Bonnet looked at the track which led out into the alkali wastes, fixed his spyglass to his eye. The hot metal of the rim burned him but he gazed thoughtfully. The track led on for another half a mile and then curved slowly to the right to head back toward Desperation Peak. It passed within five hundred yards of the outgoing trail, angling off and getting wider. Bonnet crossed the bow and found the returning spoor. He was reeling already from thirst.
He went outward along it a little way, for there was no jenny here—only a man and a man walking light. This puzzled him and he thought perhaps he might find the gold. But ten minutes later he knew that even this satisfaction was to be denied him.
Beside the trail, indifferently covered with alkali dust, were the two front legs of a mummified burro. They had been sawed off at the knees with a knife. There were also two tattered old boots with peculiar red tops. He recognized them instantly as belonging to the half-breed Cormoree, whom he had murdered.
Bonnet smiled wanly as he looked at these “tracking irons.” “What a fool I am,” he thought to himself. One of these hoofs even had a nick in it, a flaw which, if his greed had not blinded him, would easily have disclosed that two hoofs, not four, had been used.
He had been fooled; while they had searched in the wastes, the trap had been laid for them last night. The hunters had been trapped by the fox. The young miner would be back there lying beside a cool stream by now.
Bonnet turned and looked back at Desperation Peak. The dust devils were gathering with the approaching noontide. The exhaustion of moisture from him was such as to make him faint. It was easily a hundred and forty degrees here, and death would not be too pleasant.
Sven was merely a speck, stumbling more often now, picking himself up to rush on, a hopeless, degrading figure in the near distance. The major portion of his journey was yet to be traveled. He would obviously never make it.
Bonnet breathed a contemptuous, “Animal.” He took out his Colt. The metal was hot to his touch. In a moment he would not mind that; he placed the muzzle to his temple and pulled the trigger.
The shot ranged faintly across the alkali wasteland and was swallowed up in the sing of the whirling dust devils.
In the distance, Sven turned, wiped a shaking hand across his cracked lips, and looked back. His small eyes picked out the huddled dot. He convulsively took two steps toward it before he understood. Sven staggered and then, face hidden in his hands, sank down hopelessly to wait.
Tim Beckdolt came back from the spur from which he had been watching. He walked wearily up the gully toward his placer, came to the spot where the water sank away. He bathed his face and went on. Just before dusk he arrived at his diggings. He sat down, tiredly.
He emptied the remainder of the water from his canteens on the ground and put them aside to sweeten. Methodically he cut long strips from the haunch of venison which Sven had killed and left to hang on a pine tree. He restrained an impulse to devour it raw and built a fire to roast it.
Carefully, daintily, he cut the meat into small strips. He bit into it and felt the nourishment soaking into his body. He kept himself from eating too much, made himself put the meal away half finished.
He stood up and rubbed his aching shoulder, where the bullet had creased him, turned to look out across the sunset where the dust devils ranged on the alkali flats. They had been so sure of themselves; he had known they would be. When darkness had come he had realized, in hunger’s brilliant thinking, that they were sure.
While they had hunted for him on the flats he had put on the dead man’s shoes and cut off the burro’s front legs. He had come in for the canteens which he would need, had hidden the gold and punctured the canteens that he had left. Then he had laid his trap and it had worked. They had been so greedy and so sure—so eager to follow the false trail.
He straightened and squared his shoulders. It was not pleasant to kill men so, with punctured canteens and thirst on the maddening alkali flats. Tim was too young to do it without a shudder, even though he had to, to save his own life.
He went down to the creek, picked up the shovel, his shovel, and began to scoop away the mud from under the sluices and load it into the riffles. Presently, as the discolored water ran clear, gold began to gleam in the rocks beneath the sluice where he had dumped it the night before.
On the bank he ranged up the sacks. From the mud he began to pull up shovels of the pure gold and dump them for cleaning in the sluice. They’d wanted it so hard, and here it was. But they were dead now, dead and mummies out there in the alkali. He shuddered again and addressed himself to his work.
He shoveled on and on, and as he shoveled, he at length began to whistle. A blue jay mocked him and a squirrel chattered in the pine tree over his head. The woods were sweet and the water sang an accompaniment.
As he whistled he began to dream of what his stepfather would have to say now.
It was very quiet and very still as the sunset played its splendid hues on the slopes of the sleeping mountain.
Johnny,
the Town Tamer
Johnny,
the Town Tamer
THE toughest town on the railroad was Thorpeville. It had been named for a surveyor who had been jumped by Apaches here in ’71 and obliterated, and whose grave was now no less so on a knoll amongst the tin cans south of the tracks.
At the moment in history when Johnny tackled Thorpeville, that squalid cluster of shacks and loading pens was the current end of the Texas trail, whence came tens of thousands of heads of beef to be shipped to Kansas City and tens of dozens of Texas punchers to be bilked, cheated, knocked out, poisoned, shot and mayhemed.
Just now Thorpeville sat in the middle of a sea of prairie mud, the spring rains being late here, and waited for the first of the long, bawling herds which would come and make the citizenry, namely George Bart, solvent once more. Cattle buyers waited in boredom around the New York House, gamblers and their cohorts shuffled cards disconsolately, dance halls had the desolate and deceptive air of churches.
George Bart was all ready for the brisk trade which would last the next many months. As sole agent for more things than any respectable man would want, Bart had caused his warehouse—the only warehouse—to be full of cases and bottles which gurgled, barrels which sloshed and kegs which purled, as well as more mundane articles such as canned corn, pineapple, peaches, tomatoes and peas, as well as bulging sacks of dried beans and casks of brined beef. George was what might have been called a monopolist; he ran the New York House, the New York Bar, the New York Restaurant and the Gilded Cage Dance Hall. He wholesaled anything he might have left over to the few smaller establishments and kept them from growing by the simple arithmetic of canceling out whatever owner seemed to challenge the main trade.
A man of Bart’s temperament and philosophy (which was that them as grabs gits) takes very unkindly to competition in any field. Therefore, he courted the best-looking girl, drove the best gig, wore the most expensive boots and drank the most whiskey of anyone in town. His dislike of competition went so far as to hire only those marshals who could not shoot as good as George. Not, of course, that George did much shooting; there were several indefinite-eyed gents around the New York House who generally attended to the more sordid business details of the Bart empire.
The railroad had been here for a long time, it had not gone any further because of certain Bartlike proceedings back in Wall Street. So Bart was a railhead and Thorpeville, unless drivers wanted to trail another two hundred and fifty miles, was the logical and inevitable destination of the Texas herds.
George ran his kingdom and was entirely satisfied with it. Texans had to come into it and were just as intensely dissatisfied. But there was nothing they could do, they had to sell their cattle, and two hundred and fifty miles in the drag is a long, long ways to ride.
This morning the prairie looked drier, a number of crocuses were out, as well as shooting stars, and a meadowlark was trying to bust his throat over behind the graveyard.
The citizenry did not expect a herd today or for many days, a river still being in flood to the south, and they did not at first recognize the appearance of a lone Texan as the symbol that their season of rapine and robbery had begun.
Johnny Austin Darryl, somewhat better known as Sudden Johnny, owner of the Double G down Matagordas way, was thin and muddy in his saddle. But his gun was not muddy; he had stopped outside town and cleaned that weapon with great care and love, crooning the while in an off-key tenor that there would be blood on the barroom floor that night.
His herd was ten days’ drive behind him because of a swollen river and because they’d need rail cars on arrival in Thorpeville. But the ordering of said cars was not the reason Sudden Johnny had come north, nor why he had ridden in advance. There were plenty of things on the Double G to demand the owner’s attention and he had five men, any one of whom would have made an entirely competent trail boss. Well, not entirely competent; Greg Matson had brought the herd last year, which was why Sudden Johnny was here.
He rode to the middle of the main and only street and looked at the imposing falsity of the New York House, the New York Bar and the New York Restaurant, all of which bore the legend that Geo. Bart was sole owner and proprietor.
“Son,” said Johnny to a man about eighty years old sitting on a porch, “could you kindly direct me to the person of this here George Bart?”
“Son!” cried the oldster. “Look here—”
“Can it, pop,” said George Bart. He had a nose for business and anybody with a squint could read Texas on Sudden Johnny. “Howdy, cowboy. Git down and come in.”
Sudden Johnny looked over his prey. George Bart was about six-six. He carried a sawed-off Lefevre shotgun in a holster, wore a big diamond in his Windsor tie, and he had a look on his face which might have fooled a foolish fly but not another tarantula. “You Bart?”
“I’m Bart.”
Sudden Johnny threw his reins to the oldster and roweled up to the porch of the New York House.
Bart read what he could of the mount’s brand through the mud, then looked at Johnny. Some indefinable warning went through the monopolist, a faculty he had which accounted for his living so long. “Come in and have a drink,” said Bart.
Johnny was looking up and down the street and sizing the town; this man probably had hired guns and friends behind every counter. He looked back at Bart. Northerners had funny ideas about shooting, even skunks, for Johnny, although definitely a gentleman living by a strict code, was not fool enough to exercise much etiquette on Bart.
This, then, was what Greg Matson had faced. He had received payment for two thousand longhorns, had distributed spending money to his men and shortly afterward awakened in the road, slug-happy and flat broke. The Double G had had to creep mighty easy through the past winter without that cash. Greg recalled being invited into a game in a back room and no more; somebody in Thorpeville owed Sudden Johnny fifteen thousand dollars and that somebody was probably George Bart.
“Your outfit comin’?” said Bart.
“Yuh. The river’s up. Don’t you ever get spring up here?”
“It’ll go back in a few days,” said Bart. “Come ahead to order cars?”
“Yeh. Where’s the agent?”
“Over in that shack. When you get through come back and have a drink, you must be pretty thirsty.”
“I’m thirsty all right,” said Sudden Johnny. “Hungry, too.” He went down the steps and across the street to the indicated shack.
When he came out he found that they had stabled his horse for him; he went into the New York Bar and found Bart.
“Give him the best,” Bart told the bartender.
Johnny poured a careful glass. He was known somewhat as a drinking man down Matagordas. It was said he could hold more liquor than anybody in that end of Texas, but this of course was a considerable exaggeration for Johnny almost never got drunk.
He had three to start his circulation going and then insisted on paying for them. “No, no. Hell, no,” said Bart. “Glad to have you come here, don’t worry none.”
Johnny took out a poke. “Well, maybe you wouldn’t accept gold dust anyway. It’s all the hard money I got.”
“Gold dust?” said Bart, looking at the long poke. “Where’d that come from? I ain’t never seen any from yore part of the country.”
“Ain’t,” said Johnny. “It’s from Mexico. We shipped down a lot of stuff by boat and they paid us in this stuff. Yucatán, most likely. People generally will take it, though, it’s worth about seventeen dollars a ounce.”
Bart looked at the bright flakes and his eyes heated a trifle. “Let’s see some closer.”
Johnny put a dab of the stuff in the outstretched palm and Bart picked it over, glancing now and then at the tall poke of it. “You must have plenty in that sack. How much, you think?”
“Five, six thousand, that’s all,” said Johnny.
Bart shivered and put the subject aside for the moment with some effort. It was an obvious strain.
“Wouldn’t have been able to have made my drive if the Mexes hadn’t paid out,” said Johnny. “Come through just in time. Well, here’s mud in your eye.” He drank again with a quick jerk of his wrist and put the poke back, evidently forgetting the tiny amount he had given Bart.
“Here, cowboy,” said Bart. “I shore don’t want to be considered dishonest. I invited you to drink up and I meant it, this here is your gold.”
“Oh, so it is,” said Johnny, taking it back into the poke which he again put away.
Johnny was looking the place over. When you are getting ready to tear things apart, board by board, it’s a good thing to get a careful idea of how they go together.
This was one big room with a bar and tables in it with windows on the opposite wall from the bar. A big double door at the back was open to daylight and beyond it lay what seemed to be Bart’s warehouse. Two slanted doors went down a flight of steps. This was a sod house below-ground level, cool and comfortable, probably the original Thorpeville complete. A cook was struggling up the steps with a box of sardines under one arm and a keg of wine under the other. When he reached the top he shut the doors and snapped a padlock in place.
Johnny saw that the left rear of this barroom gave into a couple of small anterooms. A door opened here into the lobby of the New York House. He nodded to himself, shifted his gun belt and felt of his stubbly jaw. “Reckon,” he said, “I’ll shave me up a trifle. I ain’t ridin’ back, too blamed comfortable here.”
“Sure. We’ll have her fixed right up for you,” said Bart. “Ain’t a bedbug in the place. Joe! Show Mr.— You didn’t say yore name.”
“They call me Johnny.”
“Joe, show Mr. Johnny at a room and let the Chinese lug him a bath.” He smiled upon Johnny. “When you come down, mebbe we can have a little excitement like a game of cards. It shore is dull hereabouts.”
“Suits me,” said Johnny, “but all I got is gold dust.”
“Reckon I won’t quibble none about that, seein’ you probably got two–three thousand cattle in a trail herd down here as well. Pete already took in your war sack when he cared for your hoss.”
“Much obliged,” said Johnny.
It was afternoon when he came down. He had had a sleep and grub and he felt up to his game. He was burnished from the labors of the Chinese and bright in a calico shirt. Johnny had his campaign pretty well mapped, he’d spent a long time mapping it. The only time he’d ever go sudden was when action began, which befitted a grandnephew of Beauregard.
George Bart had fixed up a back room very tastefully with a large array of bottles on a sideboard, a quantity of edibles and a table on which lay a new deck of cards and around which sat, waiting very patiently, men who would have stayed there day and night for a week if Bart had told them to.
Johnny walked in and found a very smiling and hospitable George. “Well, we was hoping you’d be down, Mr. Johnny. A few boys like yourself drifted in and we was about to have a g
ame. Have something to drink first?”
They drank, then George pulled back a chair. Johnny was expected to get into that chair but it had its back to the door and was flanked too closely. Johnny took another which suited him better and Bart less.
Johnny picked up the cards, broke their seal and shuffled them. He gave a quick look around the table and saw nothing but hard, gaunt faces about as full of expression as a sidewinder’s. Johnny grinned at them companionably.
The door of the outer saloon opened and a man came in, a big man even as Texans go. He wore mainly buckskin, about three or four deer’s worth of it, stained with mud and grease. He had a beard, a black beard, thick enough to be bulletproof. If, from where he sat, Sudden Johnny shot this newcomer any glance, none noticed, so intent were they on getting their first cards.
Johnny had delayed. Spanish Mike McCarty was something more than Johnny’s top rider, he was also Johnny’s friend. Johnny’s height had slenderness and his movements had grace, but Mike’s chief attribute was a mountainous strength which sometimes fell on men and cured them of things, including living.
Spanish Mike combed some of the mud out of his beard, ordered a beer mug of whiskey, scooped up one handful of pretzels—one pound—from the free lunch and composed himself at the bar. He too had paused on the edge of town but not to clean his gun. He had halted to separate his arrival from Johnny’s by several unsuspicious hours and had profited by a nice relaxing snooze in the mud. Mike looked over the premises, looked out through the back door, sighed in pure delight and relaxed to watch the game.
Sudden Johnny dealt to a somewhat dumbfounded crowd. He had been clumsy enough when he shuffled the cards but somehow these cards weren’t the cards which had been carefully rewrapped and placed in the center of the table. They were honest cards and there were glowers of wonder at George Bart at this supposed oversight. When the bartender served from the sideboard he caught a terrible pain in his shins—not serious, for his grimace vanished instantly as he moved away from Bart.
Devil's Manhunt (Stories from the Golden Age) Page 4