Taggart (1959)

by L'amour, Louis

“It did.”

  “Been my experience,” Stark said calmly, “that the Arizona folks look with some understanding upon a shooting where one man is attacked by several and comes out ahead. I think you’d have a time getting this man out of Arizona.”

  Shoyer chuckled. “You let me worry about that. This man is wanted. I don’t care what he’s wanted for, or what the facts were. That’s up to the judge and jury.”

  Swante Taggart ignored the discussion. He opened the door, and stepped out into the rain. The trickle of water down the canyon floor had swelled to a fair-sized stream, but he sprang over it and crossed to the barn. Leading his horse to water, he saw Pete Shoyer come to the door wearing a slicker. The man-hunter stood there within the shelter of the rain, watching as Taggart watered the horse and then returned it to the barn, where he filled the manger with hay.

  There was only a little fodder such as they would have been able to gather on the hills and in the few meadows around. Only enough for a day or two. Taggart went to the door of the barn and looked at the rain. The door of the house opened and Miriam came out and crossed to him.

  They stood together watching the rain. “What are you going to do?” she asked at last.

  “Stay on. I said I would, and I’m through running.” “And if he tries to take you?”

  “I hope he doesn’t.”

  “He frightens me. There’s something about him … I mean, he seems indomitable, somehow.

  You look at him and you can’t imagine anyone or anything standing against him.”

  “He’s done pretty well.”

  “If I can help, I will.” She hesitated. “There’s a way out of the canyon when you get back up against the mountain. A man on foot could get out of there, and if he could get over behind that pointed peak southeast of here … well, I could bring a horse over there.”

  “Stay out of it.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “Wait.” The house door stood slightly open and he knew Shoyer was within, watching them. “No use hunting trouble. I’m going to sit tight and let him make his move … and then I’ll do what needs to be done.”

  “I think he’ll try to kill you.”

  “His way.” He leaned out to study the sky. The clouds overhead were low, heavy, bulging with rain. “What about you? What are you going to do? With your life, I mean.”

  She looked around at him. “What does anyone do? I’ll live it as it comes.”

  “And when you get out of here?”

  She countered with her own question. “What will you do? You’ve said something about a ranch … is that just talk, or do you have plans?”

  He stared gloomily into the afternoon. “I had plans. I even had a ranch, and then a hard-nosed bunch came riding in from Texas and I shot myself out of it. Out of my ranch and into trouble. “

  He built a smoke, taking his time. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stop here in Arizona, or I might go west to California. And that’s as much as I know.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Adam? He doesn’t know as much about cattle as he’d like. You two might make a team.”

  “Has Stark got a horse to spare? I mean to loan him?” “There’s one. Not a very good horse.”

  “The two of us could ride out of here together. Shoyer and me … and we could settle it out there, somewhere. Get out of your hair.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  The rain was letting up, although the clouds were still heavy and the water in the bottom of the canyon held to a steady flow. There was a dam upstream where some of it could be held against dry weeks to furnish water for the horses and to bring the grass in the hollow into better condition.

  “I never wanted trouble with any man,” Taggart said suddenly. “But if a fellow comes at you, what can you do?”

  “I know. “

  “They judge a man out here by his honesty and his courage, and it’s right they should.

  Most ways a man can go in this country he goes into danger, so you want a man alongside you who has guts. You don’t want to start a wagon across the trails with a coward who’ll quit the first time you run into trouble … he’ll get you killed.

  “And if you’re doing business out here, a man’s word has to be good. We don’t have lawyers and courts to decide, and we don’t have a lot of legal nonsense to go through.

  If I buy cattle from a man and he tells me he’s got ten thousand head, there’d better be ten thousand head … but there will be. No need to count ‘em.

  “That’s why if a man is called a coward or a liar it’s a shooting matter. Nobody wants to associate or do business with either. Man can’t afford to let folks call him either one.”

  Swante Taggart stepped out of the doorway and looked around at the sky. In the west the clouds were piled up against the mountains, but the wind had changed and the clouds overhead were breaking up.

  “There’s pushy folks around this country, and if they start pushing you, you have to push back. If you don’t, they’ll soon push you out of the country.”

  They stood silent for a few minutes and then Swante Taggart said quietly, “You’d better say something to your brother. A man who’ll hunt down and kill a man for a couple of hundred dollars might. decide it was worth while to kill one for a gold mine.”

  “You think he knows?”

  “He knows. He may even know where the mine is. Pete Shoyer may be a killing man but he’s no fool.”

  Chapter Eight.

  A t daybreak Swante Taggart, wearing moccasins, slipped out of the barn where he had slept and went up the canyon, easily finding the place of which Miriam had told him. He climbed out and from a vantage point behind a clump of cedar he studied the country with infinite care.

  Shoyer had seen him go, but knew he was helping with the grub problem and he had seen that Taggart took no horse. And without a horse in this country a man just was not going anywhere at all. Had Shoyer known Taggart better he would not have felt so sure, for the rancher was a man who had grown up hunting on foot and, like an Apache, he could travel farther in a day on his feet than on a horse.

  Stark believed the Apaches were still around, and Taggart was prepared to go along with Stark. Although not long in the West, Stark was an observant man, with an uncanny grasp and a feeling for the West and for Indians. Such a man was worth a dozen more experienced but less observing men.

  Yet Stark had gone out that morning after originally planning to do nothing of the kind, and Taggart was both curious and worried about the older man.

  Not even the girls knew the exact location of the mine, Taggart believed, or if they did they were saying nothing, but their very lack of knowledge had aroused Taggart’s curiosity, for Stark was a man who trusted his women folks, and if he had kept the site secret from them he did so for a reason.

  Swante Taggart had been doing some thinking on his own, and from his conclusions it seemed likely that the mine was at least three miles and perhaps a little more from the canyon of the chapel … somewhere in the rugged country east of the Horseshoe Bend of the Salt.

  For half an hour he studied the terrain, but he saw no movement or evidence of life.

  Then keeping to rock ledges, or stepping from stone to stone where possible, Taggart worked his way across country. That several canyons emptied into the Salt from the east and southeast he already knew from his observations north of the river before coming to the canyon.

  He was more than two hours traveling less than four miles, for he had taken cover from time to time to check both his back trail and the country around.

  Everywhere the rain had washed out tracks, washed the air clean, and left the country looking fresh and new. A snake had crossed a small sand bed … there were the tracks of a lizard, and a place where a covey of quail had raced along the ground in a wide group. Otherwise, he saw no tracks of any kind.

  He heard the sound of a pick before he located Stark. When he heard the sound he took cover and looked about for
the mine, but he saw nothing that even faintly resembled a working of any kind. The sound had momentarily stopped, and he lay still.

  To the south of him and a little west was a pinnacle of rock that loomed up like a beckoning finger, and the mountainside sloped steeply away below it. Taking his Winchester in hand, Taggart started down the slope, and then he heard the sound of the pick again. A blow … another blow.

  Swante Taggart paused and felt a sudden prickling along his scalp. He had heard a faint stirring in the rock such as one heard sometimes in the stope of a mine. The sound was similar to that of timber taking weight deep underground, and it was a sound he had never liked.

  He went on down the slope and paused again. Before him the pinnacle of rock leaned ever so slightly down slope. At the very base of it a deep notch had been cut into the underpinning of the pinnacle.

  He looked at the rock tower and saw that it was seamed with ancient cracks and cleavages.

  The rock had no coherence; it looked shattered and broken. As he watched, Adam Stark crawled from the notch dragging a sack. When he straightened up he saw Taggart.

  For an instant the two men stared at each other, and then, Stark relaxed slowly.

  “Found me,” he said. “Well, you’ve done some mining.”

  Taggart walked past him, looking up at the tower. His mouth felt dry and he was breaking out in a cold sweat. The very idea of going into that notch under the tower sent a chill through every fiber of his body.

  “You’re crazy,” he said flatly. “Stark, any man who would work in a place like that has got to be crazy.”

  “The gold is there.”

  Taggart turned and looked at him. “You don’t want gold that bad. Nobody does, nobody in his right mind.”

  Adam took out his pipe and began to fill it. “A matter of viewpoint, Taggart. How bad does a man want anything? I guess it all depends on the man, and what he wants and why. I know what I’m doing. I know what my chances are. I know that in that gold there’s a ranch, there’s cattle, there’s comfort for my wife. There’s a trip for her … to San Francisco. Maybe even to Europe.”

  “And you can die in there.” “That’s right.”

  They were silent. Adam Stark lighted his pipe. In the morning light his face looked drawn and gray, and Taggart could appreciate the strain he must be under, working in such a place.

  “That’s why you’ve kept the girls away.”

  “That’s why.” Stark squatted on his heels, his eyes searching the country around, from old habit. “Look, Taggart, two weeks more in there, and I’ll have it made.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “The stuff is richer now than it ever was. Look.” Stark took a chunk of ore from the sack. “Just look at that.”

  “I-” Swante Taggart swallowed his words. The ore was jewelry store rock, the kind a man hears about all his life and rarely, if ever, sees. It was heavy, so heavy that the weight of it startled him, and he was used to gold. The rock was seamed with streaks of gold, not the hairlike threads in some ore, but bands of it. And the quartz was rotten. His fingers broke off chunks of it and there was crumbling from the pressure of his fingers.

  Swante Taggart was not a man who loved gold, but he knew the feeling. It could get into the blood, and once it did a man was lost. He had known men who devoted their entire lives to following the ghost of gold through desert and mountain, into all the lost and remote places. He could appreciate the feeling, although he had long since come to realize there were some things not worth the cost. For him the yearning was for land, cattle, a place with water, trees, and grass.

  But for gold like this there was little a man wouldn’t do. Yet Adam Stark was not really filled with gold lust, either, and was as well-balanced a man as Taggart had ever seen.

  “Sure,” Taggart said, “it’s rich. I’ve never seen the like. But why, when the risk is so great? All of that gold won’t buy you six months of life, or even a day of it.”

  “No.” “Then it’s the women?”

  Adam nodded. “It’s Connie. Not Miriam … she’s like I am or you are. She’s a girl who can make out, and she asks nothing of life she can’t get. But Miriam’s had a nice time behind her, something Connie’s never had, and Connie has a restlessness in her. I think a spell of real living would cure her.”

  “You’re wrong.” Stark looked at him.

  “She says that’s what she wants,” Taggart went on, “and she believes it. After a fashion I suppose she does, but what she really wants is to believe in you.”

  “That’s up to her.”

  Swante Taggart indicated the rock by a jerk of his head. “You should let her see that.”

  “No.” “And you shouldn’t let Shoyer see it.”

  “How about you?” Stark looked at him with a faint smile. “You’ve seen it.”

  “It’s your gold, and anybody who would dig it out of there is entitled to it. But if I were you,” Taggart grinned, “I’d even watch me. A man with that kind of gold can’t afford to trust anyone.”

  The morning sun warmed the mountainside. In the far distance the Four Peaks lost themselves against the sky. Below, the mountain fell away toward the Salt River, scarcely a mile away.

  “Why don’t you tell her that you killed Sanifer?” Stark stared at him. “You heard of that?”

  “She’d like you for it.”

  “Maybe … and she might hate me. She’s made a big thing of him in her mind.” Stark lit his pipe again. “Nothing much to him, really. A flashy big man with an easy way of talking, but no sand … no bottom to the man, not when the showdown came.”

  He paused and a slow minute passed. “He wouldn’t fight me. He backed down cold when I braced him in the saloon, and then when I started to leave, he tried to dry-gulch me.” “She’ll hear of it.”

  “I’d rather not.” Stark got up and knocked out his pipe. Suddenly he no longer felt like smoking. “There’s things she has to learn for herself. If she doesn’t learn them, there’s nothing more to be said.”

  The air was clear following the storm. Silence lay like a blessing upon the land and the warm sun burned off the last of the night’s chill. High overhead an eagle cried and sunlight sparkled on the waters of the Salt. The Apaches came out of a draw on the north side of the river and walked their horses through the sparse growth toward the river bank. There were at least thirty of them and they had several extra horses. They drew up at the river bank and looked the country over. Taggart sat very still, hearing his heart pound. He knew that Stark saw them, too.

  If they rode into the water and along the westernmost arm of Horseshoe Bend they would emerge from the river where the dim trail led up Mud Springs Wash between Rockinstraw Mountain and the canyon of the chapel. If Miriam had gone from the canyon to the top of Rockinstraw this morning, they would find her tracks.

  “It’s a one-man job,” Taggart said. “I’ll circle around and get on the mountain near the canyon. I can see them, and I’ll know if they find her tracks.”

  “One against thirty?”

  “One man can do as much as two in this case. If both of us got it, that would leave the girls with Shoyer … or the Apaches.”

  Taggart went over back of the slope and as soon as he was below the crest, he started to run. He ran lightly and easily. If the Apaches followed the route, he thought they would have a little less distance to go than he himself.

  He ran easily, with long, steady strides. The slope was steep and rocky, but a barely discernible game trail skirted the hill well below the crest. Slowing down to cross a wash, he got a glimpse of the Apaches as they rode down the river, keeping to the edge of the water. He turned up a canyon that led south and came out of it to climb the mountain near the canyon.

  From the mountainside above the canyon, overlooking the trail up Mud Springs Wash, Swante Taggart had a good field of fire. Squatting on his heels behind a juniper, he watched the Indians, still some distance off.

  They were moving slowly and studying the
bank, obviously searching for indications of a crossing. Taggart had deduced from the dried blood on Shoyer’s shirt that there had been a battle … and now the Indians were out in force to hunt the hunter.

  From where he crouched he could see into the canyon; the spring and its pool were visible, and one shoulder of the old chapel. As he watched, Miriam came into sight, and picking up a rock, he tossed it into the pool. She turned quickly and looked up.

  He indicated the canyon mouth and flashed his ten fingers at her three times. Instantly, Miriam turned and ran for the house.

  Whatever else he might be, Shoyer was a fighting man and good to have along at this time, for Taggart had a hunch the Indians were not going to pass on.

  When the Apaches rode up to Mud Springs they were stretched out for a hundred yards or more, but at the springs they dismounted and scattered out, searching for indications that the spring had lately been used.

  It was one place that was carefully avoided by all at the canyon of the chapel … but what about Shoyer? Had he stopped there? And if he had, had the rain washed out all traces?

  From his position on the slope of the hill, Taggart could cover the approach to the mouth of the canyon, but he could not see what was happening inside the mouth where Shoyer or one of the girls was sure to be waiting.

  The edge of the canyon at this point was broken by several deep cracks, and slabs of rock lay scattered in profusion. Mingled among them were juniper and prickly pear, and the position allowed some movement under concealment.

  One by one the Apaches drifted back to Mud Springs, evidence enough that they had found no tracks. If one of the girls had gone to the mountain this morning they must certainly have left some indication, so evidently Consuelo as well as Miriam was in the canyon.

  The Apaches were making camp now, but several of them mounted and rode off, obviously scouting for Shoyer. It was very early, far too early for an Apache to camp unless there was reason for remaining in the vicinity … and this was a war party. Without doubt they had reason to believe him in the vicinity, and remembering how many tracks there must be on top of Rockinstraw, Taggart prayed they would not climb the lookout mountain.