the air was hot and stuffy here, and alive with that smothered unrest that goes with many people close together, no matter how still they sit. Ordinarily you could ride the rim for days without meeting a dozen men; and now there was a sense of impact, of smothering weight, in the sight of this place so packed, bulging with people.

  He forced his way through the thick press, and finally stood looking over the heads of row on row of seated men to where a little cleared space afforded slight insulation for the dignity of the court. At a plain table sat Sheriff Floyd Hopper, looking bedeviled; at the end of the table sat the coroner, who was also the sheriffs brother. But equally conspicuous to the eye of Kentucky Jones were the faces of some of those who stood in a packed half circle around that table and behind it. Here was Clive Pierson, the banker who must step into Mason's shoes; his face was an unwholesome grey, and a muscle in the side of his face kept twitching, for in the last three days he had hardly slept. Near him was Bob Elliot, who had gambled the future of his cow outfit upon the backing which Mason would have given him, but which he could no longer expect.

  And here was Ted Baylor of the Running M, and the owners of the Lazy Deuce, and the Circle Five, and the J Z-men who could cut a thousand beef steers from their herds at a week's notice, but might easily be set back to their beginnings if Mason's death should cause the bank to close its doors; and many others. Their faces were inexpressive, as they listened to this hash-over of the thing that had happened to them; but their vigilant concern conveyed itself to Kentucky Jones, making him listen intently like the rest.

  Lee Bishop, the blocky, almost burly foreman of the Bar Hook, was in the witness chair, very red in the face from public speaking and the heat. Bishop was only telling what he knew about a happening which everyone had already accepted as an accident, irremediable, over with; but his nervous phrases fell upon the thick silence of complete attention.

  "I was going out to the pump house, carrying a couple of pails of hot water from the kitchen," he was saying. "I aimed to thaw out the pump. Then I seen this hump in the snow-thought maybe a calf had drifted in and fell down. I went over and looked; and it was him."

  "It was who?" said the sheriff cantankerously.

  "Old Ironsides-I mean, John Mason."

  "How long did you think he had been dead?"

  "He wasn't lying there around one o'clock, when we left the home ranch. And there wasn't any snow under him. It begun snowing around two o'clock, out there."

  "Then you figure Mason had this accident between one and two o'clock?"

  "That ain't what I said."

  "What did you say?"

  "I only said there wasn't no snow under him."

  Sheriff Floyd Hopper exhibited annoyance. "Let's not quibble over words! What we want is to get done, here."

  "Well," Lee Bishop went on with an unnecessary air of stubbornness, "I turne
d him over, and I saw that he'd been shot. His gun was in his hand-that long-barreled .45 he always carried to take a pop at a coyote with, if he should see a coyote."

  "Is this the gun?" said the sheriff's brother, turning toward a cluttered window ledge at one side. A deputy handed the coroner the required weapon. There was a stir all over the room as people instinctively craned their necks to see the trivial steel mechanism which, by a fluke, had perhaps kicked away the under-pinnings of Wolf Bench cattle.

  Bishop identified the weapon. "Well," he went on, "I sent up a long yell but nobody answered; and I took out and run for the house..."

  Kentucky Jones had been searching all the room for a sight of Jean Ragland, and now he was surprised to discover her so near the focus of interest that he had missed her by searching too far away. She was sitting beside her father, the big stoopshouldered owner of the Bar Hook. The two sat almost under the window ledge where a deputy kept his eye upon a muddled collection of exhibits; and the many who stood about her had partly hidden her.

  Her hands were folded in her lap, and she sat with her eyes down, not looking at the crowd; but he noticed instantly how pale she seemed, so that her hair looked darker than usual against her face. If it had been possible for him to fail to recognize her he would have failed now, she looked so much smaller and more frail than he last remembered her. Had she been a stranger his glance might have passed her unnoticing, so little of her usual vividness was apparent. Then a deputy shifted his position, blocking her profile from Kentucky's view.

  The sheriff was bombarding Lee Bishop with questions of little point. "Is that cut-off trail between the 88 and the Bar Hook often used?"

  "Almighty little!" It was the first emphasis Bishop had used.

  "Hooray!" said a thick voice in the back of the room; and there was a momentary scuffling sound as some of the cowboys subdued a drunken companion.

  Disregarding this disturbance, Kentucky's eyes sought Jean Ragland again. Suddenly he perceived that she had leaned back so that she could peer between the standing deputies and was looking directly at him. Her eyes, which he knew were blue, now appeared startlingly dark to him in the pale oval of her face, and he found the unmistakable selectivity of her gaze mildly surprising, so that he shifted upon his feet. He smiled at her; but her face did not change.

  Then suddenly he was aware that she had signaled to him, secretly beckoned him to draw nearer. It had been the faintest narrowing of an eye, the slightest inclination of her head; yet he knew absolutely, as she again averted her face, that a signal had been conveyed.

  Deeply puzzled, he began to work his way along the side of the hall. The sheriff, he noticed, was perspiringly pushing ahead with his questions, evidently very conscious of his far-gathered audience. The sheriffs brother, the coroner, was nudging him, but he was barging ahead, as Kentucky Jones pres ently reached a point not more than three yards from Jean Ragland. He was still separated from her by the thicker press of men which had been forced back from around the coroner's table; but here he stuck.

  He was trying to catch Jean Ragland's eye as the sound of scuffling and contention broke forth again in the back of the room. The sheriff glared, faltered, and stopped. A tall deputy left Jean Ragland's side to go pushing back through the crowd.

  Watching the disturbance at the back, Kentucky Jones did not see that Jean Ragland had left her chair until she stumbled almost against him. Her handkerchief was at her mouth, and she seemed even paler than before, as if turned suddenly faint by the stifle of the close air. Campo Ragland, her father, sprang up and was beside her in a stride, supporting her in his arms. For a moment the press of the crowd was too much and they could not get through. Her shoulder pressed hard against Kentucky, but although he spoke to her by name she did not appear to hear.

  Then unexpectedly, in the smother of the crowd, her fingers closed upon his in a quick, hard grip. She had pressed a small heavy object into his hand.

  Turning it over in the pocket of his coat, Kentucky Jones discovered with a queer slow stir of the blood that the thing she had left in his hand could be nothing else but a used bullet. He knew at once that this was the slug which had killed a man.

  Campo Ragland said through his teeth, "Will you let us out, or not?" and the standing cattlemen flattened against the wall to let Campo and his daughter by, Kentucky Jones lost sight of Jean as the crowd closed behind them.

  But for Kentucky Jones the atmosphere of that packed room had changed. He was no longer simply a cattleman interested in a death which threatened to shift the economics of a range. The thing that had pulled him over four hundred miles of snow-clogged ruts in the last eighteen hours suddenly took on a new aspect, as acutely personal and definitely sinister as if he had himself been accused of murdering the man who was dead.

  And now the inevitable sequel broke. A deputy who had stood by the cluttered ledge where the exhibits were sung out sharply, interrupting the sheriff.

  "Wait a minute! Hold everything! There's something missing here!"

  In the momentary silence a lower voice said, "Maybe it's fell on the floor." There was a shifting of feet and chairs as a couple of the deputies stooped to hunt about among boots and chair legs.

  "What is it?" the coroner demanded. "What's gone?"

  "This here bullet's gone, that we had on the window sill with the other things!"

  "Bullet? What bullet? You mean"

  "The slug that killed Mason!"

  There was a sudden moment of struck silence all over the crowded room. This was followed immediately by a rising buzz, as almost every man of all the great number in that room turned to speak lowtoned to his neighbor. The sound swelled stronger and stronger, becoming a drone like that of swarming bees-the irrepressible and somehow menacing sound of a crowd which has instantly comprehended the significance of what has passed.

  Watching the stir about the coroner's table, Kentucky saw that Bob Elliot, owner of the 88, was looking at him curiously. Kentucky grinned faintly at Elliot as he worked a hole in the seam of his pocket with a thumbnail, and pressed the bullet through, so that it fell deep into the lining of his coat.

  Over the buzz of confusion he heard the coroner almost shouting, "You sure it was there?"

  "It's been here all the time, but just now I reached back, and"

  The sheriff jumped to his feet, and his chair clattered over backward. His voice rose in an angry bellow. "Lock that door," he ordered. "By God, I'm not going to have it!" An abrupt silence fell at the impact of his voice. "Some of you fellows are no better than children. I suppose you'd steal the shirt off your own back if you figured it was a souvenir! I"

  "Wait a minute, Floyd." The coroner caught the sheriff's arm, and pulled him down to whisper in his ear; and there followed an inaudible but apparently a heated discussion. It seemed to take effect upon the sheriffs plans, for he sat down abruptly, his square face flushed with exasperation, "All right, let it go, for now. But somebody hasn't heard the last of this! ...Go ahead and give 'em cause of death."

  Kentucky Jones drew a deep breath. He had come up into this crowded room to attend a routine hearing, calculated to confirm the death of a man who, however important to these people, had only died foolishly, accidentally, by his own gun. But now the inquest as such had lost all meaning, turning into a sham, an apparently unconscious fraud.

  A sudden incomprehensible anger overshadowed reason as he wondered if Campo Ragland knew that the bullet which killed Mason was not what it seemed and had prompted his daughter to get it out of the sheriff's possession. If her theft of this scrap of evidence was not in behalf of her father, then who? If Jean Ragland was being used by her father or anyone else as a cat's-paw in a dangerous situation, he meant to find it out. Once more he worked his way sidewise through the crowd along the side of the room, this time toward the exit.

  AMPO RAGLAND had taken his daughter to Waterman's rambling one-story hotel, and had returned to the street again by the time Kentucky Jones, after a fifteen-minute s
earch through Waterman, again located the boss of the Bar Hook.

  Kentucky strolled up, greeting Ragland with the slow singularly infectious grin that served him as a passport through hard times and slack, wherever he went. That grin had friends from the Pecos to the Madres. Campo Ragland, grim as was his mood, half smiled in return as they shook hands.

  "Seems like people didn't hardly realize how important Mason was around here, until now he's dead," Kentucky began. "Of course, he naturally had enemies."

  "You can't run a bank right," said Ragland lifelessly, "without raising up an enemy here and there." The boss of the Bar Hook was not quite as tall as Kentucky Jones, perhaps because of the over-accentuated bow of his legs; but his lean, stooped shoulders were very broad. His eyes were blue, like his daughter's but deep-set in sun-squinted lines. And though the general aspect of his face was benign, as if forty-odd years of wind-driven dust and snow had rounded its harsh corners and edges, it was a face which could set grimly and stubbornly, turning into a fighting face.

  "Curious," said Kentucky Jones, watching Ragland closely, "that everybody was so ready to accept that he went to work and shot himself-accidentally."

  "What else could it have been but accidentally?" Ragland said impatiently.

  "Nothing, I guess," said Kentucky; "but on pretty near any other range somebody would most likely have tried to prove there was a shenanigan."

  For a moment Campo Ragland's eyes turned upon Kentucky. Watching him intently, Kentucky Jones could not, however, see that the man's face changed. "I suppose so," said Ragland, without expression; and he half turned, as if he would walk on.

  Kentucky Jones wavered an instant. His cautious prodding had failed; but its failure was more challenging than a revealing answer. He plunged.