The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 7

by Louis L'Amour

  But at the same instant, there was a great crash of falling rock from within the cave, and screams of agony! Then more falling rock, and in the midst of it the roar of guns as Shafter, Benzie, and Fanning opened up on the remaining riders!

  Shafter’s first shot struck Callan high in the chest and rocked him in the saddle, unsettling his aim so that Callan’s bullet went wild. Then Dud, firing low and fast, triggered two more slugs into the gunman. Suddenly, loose in the saddle, as though all his bones and muscles had turned to jelly, Callan rolled and fell, like a sack of wheat into the grass.

  The first blast of Benzie’s shotgun had blown a rider clear out of his saddle even as his hands lifted his rifle, and for the rest, that was enough. The two remaining men held their hands high.

  Dud turned, thumbing shells into his gun, and started at a stumbling run toward the cave. One of his legs felt numb and he remembered a stunning shock when something had struck his knee as the shooting began. Yet as he reached the cave mouth, the vines were shoved aside and three men rushed out. Two of the would-be robbers, and behind them—Navarro!

  Shafter let out a whoop of joy and held his gun on the two riders, but they had no fight left in them. They looked pale and sick.

  Dud stared at the Mexican. “You’re safe? I thought you’d betrayed us, then I thought you’d committed suicide!”

  Navarro looked white and shaky himself, and his black eyes were large in his handsome face.

  “You forget, amigo, that I knew what was to happen! At the moment we reached the thirtieth step, I stopped and, holding my torch high, pointed ahead! There was a ledge, and on it a fallen rock that in the shadows did not look unlike a chest. They rushed forward, and poof! They were gone! It was awful, señor! A horrifying thing which I hope never to see again!”

  “Mickley? Mickley was the man who wore the white hat. When he started for the cave, I recalled the flash of silver from his gun, the same I saw on the trail!”

  “Sí, Mickley and one other, who was close behind them. These? They were frightened and ran. It was most terrible, amigo.”

  They walked back to the adobe. Beth, her face stark-white, her teeth biting her lower lip, was standing beside Benzie, who held the two riders under his shotgun.

  “You two”—Shafter motioned with his six-gun to the men from the cave—“line up over there with them others!”

  They obeyed, avoiding the bodies of Callan and the man Benzie had killed. Dud’s hard face was remorseless.

  “Your boss died back in the cave,” he said, “and there’s the other one.” He motioned to Callan. “Now who do you hombres work for?”

  A lanky man in a worn vest swallowed and said, “Shafter, I reckon we all done run out of a job! We shore have!”

  “Then I’ll give you one.” Dud Shafter’s voice was quiet. “Plant these two hombres over against the cliff and plant ’em deep. Then if I was you, I’d climb into leather and light a shuck. They tell me,” he added grimly, “they are hiring hands up in the Wind River country.”

  Gingerly, Shafter examined his knee. It was already turning black, but evidently a chunk of rock from the foundation of the house had ricocheted against his leg, for there was no sign of a bullet.

  Fanning shrugged hopelessly. “An ugly fracas,” he said, “and we ain’t no closer to the gold!”

  Dud glanced up, pulling down his pant leg. “I don’t know where it is but I’ll lay a bet Navarro knows! He wouldn’t have taken them into the cave unless he knew that wasn’t the right place.”

  “Sí.” The Mexican nodded. Turning, he pointed to the brand chiseled into the cliff behind the adobe. “See? Corb Fanning’s brand—the PV Nine—which the vaqueros, of which I was one, shortened to call the Pea Vine! Where else would a man bury his gold but under his own brand?”

  Men to Match the Hills

  Cap Moffit was a careful man. That he was forty-two years old and still alive proved that beyond a doubt, for Cap Moffit was a professional killer. He had learned the lesson of care from his first professional killing. In that case—and he had been fifteen years younger—Cap had picked a fight with his victim and shot him down and been nearly lynched as a result.

  From that day on, Cap Moffit planned every killing as painstakingly as a great general might plan a battle. And he no longer made mistakes, knowing he need make but one. Over the years he had developed a technique, a carefully worked out pattern of operation.

  He rode into the country over back trails, located the man he was to kill, and then spied upon him from cover until all his habits were known. Then, and only then, did Cap Moffit move in for the kill.

  He always waited until his man was alone. He always caught him without cover in case the first shot was not a kill. He waited until his man was on the ground, so that a startled horse could not carry off a wounded man, or deliver the body too soon among friends. And also because it made that first shot more certain.

  He never approached the body after a man fell, always went immediately away. And so far he had never failed.

  Slightly below medium height, he was of slender build, and his face was narrow and quiet, with pale blue eyes and a tight, thin-lipped mouth. He invariably wore a narrow-brimmed gray hat, scuffed and solid, a gray vest over a blue cotton shirt, and faded jeans outside of boots with run-down heels. His gray coat was usually tied over his bedroll behind his saddle.

  Cap Moffit lay comfortably on his stomach in a slight depression in the partial shade of the pines that crested Elk Ridge. Below him, in the long, green valley, was the T U Ranch, and living alone on that ranch was the man he was to kill. He was a man unknown to Moffit, although Cap knew his name was Jim Bostwick.

  “Don’t figure him for an easy one,” his employer had warned. “The man’s no gunfighter, but he gives me the impression that he’s been around. He’s tough, and he won’t scare at all. We tried that.”

  The advice bored Cap. It mattered not at all who or what Jim Bost-wick was. He would have no chance to show himself as wise or tough. Once the situation was known, Cap Moffit would kill him, and that would be that. Of this, Cap Moffit had been sure.

  Now, after five days of watching the ranch, he was no longer so positive. Men, he had discovered, were creatures of habit. All the little practices of living sooner or later fell into a pattern, and once that pattern was known, it was comparatively easy to find a point at which a man was usually motionless and within range.

  For the first three days Jim Bostwick had come from the house at five-thirty in the morning and fed his horse a bait of oats and corn. He curried the horse while it finished the grain. Not many men took the time to care for a horse so thoroughly. That completed, he brought a wooden bucket from the house and, walking to the spring which was forty steps from the door, he filled the bucket and returned. Only then did he prepare breakfast.

  By the second day Cap Moffit had decided that if the practice continued, the place for the killing was at the corral while Bostwick was currying the horse. The pole corral offered no cover, the man was practically motionless, and there was good cover for Moffit within forty yards. If the first shot failed there was time to empty the gun before Bostwick could reach shelter. And Cap Moffit had never missed once since he had entered his present profession. He did not dare miss.

  Moreover, the spot he had selected for himself offered easy access and retreat over low ground, so he could not be seen reaching his objective. On the third day the pattern was repeated, and Cap Moffit decided if it held true one more day he would act.

  He had taken every care to conceal his own presence. His camp was six miles away and carefully hidden. He never used the same vantage point on two successive days. He kept his fieldglasses shaded so their glass would not reflect light.

  Yet, despite all his care, he had given himself away, and now the hunter was also the hunted.

  ON THE MORNING of the fourth day, Jim Bostwick came from the house before Cap Moffit was settled into shooting position. Instead of going to the corral,
he went around the house and disappeared from sight behind it. Puzzled by the sudden change Cap waited, sure the frame of habit would prove too strong and that the man would return to his usual ways. Suddenly, his eyes caught a movement at the corral and he was startled to see the horse eating from a bucket. Now, what the hell! Jim Bostwick was nowhere in sight.

  Then suddenly he appeared, coming from the spring with a bucket of fresh water. At the corner of the cabin he stopped and shaded his eyes, looking up the trail. Was he expecting visitors?

  Bostwick disappeared within the house, and smoke began to climb from the chimney. Cap Moffit lit a cigarette and tried to puzzle it out. If Bostwick followed his usual pattern now he would devote more than an hour to eating and cleaning up afterward. But why had he gone around the house? How had he reached the corral without being seen? And the spring? Could he possibly be aware that he was being watched?

  Moffit dismissed that possibility. No chance of it, none at all. He had given no indication of his presence.

  Nevertheless, men do not change a habit pattern lightly, and something had changed that of Bostwick, at least for a few minutes. And why had he looked so carefully up the trail? Was he expecting someone?

  No matter. Moffit would kill Bostwick, and he would not wait much longer. Just enough to see if anyone did come.

  Moffit was rubbing out his first cigarette of the day when his eye caught a flicker of movement. A big man, even bigger than Bostwick, was standing on the edge of the brush. He carried a rifle, and he moved toward the house. The fellow wore a buckskin shirt, had massive chest and shoulders, and walked with a curious, sidelong limp. At the door he suddenly ducked inside. Faintly, Moffit heard a rumble of voices, but he was too far away to hear anything that was said.

  He scowled irritably. Who was the man in the buckskin shirt? What did he want?

  HAD HE BUT KNOWN IT, there was only one man in the cabin. That man was Bostwick himself. Stripping off the buckskin shirt, he removed the other shirts and padding he had worn under it and threw the worn-out hat to a hook. He was a big, tough man, to whom life had given much in trouble and hard work. He had come here to hold down this ranch for a friend until that friend could get back to make his own fight for it, a friend whose wife was fighting for her life now, and for the life of their child.

  Jim Bostwick knew Charley Gore wanted this ranch and that he would stop at nothing to get it. They had tried to scare him first, but that hadn’t worked. Gore had tried to ride him into a fight in town, when Gore was surrounded by his boys, and Bostwick had refused it. Knowing the game as he did, and knowing Gore, Bostwick had known this would not be the end of it.

  Naturally wary, he had returned to the ranch, and days had gone by quietly. Yet he remained alert. And then one morning as he had started for the corral, he had caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eyes. He had not stopped nor turned his head, but when he was currying the horse he got a chance to study the rim of Elk Ridge without seeming to.

  What he had seen was simple enough. A bird had started to light in a tree, then had flown up and away. Something was in that tree or was moving on the ground under it.

  It could have been any one of many things.

  CAP MOFFIT WAS a student of men and their habits. In the case of Jim Bostwick he had studied well, but not well enough. In the first place he had not guessed that Bostwick had a habit of suspicion, and that he also had a habit of liking to walk in the dark.

  It was simply that he liked the cool of night, the stars, the stillness of it. He had walked at night after supper ever since he was a boy. And so it was that the night after the bird had flown up Jim Bostwick, wearing moccasins for comfort, took a walk. Only that night he went further afield.

  He had been walking west of the ranch when he smelled dust. There was no mistaking it. He paused, listening, and heard the faint sound of hoofbeats dwindling away into distance.

  At the point where he now stood was the junction between two little-used trails, and the hoofbeats had sounded heading south down the Snow Creek trail. But where could the rider have come from? The only place, other than the ranch, would be high on Elk Ridge itself.

  Puzzled, Jim Bostwick made his way back to the ranch. If this rider had been on Elk Ridge that morning, and had caused that bird to fly up, he must have spent the day there. What was he doing there? Obviously he had been watching the ranch. Yet, Bostwick thought, he could have been mistaken about the bird. A snake or a mountain lion might have caused it to fly up. But he doubted it.

  The following morning, an hour before day, he was not in the cabin. He was lying among the rocks above Snow Creek trail, several miles from the ranch, his horse hidden well back in the brush. He did not see the rider, for the man kept off the trail in the daylight, but he heard him. Heard him cough, heard his horse’s hoofs strike stone, and knew from the sound that the rider had gone up through the trees to Elk Ridge.

  When the rider was safely out of the way, Jim Bostwick went out and studied the tracks. He then returned to the horse he had been riding and started back for the ranch, but he circled wide until he could ride down into the arroyo that skirted the north side of the ranch. This arroyo was narrow and invisible from the top of the ridge. In a grassy spot near the ranch house, he turned the horse into a small corral. It was where Tom Utterback kept his extra riding stock.

  Then he crept back to the ranch house and went about his chores in the usual way, careful to indicate no interest in the ridge. He was also careful not to stand still where he would long be visible.

  Inside the house, he prepared breakfast and considered the situation carefully. Obviously he was being watched. There was no point in watching him unless somebody meant to kill him. If the killer was that careful, he was obviously a dangerous man, and not to be taken lightly.

  Why had he not made an attempt? Because he was stalking. Because he had not yet found the right opportunity.

  Bostwick sat long over his coffee and mentally explored every approach to the situation. Putting himself in the unseen killer’s place, he decided what he would do, and the following morning he began his puzzling tactics. Going around the house, he had gone down to the arroyo, then slipped back and, by using available cover, got the feed to his own horse. The ruse of the buckskin shirt had been used to make the watcher believe another man had entered the house. If he was correct in his guess that the killer was a careful man, the fellow would wait until he knew Bostwick was alone.

  Bostwick was playing for time, working out a solution. Somehow he had to find out when the killer expected to kill, and from where. It was not long before he arrived at the same solution that had come to Cap Moffit.

  The one time he could be depended upon to be at a given spot, not too far from cover, was when he curried his horse. That black was the love of his life, and he cared for the horse as he would for a child. The logical place was from the bed of the T U Creek. Flowing as it did from Elk Ridge, it presented a natural approach. Searching it, Bostwick found a few faint tracks. The killer had been down this way, had made sure of his ground.

  Jim Bostwick prepared supper that night with a scowl on his face. Something, some idea, nagged at his consciousness but was not quite realized. There was something he had missed, but one thing he was sure of. Whoever the killer was, he had been hired by Charley Gore.

  Now it has been said that Jim Bostwick was no gunfighter. Those who knew him best knew that Jim Bostwick was a tough man, easygoing usually, but get him mad and he would walk into a den of grizzlies and drag the old man grizzly out by the scruff of his neck. He was that kind of man. Angered, he had an unreasoning courage that was absolutely without fear of consequences or death.

  Jim Bostwick was growing angry now. He didn’t like being hunted, and he liked even less the thought behind it, and the man behind it. He was going to get this killer, and then he was going to get Charley Gore.

  Yet he was not without the usual rough, ironic cowboy sense of humor so common in the west. The
killer was up there on the hill hiding in the brush, and all the time the intended victim knew it. Suddenly, he began to chuckle. An idea had come to him, one he would enjoy.

  Getting his pick and shovel he went out beside the house at a place just far enough away, but one which allowed no nearby cover, and commenced to dig. High on Elk Ridge, Cap Moffit stared down at Bost-wick, puzzled by the digging. He became more puzzled as the hole became outlined. It was about six feet long and probably no more than half that wide. Jim Bostwick was digging a grave!

  While digging, the idea that had been nagging at Bostwick’s memory flowered suddenly. There had been other cases such as this. Lone men murdered without a clue, killed by some hidden marksman who then had vanished. There had been a family of three, slain one after another, over in the Panhandle.

  Cap Moffit!

  JIM BOSTWICK WALKED into the cabin and put the coffeepot on the stove. Nothing much was known about Cap Moffit. He was a rumor, perhaps a legend. A rancher had hinted once, at the beginning of a range war, that the proper way to end one was to send for Moffit. It had been a casual remark, yet it seemed to have information behind it. After that, there had been other stories, guarded, indefinite. It seemed that some of the more powerful cattlemen knew where they could get a killer when one was wanted.

  Cap Moffit had been suspected of the Panhandle killings. His method had been talked about—the careful planning, the unerring marksmanship, the cold efficiency.

  Now Jim Bostwick was sure the same man was lying up there on Elk Ridge. Of course, there were other killers for hire, but none with Moffit’s careful, almost precise manner of killing. Realizing who he had to deal with sharpened his attention. If that was Cap Moffit, this was going to be anything but easy.

  Cap had the reputation of shooting but once—and he did not miss.

  Yet that in itself might be an advantage if Bostwick could continue to prevent him from getting the chance he wanted—or lead him into a trap, believing he had it.