by Alan Lemay
Kentucky Jones stepped to the open window. He could not see the corral from which the sound had seemed to come; but now he heard the snow-muffled hoof beats of a walking horse, unhurried and very quiet except for the dull crunch of the snow.
The night had only a thin sliver of a moon, but a frosty clarity; against the clean sparkle of the snow all snowless objects stood out in etched relief. Near the down-country trail a horse and rider now appeared, to disappear at once behind the stone pump house. Kentucky swore under his breath. He had been unable to recognize the rider, but the horse he knew a tall black with a long white stocking on the off fore. It was the horse Joe St. Marie had ridden that day. Horse and rider came into his line of vision again considerably further away, and, immediately dropping behind the fall of the land, were lost to view.
Kentucky Jones returned to his blankets with his nerves on a peculiar edge. He rolled a cigarette, and thought of Joe St. Marie.
The crack bronc rider was a man of peculiarly mixed type. Almost no trace of accent or guttural came into his speech. And if the build of his head suggested the Indian by a certain breadth at the eyes, it gave him an effect of strength, as if the crossbreeding behind him had done him no great harm. St. Marie was unusual in that he made no effort to conceal the dark strain in his blood. The big steel conchos on his five-inch belt and the silver work of his spurs and bit were barbarian touches hardly ever seen in the Wolf Bench rimrock any more. Joe St. Marie must have cut a broad swath among the mestizo girls in Mexican quarters.
These things were apparent at once; and so little further insight into this man was afforded by better acquaintance that many must have supposed that this was all there was to know about Joe St. Marie. Kentucky Joe was not so sure. St. Marie was too compactly self sufficient, he thought, to be so easily known.
He was able to fix upon one immediate probability. If Joe St. Marie had gone out, he would presently return. Had he meant to jump the range he could have used any number of subterfuges for giving himself a long start before his absence was noted. St. Marie would be back that night; and, since he had not bothered to pick a fresh horse, he probably did not mean to be long gone. Kentucky dressed, and propped himself up in the corner of his bunk to watch the pump house trail.
An hour passed; more than an hour. Looking at his watch he was astonished to learn that it was only quarter past eleven o'clock. Sometimes he had dozed, but he was certain that he would have heard St Marie's horse if it had come in. He smoked again, and waited ten minutes more.
Upon the snow a spot appeared. It pulled up, shifted and separated, and he saw that it was not one horse but two. For a moment or two both riders sat motionless, plainly in view against the snow; and the watcher made out that the second horse appeared to be a pinto, for he could not see the animal's fore legs, and thus knew that they must be white. Suddenly he knew that he was looking at the pinto horse of Bob Elliot.
Kentucky Jones spat through his teeth, and anger rose into his head like a rising wind. Now that he had identified the horse it was as if Bob Elliot stood before him, so that he sensed again the driving, thrusting energy that swung ruination across the Bar Hook range in the form of long herds of trampling white faces.
And here for the first time was something definite and conclusive, upon which a man could lay his hands. The Bar Hook rider, whom he was now certain was Joe St. Marie, had ridden out to confer with the boss of the 88. He promised himself that within five minutes he would know exactly what that exclusive saddle conference meant.
The pinto horse now turned, going back the way it had come; and the other rider, coming on, was lost to view again in the dip of the ground.
Kentucky Jones took up the long-barreled Colt which had so seldom emerged from the bottom of his war bag, and checked its action to see that it was free of frost. Promptly he stepped through the window and ran to the corner of the house. Against the far corral stood a stable shed of peeled logs. To this he made his way, keeping it between himself and the trail. Within the long shed, across one end, was fixed a horizontal log, used as a saddle rack; he knew that the rider would return his saddle here. Beside it, in black shadow, he took his post.
It seemed to him that the night was silent for a long time before finally he heard again, close at hand, the small crunching complaint of the snow under the hoofs of a walking horse. He distinguished the creak of saddle leather as the rider swung down; and once more he heard the stealthy slip of cold wood on wood as the rider let down the gate.
Flattening himself against the wall he could see neither horse nor rider as the pony was led close to the stable shelter. The animal was still out of his angle of vision as he heard the rider drag the saddle off, not three yards from where he stood.
Then close beside him the rider appeared, and for a moment was a silhouette against the snow; a figure made shapeless by the shouldered saddle.
Within the stable he could see nothing at all, though the other eased the saddle upon the rack so close at hand that a swinging stirrup struck his knee. So little space separated them that he could hear the rider breathe, could have touched him by raising his hand.
Kentucky Jones said softly, "Put up your hands."
He heard the breath jerk in the others throat; and for a moment they stood in utter silence, as if neither of them any longer breathed at all. He could not tell whether or not he had been obeyed.
The other said, "Who who is it?"
The wind went out of Kentucky Jones. The voice was hardly more than a whisper, twisted almost past recognition by shock and strain-but he would have known it anywhere in the world as the voice of Jean Ragland.
For a moment both of them stood motionless in the dark. Then Kentucky Jones said, "What in the name of-" He stepped out from the wall so that he could see her silhouetted figure against the snow outside. Without the saddle there was nothing about her outline to suggest the man he had expected. He had a queer shocked feeling that somehow a substitution had been made by unnatural means, so definitely had he expected Joe St. Marie. Then he saw her sway; and he stepped forward in time to catch her in his arms.
Even then she would have slipped to the ground if he had not held her up. The starch had gone out of her and she stood limp, not inert but trembling violently.
"Don't don't ever do anything like that again," she gasped at last.
"Good Lord! Do you think I had any idea it was you?"
She freed herself and stood unsteadily on braced legs. "What on earth were you trying to do?"
"I thought - I thought you were Joe St. Marie."
"St. Marie?"
"I saw someone slide out of here on the horse St Marie rode today. I saw that horse come back, and I saw its rider talk to Bob Elliot, on his big paint."
The shock of surprise she had sustained in the dark was turning into anger. "And what did you think you were going to do about it?" she demanded.
"That hardly matters now, does it?"
"I asked you a question," she said hotly.
"I'll answer it then. If anybody but you had gone wolf prowling out of here in the night to powwow with your father's worst enemy, and I caught him at it I'd have had the reason for that out of him, if I had to choke it out of him with these two hands."
Jean's anger wilted. "You're bad luck for me," she whispered. "Everything that you have anything to do with goes wrong for me."
"Maybe," he said, "that's because I don't know what you're trying to do."
"Why should I tell you what I'm trying to do?"
"No reason; except that it seems to work out badly when you don't."
She turned to him sharply. She was standing very close to him in the dark, but her words were so faint that he could hardly make them out. "I can tell you this," she said. "I know what I'm doing here. I know more about what's happening here than you can possibly know. Can't you trust that? Haven't you any faith in me at all?"
"You still won't tell me what you're trying to do?"
"I can't! I can't possi
bly do that."
LL day long the Bar Hook had tried to reach Sheriff Floyd Hopper without success; he had lost himself somewhere among the ranchers who had no phones. Campo Ragland was unwilling to take up the death of Sanders with its definite implication that Mason had been murdered-with any of the deputies. And the case hung fire, awaiting Hopper's return to Waterman.
But when word reached the sheriff at last, two hours after dark, he lost no time in getting on the job. That day Campo Ragland had put all hands except Jones and Bishop on the road to Waterman with his five carloads of long twos; and since the beeves had trampled the road open as they went, the sheriff was able to drive steaming into the Bar Hook within an hour of his first notice.
Floyd Hopper came into the kitchen briskly, his flat loose-skinned jowls reddish-purple from the wind; and though he grinned at them ruefully as he tried to rub the frost out of his mustache, his eyes were wary, and did not smile at all.
"So poor Zack has turned up at last," he said, warming his hands over the stove. "How come you to find him, Lee?"
"My horse kept shying one particular place," Lee Bishop said. "Soon as Kentucky called it to my notice I begun to wonder if there wasn't a dead coyote or something under the snow. So Kentucky and me looked, and there he was."
"`Soon as Kentucky called it to your notice,' "the sheriff repeated. "So it was really Kentucky Jones who thought of looking in this place is that right?"
"Well, yes, though he only said"
"All right. Could you make out how he died?"
"Fighting," said Bishop. "He was lying in a kind of heap, face down, but partly on his side. He'd been shot twice, once in the left side, and once in the back. His gun was under him in his right hand, and it was fired three times."
"His gun belt-" began the sheriff.
"He didn't wear a gun belt didn't own one, far's I know just carried his gun in his pocket, I guess."
The sheriff nodded. "Let's see his gun, then." As Lee Bishop went out, the sheriff turned to Kentucky Jones. "Could you tell which way Zack was firing when he went down?"
Kentucky exhaled smoke and shook his head. "A man's liable to spin and fall most any way, when he's hit."
"Zack was lying beside a rock, wasn't he? Now, the trail from down-canyon comes past that stone pump house. Did it look to you like he might have took cover behind that rock, to fire down the trail?"
"That could hardly be," Kentucky answered.
"Why" ?
"Because he lay on the down-trail side."
"Which way-" The sheriff broke off abruptly as Lee Bishop returned to the room with Zack Sanders' six-gun. He took a quick stride forward and took the gun in his hand.
"What's the matter?" Campo Ragland demanded instantly.
The sheriff drew a deep breath and blew it out through puffed cheeks. The eager intensity of inquiry had gone out of him. "I never have any luck," he grunted. "This damn thing has sure worked out to make a fool of everybody!"
"What's wrong with that gun?" said Ragland again.
"Nothing, except the caliber," said the sheriff. "It's a forty-five, that's what's the matter with it How much snow was there under Zack Sanders?"
"None," said Bishop.
"Lee," said the sheriff, "you found Mason too: could you judge which was killed first? Sanders or Mason?"
"I wouldn't be able to draw any difference."
"Uh huh," said Sheriff Hopper. "This here is the devil."
"It was sure a striking accident," Kentucky agreed. "More like a whole committee of accidents."
"When I first heard of this," the sheriff admitted, "I was hopeful we were out of the woods. Naturally the first thing that came to mind was that Mason and Sanders shot it out, and both dropped. But the caliber of Zack's gun it throws that theory out."
"Shucks-right back on the double suicide theory," said Kentucky. "But wait a minute!"
"What's the matter?"
"The gun Mason carried was the same caliber as this gun of Sanders' here," Kentucky pointed out. "It passed at the inquest that Mason was killed by the accidental discharge of his own gun. How is it we're so certain now that Mason was not killed by that caliber?"
The sheriff pulled a pipe from his pocket and rammed tobacco into it with a disgusted thumb. "Because," he said, "Mason was not killed by the discharge of his own gun. John Mason was murdered."
They stared at him, and Kentucky Jones heard the breath catch in Jean Ragland's throat.
"How long have you known this?" Campo Ragland demanded at last.
"I've known it," said the sheriff, "since the day of Mason's death."
"Then you knew at the inquest"
Sheriff Floyd Hopper did not avoid the challeng ing stare of the cattleman. "Yes," he said, "I knew it at the inquest."
There was a fragile and puzzled silence, presently broken by Campo. "Then the coroner's jury wasn't given all the facts?"
"No," said the sheriff.
"I'm damned if I see your idea, Floyd!" said Campo.
Floyd Hopper's temper seemed to flare again. "I had good reasons for steering in a bum verdict at the inquest But those reasons have gone to hell in a snow storm, now!"
"What I want to know," said Campo Ragland, "is how much more you didn't tell the jury!"
"Not much, Campo. John Mason was killed by two shots-not one from a gun of lighter caliber than forty-five. Tomorrow the whole country will know that-and our chances of getting the killer are cut in two." He extended his hands over the stove, but promptly withdrew them again, and instead peeled off his coat.
"Naturally," Kentucky put in equably, "it's easier to catch a criminal who thinks he's safe."
"And easier yet," said Campo irritably, "to explain away a killing as an accident!"
"Yes," said the sheriff without heat He returned Ragland's stare through the smoke cloud from his pipe. "But I also had one or two other reasons. For one thing, this is some worse than just a one man killing, Campo. It's kicked the whole of Wolf Bench onto the edge of a general smash."
"We all have reason to know that," Ragland growled.
"All right. Suppose now somebody that don't know much about it picks himself out a first class suspect. Suppose, for instance, somebody goes around Wolf Bench pointing out that Lee Bishop just happens to be the man that found both Mason and Sanders both deep hidden under the snow. There's been many a blow-up on less evidence than that-and with less feeling back of it than this is going to raise up here!"
Lee Bishop said nothing. Campo was eyeing Sheriff Hopper narrowly. "Somehow, Floyd," he said, "it seems like to me you haven't come to your real reason yet."
"No?" said Sheriff Hopper. He took a deep drag on his pipe. "Then I'll give you just one reason more. Maybe you've forgot, Campo, that John Mason was shot down within a dozen horse jumps of your own house here; and by singular coincidence-that neither you, nor your daughter, nor a angle one of your hands, was even within earshot of the guns."
After a moment Campo said in a low voice, "Floyd, what do you mean by that?"
"Campo, I know that John Mason was your close friend. I know that you and your brand are as bad hurt as anybody is, almost. And with my experience, I can reason that the thing couldn't have happened if any of you had been here. But most people hate coincidences, Campo."
Ragland stood up, his face blank. "Floyd, if you're saying you smothered that inquest as a favor to me"
"Maybe," said the sheriff, "I should just have let you explain all that to the rimrock in your own way."
Campo Ragland sat down, his combativeness abruptly deflated. "Floyd," he said, "you shouldn't have done it."
"Of course to hell I shouldn't have done it!" said the sheriff, his irritability coming to the surface again. "A fine box I'm in, now that Zack Sanders is found!"
"Well, anyway, Floyd," Campo mumbled, "I appreciate what you tried to do."
"All right," the sheriff accepted, "see that you do! Seems to me, Campo, that after this you'd be justified if you'd stop holding infor
mation back."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Tonight over the phone I asked you if anything else peculiar had happened. You told me `No.' But I happen to know that you got home here Tuesday to find that this house had been searched."
Kentucky Jones had never seen Sheriff Floyd Hopper show to as good advantage as he did to night. Basically the sheriffs mood was disgruntled and ugly; it was not easy for him to face the exposure of his subterfuges. Yet he was the man in the saddle here. He sat now sprawled behind his smoke, his eyes surly and red, like the eyes of a bear. And he had the tough, planted look of gnarled tree roots.
"What house?" said Campo Ragland at last.
"This house," said the sheriff. "What are you trying to do, Campo? It doesn't get you anything to stall with me. This house was searched and something was taken from it."
"If you know that something was taken from this house," Campo Ragland said, "it's because you had it taken yourself."
Hopper shook his head. "All I know is that something is gone from here-and never mind how I know that. It'll have to satisfy you that I do know it."
"It seems," said Campo Ragland, "that you know a lot of things that nobody thought you knew. I'm thinking that maybe you know a lot of things more."
"What you'd better be finding out is this, Campo," said Sheriff Hopper. "I'm no fool, even if I am the duly elected sheriff of Waterman county. You could do a whole lot worse than play a straight game with me."
Campo's retort was mildly explosive. "Straight game? Of course I'm playing a straight game! I'm willing to turn face up what cards I hold they're always face up. It's not my fault when I hold very damn few cards."
"What I'm saying is"