Yet this man was not going to the Basin. He was leaving the train at Alamitos.
She became aware that he was looking past her with sudden sharp attention. His eyes flickered over the car again, returning to the seats behind her, and involuntarily she turned to look. The man who had been seated back there was gone.
The train had made no stops, and this was the only passenger car. Yet the man was gone.
Obviously disturbed by something he did not understand, the big gunman’s eyes rested briefly on her, and for an instant he seemed about to speak. The train slowed and steam drifted past the windows. She picked up her bag and walked down the aisle.
Conscious of being stared at, she glanced at a stocky man in a broadcloth suit and derby hat, his florid face and glassy blue eyes directed at her with singularly disagreeable attention. She averted her eyes, yet she had a feeling his interest was not entirely due to the fact that she was a woman.
When she descended to the platform Ed Flynn was waiting for her near the corner of the freight depot.
Nancy Kerrigan was a girl who found her home attractive. She had gone to school in the East, but for her the world revolved around Alamitos, the high plains of her own ranch, her cattle, the men who worked for her, and particularly, the wild, free country.
She had lived at Kaybar most of her life except for her time at school, and a few visits to friends, and for her it had always seemed the ultimate in security. Now that security was menaced in a way she had never believed would be possible. And with it, her whole future was at stake.
Ed Flynn took the bag from her hand and started toward the buckboard. Flynn had come West with her father and uncle, and had helped to found the Kaybar. Since her father’s death he had been foreman. No businessman, he was nevertheless an excellent cattleman, understanding range conditions and the fattening of cattle as few men did.
She drew his attention to the straw-haired gunman. Flynn put her bag in the buckboard and then said quietly, “Whoever is paying the bills is going first class. That’s Buckdun.”
The name was legend. Buck Dunn, shortened by common usage to Buckdun, was known wherever range riders gathered. A professional fighting man, at times a bounty hunter, rarely a town-tamer, he was always a hunter and killer of men.
Nancy Kerrigan was familiar with cow-country gossip. Often enough the fighting in cattle or sheep wars was done by the hands on the job, without importing gunmen, and many a rancher was prepared to handle his own shooting chores. But when men like Buckdun came to town, somebody was preparing for war.
As Flynn helped Nancy into the buckboard she saw him glance across the street, and two Kaybar men sauntered from the walk in front of the store and got into their saddles. They were Pete Gaddis and Johnny Otero.
“Armed escort?”
Ed Flynn nodded grimly. “Two weeks has done a lot to this country.”
“Has there been trouble?”
“Nugent lost fifty head of steers. He trailed them south along the malpais and then they just seemed to drop off the world.”
“Rustlers?” Nancy was incredulous.
“When your father and I came into this country we didn’t have a neighbor within a hundred miles in any direction, leaving out Indians, but this country is changing fast. Yes, there are rustlers working now. For the first time.”
Nancy waved at Gaddis and Otero.
Johnny Otero had grown up on the Kaybar where his father had been one of their first hands. He was New Mexican, his family coming up from Mexico more than a hundred years before. On his mother’s side the family had been living around Santa Fe since before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Now nineteen, Johnny was considered the best rifle shot in the country.
Pete Gaddis had been at the ranch only four years, the newest of their hands with one exception, and he had a reputation for being a tough man, in any kind of a fight. Gaddis had been a shotgun guard on the Cheyenne to Deadwood stage, deputy marshal in a tough cowtown, and a warrior in more than one range war. A short, solidly built man, he was a top hand.
Flynn struck a match with his left hand and cupped it in his left palm to his cigar. “Burris and two strangers filed a homestead on a piece of Nugent’s range, claiming it was government land and open for filing,” he said. “You know Tom Nugent. He flew off the handle and burned them out and there was a shooting. The homesteaders showed fight and shot a Nugent rider out of the saddle. One of the strangers died right there and the last I heard Nugent and his crowd were hunting the other one off east of here.”
“What happened to Burris?”
“He lit out for Alamitos like his tail was afire, and they let him go.”
Nancy Kerrigan started to explain the situation to Flynn, then decided to wait until she had thought it out and decided upon a course. Ed Flynn was good at handling men and cattle, but had little imagination and was hesitant to offer advice. The business side of the ranch she had been handling even before her father died. Besides, the decision must be her own, as Kaybar was her own.
“Do you think,” she asked suddenly, “that Port Baldwin had anything to do with those squatters?”
Flynn was astonished. He flicked the ash from his cigar against the whipstock. “I never gave it any thought,” he said honestly. “You take after the colonel, Nancy, you surely do. That sounds like the colonel himself.”
Alone in her room, Nancy took the pins from her hat and removed it, fluffing her hair a little, and thinking about the results of her trip to Santa Fe.
Outside on a far green slope cattle fed, and just over that low hill the streams all flowed toward the Pacific Ocean, while here, where the ranch was situated, they flowed toward the Atlantic. The low hill out there was the Continental Divide, although it could not be guessed from a casual glance.
Supposedly her trip to Santa Fe had been like all the others, to shop for new clothes or things for the ranch. She had shopped, but her major purpose had been to consult her father’s lawyer.
To Nancy, the Kaybar was one of the few permanent things in a changing world until she overheard a casual comment in the store in Alamitos one day while getting her mail.
A couple of drummers waiting to see the proprietor had been discussing land titles and their general insecurity.
The idea nagged at her consciousness until she went to her father’s desk and the big iron safe and got out the ranch papers. There were bills, receipts, records of cattle bought or sold, payroll records, and lists of expenditures and planned development, but there was no deed.
Everything had been kept with meticulous care, and had there been a deed it would have been among those papers.
When her father and uncle had come West title deeds had no importance. They stopped where there was water and grass and they “owned” land by right of possession. That right was never questioned in the early days except by roving Indians. Colonel Kerrigan had talked business with the Indians and had bought land from them. Several times since then he had, when the years were bad and the Indians hungry, given them a few head of steers.
For a long time there had been nobody else within miles, the ranch had grown larger, the few deals made had been by driving cattle East, selling to the Army or to survey parties.
It had taken the trip to Santa Fe to show Nancy how flimsy was this rock upon which she was building her life.
Her father and uncle had settled on the land eighteen years before when she was scarcely three, and she had come to live on Kaybar when she was five. Twice, before she left for school, she had survived Indian attacks on the ranch, both by roving bands of Paiutes.
They had a claim, the judge assured her, by right of possession, and such claims were usually allowed, but settlers were streaming West and Congress was looking favorably on the claims of the settlers wanting land. That her father had bought land from the Indians might not help at all, for another Indian could always be found to dispute the right of the original Indians to sell land at all.
Out on the knoll west
of the ranch house, and not quite to the Continental Divide, were buried her father, her aunt, and uncle, and three cowhands who had died in fights to save the ranch from Indians. Buried in a neat row along the farther fence of the little cemetery were nine Paiutes and three White Mountain Apaches who had died trying to massacre the ranchers.
Nancy got out the carefully drawn map her father had prepared of the range where their cattle grazed. The ranch lay south of the railroad and, roughly, from the Divide to the lava beds, called the malpais, and south to the Datil Mountains. What was called the home ranch, however, comprised fifty-five sections of land. With the exception of a few widely scattered meadows used to grow hay against the winter, none of it could be considered farm land.
For a long time she studied the map. It was a good map, for her father had been an Army engineer in the war with Mexico, and had had good training in the field. Every waterhole was carefully marked as well as seeps and such places where water might be found in the wet years. Upon those waterholes the ranch depended; without them the ranchers could not exist, nor could anyone else.
Cattle would walk miles for water, but there was a point beyond which it would not pay for they walked off good beef. That was why several of the waterholes on the range had been developed by themselves, maintained by themselves, to keep the stock from wandering farther than necessary.
From earliest childhood she had been taught to accept responsibility, and to make her own decisions and abide by them. “Every youngster wants to be grownup,” her father had said, “but the difference between a child and an adult is not years, rather it’s a willingness to accept responsibility, to be responsible for one’s own actions.”
It was a lesson she learned well, and in the years since the death of her father the ranch under her management had earned money and unproved in value. It was she who had conceived the idea of digging for water and thus creating new waterholes.
Nancy went to the door. Flynn was standing near the corral, talking to Pete Gaddis.
“Ed, will you come here a minute? And don’t go away, Pete. I want to talk to you, too.”
When Flynn was seated she had Juana, the Mexican girl, bring coffee. Then she explained why she had gone to Santa Fe. He sat very still, not looking at her, but tracing imaginary patterns on the table with his finger.
“Ed,” she said finally, “we shall have to move fast. I have a bad feeling about all this. I want you to file on Iron Springs. I’d like Pete Gaddis to file on the Blue Hole, and Johnny Otero on Rock House. The ranch will provide everything needed and when the land has been proved up, we will buy it from you.”
“How will we manage it? If we all start a run on Santa Fe, somebody will start asking questions.”
“You’ll go by yourself. I want you to ride to Horse Springs, Ed, and take the stage from there. Come back the same way. I’d like it if nobody knew you were gone.”
He glanced up quickly. Ed Flynn did not know whether Nancy Kerrigan knew about Gladys Soper or not. Nancy was, Ed often thought, a very uncertain girl sometimes. Maybe she knew that he had been keeping Gladys and maybe she did not. Of one thing he was sure; Nancy Kerrigan would never admit it if she did.
“Nobody” meant Gladys, too. And that could make a difficulty.
“It will have to be you, Ed,” Nancy was saying. “They know you and they will file for you without creating any talk. And that is the way I want it.”
Gladys had plans for the next few days. This trip would raise hob with those plans, and Gladys could be difficult when she wished. Damn it, if there was only some way …
“And, Ed. Let’s double the saddle stock we’re keeping up. We’ll be doing a lot of riding from now on.”
It was the coming of the railroad that changed everything, Nancy thought. True, they had made a lot of money supplying beef to the workers when the road was being built but, when the railroad went in, the riffraff came.
That man on the train, with the florid face and the pale-blue eyes, now. Who was he. Why was he here? And why had he tried to attract her attention?
Had he known who she was? Had he guessed why she was in Santa Fe?
Chapter 3
KETTLEMAN PAUSED abruptly upon seeing the man sprawled in the brush. Standing close against the trunk of a pine, Kettleman surveyed the area with extreme care. Only when he was positive that he was alone did he approach the fallen man.
He lay on a gentle slope and, for concealment, he could not have fallen in a better position. Approached from any other angle he would have been invisible.
Kettleman knelt and examined the man. He was not dead. His pulse was strong. He had lost blood, but from a quick examination, Kettleman could find only a flesh wound. A bullet had cut through the heavy muscle under his arm.
Gathering a few sticks of curl leaf and dry cedar, Kettleman built a small, smokeless fire and when he had heated some water, he bathed the wound. As he worked the man moaned, then opened his eyes and stared at Kettleman.
“Who are you?”
“That’s what Nugent asked me. And you’d better be getting out of here because he will be coming back this way.”
With an effort the man sat up. “Can you carry double? I got to hide. Nugent figures to kill me.”
“Sorry … I have no horse.” Kettleman gathered his gear and stowed it. “And don’t ask further help from me because you know this country better than I do.”
“You ain’t much help.” The wounded man stared at him sourly. “What am I going to do?”
“Your problem. But I’d begin by getting out of here, because I do think Nugent intends to kill you, and I don’t blame him. You aren’t much good.”
The wounded man’s face flushed angrily. “What the hell do you know?”
“I know I cleaned your wound and you didn’t even take time to thank me.” Kettleman slung his packs again and picked up his weapons. “Whoever hired you had to go pretty far to find a man.”
“Who said anybody hired me?” The man’s eyes were cunning.
“Your kind is always hired,” Kettleman replied, “and seldom worth the cost. You’re on your own.”
He turned sharply into the brush, not wanting his back to the man, then changed course and went into the deepest part, moving softly as possible. Turning west again he passed the ruins of an old pueblo, and paused to study his back trail. There was no sign of movement. Then he examined the country around him, and chose the best route toward the lava beds. He wanted to keep off the horizon, not being eager to reply to inquiries nor to encounter any of Nugent’s men.
An hour later, from the crest of a ridge he could see far and away the smoke of a train. The air was very clear and fresh, and he breathed deeply. Off to the north he could see two mesas lifting their square rock shoulders against the sky. One of them was topped by buildings and a thread of smoke went up from them. That would be Acoma, the sky city.
The sky was very blue, here and there a fluff of white cloud. It was a lovely country, and too bad he had so little time left to enjoy it.
For the first time he felt a sharp twinge of regret, and he walked on with long, swinging strides. It would not do to find things to love at this late date, even so fair a land. Inside him this thing was growing, slowly capturing his life, and it was better that he go remembering nothing that he wanted to remember.
There was a place on the edge of Ceboletta Mesa that he had to find, where the mesa sent a rocky shoulder toward the lava beds. That point was the key to the opening he was looking for.
Several times he sat down to rest, although he did not like to sit down, and had never been one to delay short of a goal. Yet his strength was waning and his legs were growing very tired. The walking here was nothing like the walking he had done behind hunting dogs in Virginia or New Jersey. This was rough and rocky, and he had climbed nearly three thousand feet since leaving the railroad.
Skirting the edge of a wooded area he crossed a plateau dotted with small lakes and emerged within fifty yards of
the point he had been seeking. Before him, and some distance lower down, lay the lava beds, the dreaded malpais.
Like a fat, enormous snake it lay stretched across the country, a black and ugly mass of twisted, rope-like rock, clinkers and piles of lava, that looked like hell with the fires out, filling its sterile sink and winding south and north for many miles.
This was desolation. This was what remained after Mount Taylor and El Tintero spewed forth their flaming rock and drenched the country with liquid fire so that the Indians fled the country in terror and were long in returning.
The river of lava had flowed southward, killing everything in its path, flattening stone houses or flowing through them, flowing downhill, piling up to cross over hills, falling in cascades down steep cliffs, until finally it solidified into a great stream of natural glass, leaving behind all the formations lava can create. Hardening from the outside, often the lava continued to flow beneath the surface and left vast caverns, roofed over in places by blisters of apparently solid rock that was actually eggshell thin.
Splitting at places into separate streams it left islands of grass like sunken parks, dotted with trees and surrounded by walls of lava sometimes fifty feet high. Underneath were perpetual ice caves.
It was in one of these islands of green, Kettleman knew, that Flint had found his hideout.
No tracks or other evidence of travel lay in the bottom of the narrow crack Flint had followed to the hidden oasis. So narrow throughout most of its length that a horseman’s feet brushed the lava walls on either side, it was at no place wider than a tall man’s outstretched arms could reach.
It wound, twisted, bent sharply and seemed to end a dozen times before reaching a rock-walled acre of grass and trees. Against the wall, Flint had built a rock house, using the building blocks provided by the lava flow itself. Adjoining the rock house he built a wall, closing off a cave mouth to be used as a stable. By facing an undercut cliff with stone, he had constructed a passage from the cabin to the stable so he could move from one to the other in perfect shelter.
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