Winter Range

by Alan Lemay

  "Just before Zack's horse come in," Kentucky said, "You were starting to tell me what was holding Campo back. There's the kingpin of the situation, Lee if you're right that you know what it is."

  Lee Bishop's face took on the stubborn look of a man who thinks he will be disbelieved. "This may sound funny to you, Kentucky, but I've known these people here a long time a sight longer than you have, and I know that I'm dead right."

  Kentucky waited while Bishop studied the ash of his cigarette. "Kentucky," said Lee slowly, "it's Jean Ragland that's holding her father back."

  Kentucky considered this. "What makes you think so, Lee?"

  "There isn't anybody in the world has any influence with him except her-not even her mother. The rest of us come and go and he pays us no more mind than horses. But Jean she can fan him just as handy as she fans a bronc If she makes up her mind there will be no war with Elliot, there'll be no war, and Campo will watch Elliot work his ruination, and never smoke a gun."

  Kentucky Jones thought he saw the chance to probe a side trail. "Maybe," he said, "that's why he had that big picture of her hanging there in the main room."

  "What big picture?"

  "Don't you remember?" said Kentucky. "The picture that's always hung on the wall of the main room, right opposite the kitchen door-about so high and so wide, with the frame made out of black wood, and onions at the corners?" He was describing the position and appearance of the empty frame which had so startled Jean the night before.

  "Onions at the corners?"

  "Well, some kind of carved-on vegetable."

  "That wasn't no picture of Jean."

  "Then whose picture was it?"

  "I don't know. Just some guy on a horse."

  "What kind of looking horse?"

  "Just a horse. What the hell do you care?"

  "Nothing. It's kind of interesting to see who remembers what."

  "Here we got a couple of deaths," said Lee Bishop disgustedly, "and a range fight that's about to make the Bar Hook a thing of the past, and our old man quits on us, and we're backed up against the wall-and all you can find to think about is some guy had his picture took on a horse!"

  "All right," said Kentucky. He picked up the other thread. "Anybody can see Jean has a heavy drag with her father-and maybe is the only one that has. But that's slim backing, Lee, for what you said. What was your other reason" he watched Bishop steadily "for thinking that Jean is keeping her father from making a stand against Elliot?"

  "Other reason?"

  "Didn't you have another reason that you haven't given me, Lee?"

  Lee Bishop hesitated for a long time. "No," he said at last.

  "Lee," said Kentucky, "if Jean doesn't want her father to scrap it out with Elliot, what do you suppose her reason is?"

  "How do I know what her reason is?" said Lee Bishop explosively. "How does any man know what any woman's reason is? Maybe the trouble we've had here already has made her sick of guns, and she's afraid that if we stand our ground there'll be more of these here empty saddles come in under the bellies of horses."

  "Have you talked to her, Lee?"

  Lee grunted a negative, and hesitated again, groping for words. "Look here!" he burst out at last. "Look here! You've got to talk to her!"

  "Me?"

  "There's nobody around here she'll pay any attention to but you. Some way she's got a blind on the old man's eyes and she's keeping him snubbed down helpless. Kentucky, I tell you," Lee Bishop declared savagely, "if we make our stand against Elliot now, it may be we can turn him, and get out of it cheap. But the farther this thing goes the harder it will be for him to draw back. If this thing goes too for there will be no way but to fight it at a deadlock until one or the other is smashed. Most likely both will be smashed. You've got to talk to that girl!"

  "What makes you think I can do anything with her, Lee?"

  Lee Bishop groped for some way to express a thing that he sensed, but could not prove. "She follows you with her eyes," he said at last. "Whatever you do, if you aren't looking, she follows you with her eyes."

  "Horsefeathers!" said Kentucky.

  "Maybe; but you got to do what I say anyway," said Bishop stubbornly. "What chance we got here, the way things stand now? We're not going to have enough range left to keep our brand on a jackrabbit. You got to talk to that girl!"

  "You think," said Kentucky, "there's anything about the cow situation I can tell her that she don't know?"

  "You got to get her to pull out of here until this thing is over. You got to get her to go out on the coast and join her Ma, or go for a visit in Flagstaff or Cheyenne, or some place don't make no difference where she goes. But you got to get her to get out of here and leave this thing to her old man to work out in his own way."

  "I see a swell chance to get popular, with that," said Kentucky. "`Excuse me, ma'am, kindly ma'am, would you just as leave get the hell out of the state?'"

  "You'll talk to her?"

  "No," said Kentucky. "Do you think I'm a damn fool?"

  "Yes," said Bishop.

  E LINGERED at the corrals, however, after Lee Bishop had ridden off to have a look at the condition of the Waterman road; and presently, as he had more than half expected, Jean Ragland came out to look at a lamed pony.

  "I don't know but what we ought to fire this," she said, running a hand over the pony's swollen stifle.

  "I'll rub some of them chili beans on it, that I fixed for breakfast," he told her. "And maybe I'll bind on a pad -a couple of them left over pancakes of mine will be just the ticket"

  Jean straightened, dropping pretense. "I want to ask you about a couple of things," she said.

  "I was kind of looking for you to," he admitted.

  Jean Ragland said, "You have the thing I gave you?"

  He regarded her gravely. "That bullet?" He told her what he had done with it. "I don't know that it did any good to get hold of it, though."

  She stared at him a moment "Do you think do you think-" She stopped.

  "I don't know for sure," he said; "but I'll gamble you that the sheriff has the other bullet."

  The back of her gloved fingers went to her mouth, but her face was calm, and she was not afraid to meet his eyes, "What other bullet?"

  "It's possible I'm wrong. I'm not in the confidence of the sheriff nor anybody else. But I tell you for what it's worth; I'll bet my last cent that that bullet has a twin; and that the sheriff has it."

  "But what makes you think there were two?"

  "Well he was cussing because the bullet had got away from him; and he said that taking it wouldn't help anybody, because even if they needed it they had the-and there he stopped. So I asked him if he meant they had another slug."

  "And what did he say?"

  "It kind of made him mad, and we had a little dispute. But finally he said that they had taken a cast of the bullet. Now, I took that last to be a lie."

  Jean's face was troubled. "Why?" she asked sharply.

  "Sometimes," he said, "you ride by a bunch of brush that looks like there ought to be a deer bedded down in it; but you look at that brush and somehow you know that there's no deer there."

  "I see."

  "The sheriff offered me a job," he said. He told her now about what Hopper had wanted him to do concerning the Bar Hook man who had not been where he had said he was when Mason died.

  She nodded promptly. "Yes, I know who he means."

  "I gathered that several people know about it; but not I."

  "It doesn't amount to anything," she said quickly. "It was just a rider here that quarter-blood Indian, Joe St. Marie. I'm certain he doesn't know anything about it."

  Kentucky Jones now knew St. Marie as one of the two cowboys who had come in during the night, a blunt-faced, competent rider, not so dark of skin that his Indian blood would have been conspicuous had not his flair for personal decoration in cut steel and silver work betrayed him.

  "St. Marie is the best bronc rider we've ever had here," Jean said. "But he isn't
always dependable. If he wasn't working where he was sent the day Mason died, that isn't the first time he's goldbricked his job."

  "You don't think his perjury means anything then?"

  "That's all silliness!"

  "I thought it sounded that way. Of course I told Hopper I wouldn't touch his proposition with the end of my rope."

  She said peculiarly, "Yet, after you talked to the sheriff, you went to my father and got this job."

  "Absolutely not! I had this job before I talked to Hopper."

  "Then why," she asked him bluntly, "did you want this job?"

  He considered. "Maybe," he said at last, "it was partly because it looked to me as if you needed some help in something you were trying to do."

  She said slowly, "Do you mean that, Kentucky?"

  "It stands."

  "Then-" she spoke with difficulty "you're free to go. Ride out of this, and try to forget everything that has happened here! Some day I hope to see you again; I swear that I truly appreciate what you've done. But there's nothing more that you can do here now."

  "I'm not so sure of that," he answered.

  "What can I say," she burst out, "that will make you believe me?"

  "Tell me this. Who asked you to try to get that bullet out of the evidence, Miss Ragland?"

  He had failed to surprise her. She looked directly at him, and the blue of her eyes appeared paler, like the color of clear ice, and as little revealing. "No one," she answered flatly. "I wanted it for a souvenir."

  At this suggestion Kentucky could not suppress a chuckle. "If by any chance that were so," he told her frankly, "that would be far and away the coolest thing I ever heard of being done."

  He saw her color slowly, and her gaze flickered, but she stood her ground. "You-you don't know what you're saying. But of course you're right It was a silly, loco thing to do; maybe the worst thing I could have done."

  "And yet," he said gently, "you'd do it again."

  She averted her face abruptly. "It seems like," she said, half to him and half to herself, "I ask too much of people, way too much, always."

  "You've never asked anything of me."

  "I made you carry the bullet away for me."

  "That doesn't count."

  She turned to face him. "Then I'll ask something of you now."

  "Bueno."

  "Taking that bullet was a fool, crazy thing to do. You say I'd do it again. That's as may be. But now I want you to forget that it ever was done. That must never be known never in this world! Do you understand?"

  "That's all right," he agreed;"as far as that is in my control."

  "As far as what do you mean?"

  "I think," he said, "that somebody saw you take it."

  Her lips parted but she did not speak; and she waited, watching him.

  "The man that saw it isn't sure of what he saw; but he's made a sharp guess. He even suspects that you gave the bullet to me."

  Her question tumbled out of hen "How do you know that?"

  "He came into the sheriff's office while I was there, and he accused me of having received the bullet. He even said I probably had it with me then-which I did."

  "Who?" she demanded. "Who was that?"

  "Bob Elliot," he told her.

  She turned from him with a queer dull swaying movement, like a little tree turned by the wind. "Oh, dear God!" she whispered. Abruptly she turned back to him. "What did you say? What did the sheriff do?"

  "What could I say? I just stepped into Elliot and cracked him down."

  "You what?"

  "I took a smash at him. He ducked into my left, and dropped like a thrown-down rope. The sheriff"

  "Stop!" she ordered him. Turning his eyes to her he was astonished to see that her face had gone white with anger. "That was the worst thing you could possibly have done! I wish-I wish you'd never set foot on Wolf Bench!"

  He said slowly, "I can't blame you for that But"

  The intensity of her anger cut him off. "For heaven's sake, shut up! I don't want to talk to you now."

  She climbed the fence, swinging over it easily, like a man.

  "Wait a minute," said Kentucky; a sudden quickening of his voice arrested her. "I just now got an idea, here."

  "I don't think anything you can say can interest me," she told him.

  "This will interest you," he said gravely, "if I happen to be right."

  He had been watching Lee Bishop ride in at a walk from the look-over he had been giving the road to Waterman. Twenty yards from the place where Kentucky Jones and Jean Ragland stood, Bishop struck a match to the cigarette he had rolled. As he raised the cupped flame to the cigarette, his horse shied with a sharp sidelong whip that put out the match, and they saw Lee Bishop's lips move as he swore.

  Kentucky crawled through the fence. "That's happened ten times today," he said. "How is it, Lee, that half the ponies shy when they pass that rock?"

  "Cussedness, I guess. Maybe that rock looks like a bear, to them -1 dunno."

  "Looks like they'd get used to it, then. Have they always done that right there?"

  "Well, no, come to think of it. Say-I wonder if there's a dead coyote under that snow?"

  Lee Bishop dropped to the ground, and the two walked back to the rock which conceivably, to horses' eyes, looked something like a bear. Lee Bishop explored the drift with his boot.

  "Uh huh," he exclaimed, "that's just what it is!" He thrust gloved hands into the snow.

  Then Bishop hesitated, stood up, and stared at Kentucky Jones blankly. The blood that had come into his face as he bent over drained away rapidly and completely, leaving his face grey, and somewhat silly of expression. "No, it isn't," he said in a curious voice.

  It was Zack Sanders they found, under the drift. He had been shot twice, and had died where he fell; and they saw that he had fallen in this spot before the first of the snow.

  F IT had been a shock to the people of the Bar Hook when Zack's horse came in, the finding of Zack's body was a bombshell in truth. Examination established definitely in the minds of them all that Zack's death could have occurred at no other time than that ascribed to the death of Mason; for the same factors which had established the time of Mason's death applied here also-the time of snowfall, and the brief hour during which the Bar Hook had been deserted before the fall of the snow.

  Campo Ragland made repeated and insistent efforts to get in touch with the sheriff by phone, but Floyd Hopper was not in Waterman, nor could he be located. Under the intense pressure of the implications carried by the unwelcome discovery, the Bar Hook people found that they had little to say to each other. More than the death of a cowboy cook was involved here. No one could any longer suggest that Mason's death was an accident. The man whose death so desperately weakened the position of rimrock cattle had been murdered almost within the shadow of this house.

  Yet, until the sheriff could be located, there seemed to he nothing that they could do that night but wait.

  Kentucky turned in late, and with no great hope of sleep. The finding of Zack Sanders' body had given immediacy to a situation with which he was not yet prepared to cope. He had hoped to satisfy himself as to what had actually happened in the Mason case before the irresistible march of events brought disaster to the Bar Hook. Instead, all the rimrock would know tomorrow that the Bar Hook had been the scene, not of an accidental death, but of a murder, the result of which promised to ruin half the brands of Wolf Bench.

  Once more he juggled in his mind the ill-assorted facts in his possession, trying to align them through the medium of his new knowledge.

  The obvious assumption that Zack Sanders and Mason had killed each other-he discarded at once as beyond all probability. Undoubtedly this would be the sheriffs first recourse, he thought; and he decided to leave it to that official.

  Yet, barring this foolishness from his calculations, he was unable to make headway toward rearrangement of what he knew. It would have been easy to suggest that Joe St. Marie, who had lied about his whereabout
s at the hour of the crime, might have killed Zack Sanders as the result of some obscure quarrel and then killed Mason because Mason was a witness. This did not, however, explain Jean Rag land's theft of the bullet that killed Mason; nor her alarm over the fact that a picture had been stolen from a frame; nor her anxiety to conceal this loss from her father.

  If one thing was certain it was that he knew too little about Joe St. Marie. For a little while he experimented with the extraordinary hypothesis of a love affair between St. Marie and Jean. St. Marie had killed Sanders because of a quarrel, then Mason because Mason was a witness; Jean, feeling sorry for St. Marie had stolen the bullet to protect him; St. Marie had stolen a rifle from the house to suggest that the missing weapon was the weapon used; and while he was at it, he had stolen a picture of Jean Ragland. Here the hypothesis blew up; the picture stolen had not been a picture of Jean, but of "some guy on a horse."

  Suddenly he recognized the startling folly of a solution which contended that the sensitive and somehow innately patrician daughter of Campo Ragland was infatuated with a quarter-blood rider of broncs. He swore at himself. What he knew was that Jean was inextricably involved in a murder which was a disaster to all of Wolf Bench; and that as a result of this murder the 88 herds were pouring across the Bar Hook range. For the present he had to admit that he was sure of nothing more. He closed his mind to the puzzle, and tried to drowse.

  But presently he found himself roused sharply to a new wakefulness. For some moments he lay listening intently, unable to decide what was wrong. Then there came to his ears the slip of cold wood on wood. The sound was distinct, yet somehow stealthy; he knew at once that someone's hand had fumbled in an effort to take down the bars of a gate in silence.