“Well, if you won’t do more’n you have,” Melville snapped, “then I reckon us ranchers will have to protect ourselves.”
Oakes leaned back again, shifting uncomfortably. “It’s not that I won‘t, Daryl, it’s that all I’ve got is me and my night man. Sure’s I ride out to your spread, the coyotes are hitting the Double Diamond. I ride there, and they strike Leach’s Lazy L.”
“As Miss Starbuck said, Quince, track them down.”
“Don’t think I haven’t tried. But once off the flatlands, we lose them up in the rock canyons. Can’t even get a line on where the cattle’s being sold, either, no sign of any of your herds showing up anywhere in the territory. It’s just like the mountains opened up and swallowed them whole, and I tell you, it’s got me buffaloed.”
“Well, I guess that means me and the others will have to form a vigilante committee,” Melville said, glaring as he leaned over the desk again. “I know it’s illegal, but we’re fed up with losing our men and cattle.”
Deputy Oakes brooded, as if considering the ultimatum. “Daryl,” he finally said, “I’ll ask you not to go off half cocked. Let me wire my boss in Laramie to send some more deputies. I’ll scatter them around, and we’re sure to get a lead on where the rustlers are rat-holed. You tell that to the others, will you?”
“I’ll try,” Melville replied. “They might not listen.”
“Make them listen. Letting your crews run around with itchy trigger fingers can only lead to worse trouble, not less. I mean this for your own good. I’d really regret having to arrest you or any of your men for taking the law into your own hands.”
“All right, Quince, I’ll string along with you awhile longer.” Straightening, Melville started for the door. He paused, hand on the knob, to add, “But things have to change around here, and fast.”
“They will, Daryl,” Deputy Oakes replied with an earnest heartiness. “You’ve got my word. You can count on it.”
Melville nodded and opened the door, then hesitated again to look at Jessica. “Coming, Miss Starbuck?”
It was less a question than a command, and normally such a tone would have provoked Jessica. But she had no more to say to Deputy Oakes, and plenty to ask Daryl Melville. Besides, she was interested in knowing why he’d raised his eyebrows when he heard her name. So, with a parting smile to the deputy, she went out the door that Melville was holding open for her.
Before she could utter a word, Melville started angling across the street, his long swift strides hard for her to follow.
“Where are you going so fast?” she asked.
“To get my father,” he said, slowing so she could catch up. His onyx eyes were flashing more irately than ever. “He’s over in the Thundermug, half swacked by now. The damn dog-bleeding crooks.”
“Who?”
“Halford and Kendrick, bartender and gambler, the owners of the dive. If one doesn’t rob you, the other one will. Say, by any chance would you be related to the Starbucks in Texas?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I’m one of the ranchers in the Circle Star co-op.”
“Oh? Which one?”
“Spraddled M. M for Melville.” Reaching the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street, he stopped and smiled at Jessica. “Daryl Melville. And my father, Tobias, of course; he started it after driving cattle up from Texas back in the early seventies.”
“You sound proud of it.”
“Dirt-proud, mostly, but it’s home,” he responded wryly, and gestured down the street, where the trail continued west to Garrett. “There’s a fork in the road a fair piece from here, that goes to five spreads back in the slopes, including ours and the Flying W. There ain’t none of us but hasn’t fought everything Mother Nature has to throw, and we were winning until this thieving and murdering came along. Hate to say it, but you rode into a range that’s raring to explode.”
“I’ve done that before,” Jessica said quietly.
“I admire your spunk,” he said, starting up the boardwalk again, “but it’s too bad you didn’t know this before buying out Mrs. Waldemar.”
“I haven’t. My only interest is to protect the investment Starbuck has in her herd. In all your herds, if possible. But are you ranchers truly serious about forming a vigilante committee?”
Melville gave a laugh, short and bitter. “I was pure bluffing. The big ranchers don’t need to, they’ve got their own guards. And the smaller ranchers are afraid that to fight back would goad the rustlers into wiping them out, man, woman, and child. So all they’re willing to do is stand pat like sheep, doing nothing ‘cept bleat and leak in their pants, if you’ll pardon the expression, Miss Starbuck.”
“Jessie.”
“All right, but only if you call me Daryl. And don’t get me wrong, but I can’t see how you hope to help the lady, Jessie.”
“First, by riding out there this afternoon for a talk.”
“Won’t make it before dark, I’m afraid, and the Flying W isn’t much set up for overnight guests. Or are you already expected?”
“Not especially, no. I’d better wait till tomorrow morning.”
“Well, you can leave word with her crew that you’re coming,” he said caustically, thumbing toward a knot of horses tied in front of the saloon. “Crews are like mavericks, they have to be taught who’s boss and be ridden on short rein. Otherwise they run wild.”
Melville moved through the batwings without holding them open for Jessie; it never dawned on him that a rowdy saloon would be a place she’d visit. She followed anyway, her curiosity piqued by his comment about the Flying W crew, and stood unobtrusively along the wall by the entrance. The Thundermug was aptly named, she thought.
Melville was brushing between the mostly empty tables, thrusting toward the card tables and chuckaluck layout clustered near the rear. It was far too early for much action in the saloon, not even any drink-caging bar girls around yet, and what patrons there were seemed more interested in boozing than gambling. Only a small group of players and kibitzers were gathered at a single smoke-obscured card table, and from what Jessica could see of it, there didn’t appear to be any high-stakes excitement going on.
The drinkers were mainly in two separate clumps at the shiny mahogany bar that stretched along one wall. The nearer men were sullenly quiet, a ferret-eyed watchfulness on their lanky, stubbled faces, a challenging bravado to their display of bristling weapons. The other bunch were nondescript cowpunchers, wearing pistols out of habit, the tools of their trade the rope and ring and branding iron. It was from them that Jessica heard the dull roar of talking and laughing, the clink of glasses and bottles.
Behind the bar, two white-aproned tenders were busily pouring. Brackets and chandeliers reflected in the polished backbar mirrors, and gleamed against the huge portrait of a buxom reclining nude. Seated on a high stool next to the nude, presiding over it all, was a frog of a fellow with slicked-down balding hair and a handlebar mustache, a nugget chain looped across a flowered vest, a torpedo cigar clenched in his gold-capped teeth.
He, Jessie surmised, would be Halford, one of the owners. And the boys happily lapping up his rotgut would be Mrs. Waldemar’s crew. Melville was right—they were going to have to learn some loyalty and earn their keep. Before Jessica or anyone else would have a prayer to saving the Flying W, those men would have to be out there riding, and riding with everything they had. And the more Jessica looked at them and considered their failings, the more incensed she became.
Finally, beyond endurance, Jessie strode up to the crew. “Drink hearty,” she snapped in a cold, cutting voice. “Because this’ll be the last drink you’ll have on the Flying W payroll.”
Startled heads turned. A hush fell over the bar.
Then one of the men chuckled cynically. “Aw, hell, it’s only a female.” He was a bowlegged, weatherbeaten man with a nut-shaped head of narrow, sly features; he was older than the others, who were rawboned youths with devil-may-care in their eyes. “Don’t pay her no mind, boys,
you know how women go on the prod.”
Jessica eyed him sharply. “You must be the foreman.”
“Uh-huh. Nealon’s the name, but you can call me Lloyd.”
“I call you a bum.”
“What?” He reared back, glowering. “Just who d‘you think you are, comin’ in here where you don’t belong, pesterin’ and insultin’ us?”
“I’m Starbuck,” she said flatly. “By contract, I own the beef you’re not herding. Mrs. Waldemar wrote that she had problems, and now I can sure understand why, with a slob like you rodding a pack of lazy, elbow-bending drunks.”
The others were staring dumbfounded, but Nealon was growing crimson, champing at the bit. “Okay, sweets, enough of your gag.”
“It’s no gag. And if you think it is, Nealon, you’re dumber than you’re acting already.” She stepped closer, surveying the crew, her hands in fists on her hips. “Now open your ears, because I’m going to say this only once. I’ve come a long way to help the Flying W, and I don’t have the time or patience to fool around. I’m going to be out there early tomorrow morning, and any of you who aren’t up and out working, and working hard, will be fired.”
A babbling broke out among the crew—all except for Nealon, who was now the one to stare gawking, silent and stupified.
Before they could collect their wits, Jessie pivoted to stalk away. And two things happened, almost simultaneously. Ki walked through the batwings and, seeing her, started across. And from the card table rose an infuriated bellow: “You skunk, Kendrick, I oughta break every bone in your body with my bare hands!”
“Lay a finger on me and I’ll kill you!” a second voice shouted almost as loudly. “I run a friendly, honest game here, and your old man sat in of his own free will. Now get him and get out!”
Jessie and Ki, along with most everybody at the bar, headed toward the back, joining the watchers around the table. Cards and chips were scattered all over. Two players were seated with their eyes wide, mouths shut, hands flat on the green felt—the best position to hold when a game was in dispute. A third player was a bull-bodied, whiskery brute who was obviously enjoying the ruckus and was feeling immune, lounging back in his chair with a contemptuous smirk pasted on his brutal, scarred face.
Slumped in a fourth chair, his head resting on the table, was a white-haired elderly man. Tobias Melville, Jessie assumed. His son Daryl was towering behind him, face gnarled with rage and nearly as red as Nealon’s had been. Across from them, standing where his chair had tipped over, was the fifth player, a squat, plumpish man with a cherubic face and pouty lips, garbed in a black cutaway coat, ruffled shirt, string tie, and a rakishly tilted green Keevil hat.
As Jessie and Ki approached, Melville was snarling at him, “Sure, you run it friendly and honest, all right. About as friendly as a rattler, Kendrick, and you give a man just about as much chance.”
“I won’t take no more of this,” the gambler warned.
“You’ll take it,” Melville raged heedlessly, one hand gripping his father’s lax shoulder. “You’ve been taking everything else from us for months now, when you know we can’t pay, only go deeper into debt to you. You and Halford have been addling him with whiskey till he can’t tell an ace from a queen. Just look what you’ve done to him!”
“Yeah, the old fool’s passed out cold,” the smirking player cut in snidely. The other players stayed quiet and still, unwilling to intrude. “Tell you what, Melville, I’ll help you. I’ll help you carry him out and dump him in the closest horse trough.”
The man snickered at his own joke. He was big enough to get away with it, taller than Melville and heftier by a good ten pounds. But Melville was beyond caution now, and he focused all his pent-up fury on the sneering giant, his voice like the edge of a scythe.
“Shut your mouth, Volpes, before I shut it for you. I’ve had it with you too, just like the other ranchers have had it. We’re out there working, trying to live decent, but for some reason all you can think to do is sneer and bully like the king of the shitpile.”
Volpes rose swinging.
An uppercutting haymaker crunched against Melville’s jaw with a meaty impact, sending him reeling off balance. Wincing with pain, Melville shook his head to clear it, falling back a pace to regain his footing, as Volpes confidently charged to polish him off.
Melville ducked the onrushing roundhouse fist, dancing aside and striking back with a jolting right-left to Volpes’s stomach and heart. The attack caught Volpes surprised and unguarded, but he moved in undaunted, hammering with abandon. Melville shifted and feinted, evading the blows, stabbing two lefts to Volpes’s face so fast that one had scarcely hit before the other had landed.
Then a roundhouse knuckler cracked alongside Melville’s cheek, momentarily stunning him. Before he could recover, Volpes got an arm around him and smashed him twice in the face with stiff, short-range punches. Melville butted him hard, breaking free, and launched another one-two combination. His left opened a gash over Volpes’s eye, the right flattened the bridge of his nose. Volpes staggered, spurting blood from his nostrils, and the customers yelled.
And the gambler went for a belly-gun. Or at least it appeared that way, Kendrick barking an oath and darting his hand inside his coat, where a stubby-barreled weapon would be hidden in a shoulder holster.
Before Kendrick could produce whatever he was after, Ki took a step forward, his arm blurring up and out. A throwing dagger winked across the table. Kendrick choked on his oath, his hand still dipped inside his coat, and stared down at the jutting hilt of the knife, which had sliced through his coat pocket, skinning his ribs.
“The next will be closer,” Ki called, smiling.
Kendrick grinned weakly and removed his hand.
The fighters traded blows, Volpes the stronger and cruelly effective, and Melville the faster and angrily impervious. Ignoring the battering jabs and chops, Melville returned rights and lefts until he’d wiped Volpes’s smirk off his face, and sealed up the eye with the cut over it. Volpes dove, grappling, to wrap him in another crushing hug, but this time Melville was prepared, catching Volpes by the beard and jerking his face downward, mashing Volpes’s already broken nose against his rising right knee. Pushing Volpes away then, Melville hit him a half-dozen more times in both eyes. Like a blundering, blind bear, Volpes tried to slug back, but Melville went under the swings and pummeled him in the belly and face, driving Volpes against the table, overturning it, punching him the length of the saloon and pinning him against the bar. Dazed and bleeding, Volpes sagged to his knees, bewildered by the unleashed fury of Melville’s assault.
Melville hauled Volpes to his feet, while the crowd closed in around them, baying for the finishing blow. They weren’t disappointed. Melville brought his right fist up from somewhere down around his boots. It hit Volpes’s chin with the sound heard in a slaugherhouse, when a steer was brained with a maul. Volpes arched backward and slid five feet along the sawdust-covered planks, coming to rest when his head struck a brass spittoon. He didn’t get up.
Melville stood catching his breath, looking moodily down at Volpes. Then, turning, he thrust through the congratulatory throng to where his father sprawled snoring on the floor, the old man having fallen there when the table overturned. Jessica and Ki followed, and Ki helped Melville pick up his father and dust him off.
Kendrick, who was righting the table, paused to give the two men a murderous glare. “From now on, you’re both barred from here.”
Melville, misunderstanding, snapped, “That’s dandy by me. I’ve been trying long enough to stop Dad from coming in this snakepit.”
“Oh, Toby’s welcome anytime. I mean you—and him.”
Melville regarded Ki and then the gambler again, and then he frowned quizzically. “Say, isn’t that a knife sticking outta your coat?”
Ki answered for the gambler, “He was trying to do what your opponent couldn’t. With lead. I thought it wise to discourage him.”
Livid, Kendrick blurted, “W
hy, you slant-eyed—!” And then promptly shut up, seeing Ki smile the same pleasant smile as before.
Now Melville laughed. “Serves you right, you sidewind er,” he said to Kendrick, and lifting his father by the shoulders, he began carrying him toward the front. Passing the bar, where the customers were thirstily debating the finer details of his fight, Melville glanced back and grinned at Ki, who had hold of the father’s ankles. “I guess I owe you my thanks, Mr...”
“Ki.”
“Just Ki, no ‘mister,”’ Jessie added, opening the batwings.
Outside, Melville said, “Our wagon’s by the barber shop.” Starting across the street, he gave Jessica a sidelong appraisal, seeming to want to say something, but only managing to clear his throat a number of times. Finally it came out: “Maybe I shouldn’t ask this, Miss Star—uh, Jessie—but are you... with Ki?”
“You bet. Ki’s my guardian and sometime chaperone,” she explained teasingly, intrigued by the way Melville’s bruised mouth went from a crestfallen droop when he’d asked, to a smiling curve when she’d answered.
Melville stopped in back of a scruffy one-horse farm wagon, whose swaybacked horse dozed placidly at the hitching rail. Opening the wagon’s tailgate to climb up inside, Melville started to speak again with faltering embarrassment.
“This is plumb shameful. Please don’t think the worse of me or Dad, Jessie. It’s mostly on account of him being so powerful lonely and sad, ever since my mother died four years ago.”
“I understand, Daryl. Misery makes it easy for men like Halford and Kendrick to take advantage—and take your money.”
“You don’t know the half of it. We’re in hock up to our ears to Kendrick, and we’d have to sell out or simply give him the whole blamed Spraddled M, if we ever had to pay him off all at once.”
“You think he’s rigged the games to win it?”
“He doesn’t want our ranch,” Melville replied, as he and Ki slid his father into the wagon bed. “Besides, Dad plays so badly, Kendrick would have to cheat to lose. What makes you ask, Jessie?”
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