He had followed the lone trails, the ancient trails, the silent and mysterious trails with Flint. Wherever that strange and silent man wished to go, he seemed to know a hidden way to travel. For days on end they had ridden without speaking, their campfires surrounded by a vast and empty stillness.
He remembered the pungent smell of cedar, the smokiness of damp wood, the crisp crackle of pine, the deep red glow of dying fires, the sound of wind in the mesquite. How many fires had he fed with wood or buffalo chips? He had traveled the far rim of civilization, moving like a ghost across lands known only to roaming Indians.
Three years. Never once had Flint told him what they were about. Always he was left far behind to care for their horses and wait. Suddenly then, Flint would ride up and they would shift saddles and be gone again.
For Flint never directed his steps toward the saloons and gambling houses. After the jobs he did they would ride away into the wildest, most remote country, and then, sometimes, Flint would talk for long hours of the desert, the mountains, of how to survive under all conditions and how to live.
Kettleman got slowly to his feet and walked down to the water. He stood there, watching it chuckling over the stones. The gnawing in his stomach was always there now. There was but little time left.
Yet already some of the quietness of this place was seeping into him. The tension was going out of him, his muscles were mysteriously relaxing.
It was long after the stars came out before he slept, and then for a time he was dreamless, but he awakened, and sat up in the chill night and lighted his pipe. He walked to the door, and the air felt strangely damp, the stars very clear. He listened into the night, but heard no sound.
That girl on the train. He remembered the clear, honest way she had looked at him, the grace of her movements. Why had he not met such a girl when he was still alive?
For now he would die, like a wolf as he had lived, a lone wolf, in a dark place, snapping at his wounds. He had lived with bared teeth, and it was proper that he die that way.
That Gaddis now, Kettleman reflected. He liked the fellow. He had a slow, easy, half-amused way of talking that Kettleman liked.
There was a fight building. The straw-haired man on the train — a warrior if he had ever seen one.
And suddenly then he thought of Porter Baldwin.
A shrewd, tough, dangerous man. A promoter. Hardly a Western man, but one who never moved without a purpose, and one with considerable experience in the knock-down and drag-out world of finance. He had been a blockade runner during the Civil War, running cotton and rifles through to the Confederate side, and selling information to the North.
He had been involved in the efforts to corner the gold market that Jim Fisk and Jay Gould had supposedly started.
If Porter Baldwin was out here, it was not because of cattle. There was money in cattle and they might be a side line for Baldwin, but he would not involve himself personally unless there was more behind it than the profits from cattle.
Well, it was no business of his. He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and went inside. When he awakened the sun was high, and it was the first good night’s sleep he had had in a long time.
The gnawing pain was in his stomach, so he got out of bed and prepared a light breakfast. He moved slowly, taking his time about everything. As he ate, he planned his day. He must first of all find the passage to the inner island of grass. It was doubtful that, after these years, any horses remained, though they had been fine stock, young and in good shape and, Flint had assured him, there was feed for a dozen head and a water supply fed by the same stream that flowed through this oasis.
The few articles of food he had brought with him were scarcely sufficient for three days of sparse living, so he must go after supplies, and he wanted to pick up a box of books he had shipped to himself at Horse Springs.
Two other cases of books and supplies he had shipped to Alamitos, not wanting to attract attention by appearing in either place too often, but he would need pack animals to get the stuff back here. However there was no hurry about anything but grub, and he wanted to get enough to last.
Flint had left the horses, a stallion and two or three mares, in the inner and larger basin. If they were alive they would be sixteen or seventeen years old. But there might be young stuff. The way to the basin lay through one of the long lava tunnels with which this place was riddled.
He walked down the passage Flint had made to join the cabin to the stable. He had simply taken slabs of rock without mortar and walled in an overhang of the cliff. In the back of the stable there was a manger built against the wall, a dark alcove behind it. Going into that stall he laid hold of the manger. It swung out on concealed hinges and he stepped back into the alcove and swung the manger into place behind him. The tunnel was there before him.
A shelf, head-high was on the right.
He put his hand up and found a few candles. He lighted one of them and walked into the passage. The height was uniform, not over eight feet, and the tunnel was for the greater distance about twice that in width. He counted nearly a hundred steps before he saw light.
He walked out into a little park.
There were perhaps three hundred acres of good grass here. Along the far side there were a dozen cottonwoods and some willows, and there were scattered pines.
Standing at the mouth of the lava conduit, he counted seven horses, heads up, staring at him. He took three steps into the open so they could see him plainly.
One horse, a big bay standing at least seventeen hands, threw his head up sharply and blew loudly. He trotted forward a few steps, then pawed the ground.
“Want to fight, do you?” Kettleman talked softly to the horse. “I’m friendly, old man. Don’t hunt trouble from me.”
His eyes went to the other horses. Young stock — a couple of three-or four-year-olds, and a couple that were not such young stock. There was another horse, a mare, that was considerably older.
Flint had been a quiet man with horses, but he made pets of them all. Kettleman called them, the long, crooning call that Flint had used.
The old mare’s head came around sharply. Did she remember? Did she remember enough?
Some said a horse did not remember for long, yet others claimed the opposite. He called again, and walked a few steps farther, holding out a piece of sugar as Flint always had.
Several of the horses began to walk away, the red stallion standing guard, head up, nostrils flared. The old mare stared at him. Tentatively, she came a step or two nearer, stretching out her nose as if to sniff.
He stood still, liking the warmth on his back. The sun was bright, a bee was droning among the brush near the wall of the park. He called again and went another step. The stallion shied, trotted a few steps to one side, then wheeled and trotted back. The mare stood her ground.
Yet she was nervous, and he did not want to frighten her. He waited awhile longer and then went toward her. Just as she was about to shy away, he tossed the sugar toward her. She flipped her head, but moved off only a few steps, and when he left, she came up and sniffed the grass to see what he had thrown. He saw her nibbling at the sugar, but he did not go back.
The day was early and he had brought a book. He sat on a flat rock with the sun on him and read. The stallion circled nervously for a time, and then went to feeding as had the others.
After an hour he put the book aside and studied the layout of the big pasture.
It was a near perfect oval, with lava walls fifty to sixty feet high. There was a permanent water source from the same spring that provided water for the cabin. It flowed under the lava and into this park, but Flint had told him there was another waterhole on the far side.
He was still tired from his walk of the previous day, and his leg muscles were stiff. There were few places a man might climb out of the oval, but nowhere a horse could escape. He was certain he was the only man these horses had seen, with the exception of the mare.
He spent most of the afternoo
n wandering about close to the tunnel mouth or reading, and then he retreated through the tunnel to the cabin and made some beef broth. Kettleman ate it slowly.
A few days more…
****
PETE GADDIS leaned on the mahogany of the Divide Saloon. It was early evening and he had been in town only a few minutes. There were a lot of strangers around, most of them riders for the Port Baldwin outfit.
Red Dolan, the bartender, came toward Gaddis and put his big, thick-palmed hands on the edge of the bar. The two were friends. Neither had known the other before coming to Alamitos but what lay behind them was much the same.
“Not like the ones we used to know,” Dolan commented, his eyes on the Baldwin riders. “Tough kids. Not like McKinney, or Courtright.” Dolan took the cigar from his teeth. “Did you know Long-Haired Jim?”
Gaddis grunted. “Rode through Lake Valley, one time. He was around.”
“Fast man. There were some good ones came out of Illinois. Courtright, Hickok — I could name a dozen.”
“Knew a man served with Hickok in the Army. He was a good man then, too. He used to laugh at the stories told about him — killing eight or nine of the McCandless gang.”
“They like to think we’re wild and bloody out here, those folks back East do. Why, that Nichols lied in his teeth, and knew it. Hickok was in a bad way, just gettin’ over a bear-scratching. He was in no shape for a fight then, and said so a dozen times. All the fighting he did on that day was with a gun.”
Gaddis took a gulp of rye whiskey. “Buckdun’s in town,” he commented.
“That means somebody’s going to die.” Dolan relighted his cigar that had gone out. “But you’re wrong. He’s not in town. He rode out before daybreak.”
Gaddis considered the information. It seemed unlikely there was any connection, but Ed Flynn had ridden out before daybreak, too. Ed was bound south for Horse Springs, and nobody would know about that. Yet the more he thought of it, the more he worried. Flynn was a good man — steady. But he was no match for Buckdun, even if Buckdun gave him a chance, which he wouldn’t.
“Odd breed,” Gaddis said. “I never could see drygulching a man.”
Red Dolan’s thoughts moved back down the years. “Yes,” he mused, “they are an odd breed. I knew one, a long time ago. To him it was like fighting a war in which he was a soldier. Only I think he changed his mind about it, after awhile.”
“What became of him?”
Dolan brushed the ash from his cigar. “Dropped off the end of the world. I never knew what happened to him — and I would have known.”
“Friend?”
“Folks used to leave word with me sometimes. You know how it is, tending bar.” Dolan paused. “No, I’d not say he was a friend. I don’t believe he ever had a friend — unless it was that kid.”
Pete Gaddis shivered. It was the feeling you had, they said, when somebody stepped on your grave.
“There was a kid came to Abilene once, hunting him,” Dolan went on. “A few months later Flint showed up. I never did see them together, and down at the stable where the kid worked, the boss said they never talked. Only when Flint disappeared, the kid did too.”
Pete Gaddis took out the brown papers and built a cigarette. He had known Dolan several years and they had talked a lot about guns and cows and liquor and boom towns, but they had never said anything about where or who or how. It was a strange thing that never until now had they touched upon anything they had in common.
“A man like that can’t have friends,” Gaddis said. “Even a friend can be trusted so far. I doubt if a man in that business would have many friends.” Gaddis changed the subject. “This Buckdun — did he ride south?”
Dolan looked carefully at his cigar. “I don’t know,” he said. “I made it a point.”
Gaddis downed the last of his whiskey. He drank very little, taking his time with every drink. He took a last drag on the cigarette and dropped it in the sawdust and rubbed it out carefully with his boot toe.
“Bud was in — you know that long, thin galoot who rides for Nugent? He was some liquored up and he was telling us something about a stranger who backed Tom Nugent down.”
“A stranger, you say?”
“Big, dark man who backed his talk with a fancy shotgun. Told Nugent he didn’t like to have his sleep disturbed, and when Nugent ordered him off the land he told him to go to hell.”
Gaddis chuckled. “I’d like to have seen that. Nugent’s a fire-eater.”
“This time he backed right up.”
Pete Gaddis pulled his hatbrim down and walked out of the Divide Saloon into the evening. A stranger. Of course there were a lot of strangers around.
He walked across the street to the restaurant, thinking about that stranger. Tom Nugent’s activities were well known, and, if he had met the stranger, it had been over east, beyond Ceboletta Mesa the night he was chasing down those squatters.
That meant, if the stranger was the man to whom he had talked near the lava beds, that the stranger was working his way west.
But from where he had encountered him, always allowing it was the same man, he must have headed south. Nothing could cross the lava and nobody like him had showed up in Alamitos. And there was nothing to the south until Horse Springs, and the plains where Kaybar cattle grazed.
Suppose more than one gunman had been imported? Suppose this man who was sandy enough to buck Tom Nugent and back him down was a killer imported to kill — whom?
Nancy?
Unlikely. Not many men would kill a woman, and he doubted if a killer could even be hired to do it.
Ed Flynn…
Here he was on surer ground, and the thought worried him. If he only knew where the man had come from. Or if he had a look at him. Bud had seen him.
And if he knew Bud, he would be in town tonight. Bud was a tough hand, but one who liked his bottle.
Flynn was gone, anyway. He had headed for Santa Fe to file those claims.
Pete Gaddis settled down to wait.
****
IT WAS the third day before Kettleman managed to get the mare to take sugar from his hand, but once she did she allowed him to pet her, and within the hour he had a bridle on her, and then a saddle.
She humped her back a little at the saddle, but not much, and he petted her and talked to her.
The big red stallion did not approve. He blew and shook his mane and pawed earth. He ran up, then ran away. He was furious, but he was also afraid. Undoubtedly he was puzzled, too, for the mare was unexcited and even seemed pleased at what was happening.
He curried the mare, cleaned the burrs from her tail, and cleaned her hoofs. It had been a long time since he had helped shoe a horse but he knew how it was done.
When he got into the saddle the mare did not even buck. She was old, but more important there was a vague memory in her mind of other days when she had been well treated and cared for and there had been grain to eat, and always the sugar. He rode her around the oval, then back to the tunnel.
He was going to ride the mare to Horse Springs, but even as he sat the saddle, he was looking at that big red stallion. He had never seen a more beautiful horse — and the way it moved!
There was a black that looked good, and a big steel-dust, almost as big as the red stallion and perhaps a year or two younger.
****
THE STAGE station at Horse Springs was a low building with an awning supported by posts sunk in the ground. Wind and weather had battered the unpainted structure, fading the few signs and reducing the color to a nondescript gray.
A half-dozen other buildings had gone up in the vicinity, a couple of which had been abandoned and now stood empty. The main station was occupied by the saloon, post office, and general store operated by Sulphur Tom Whalen.
Sulphur Tom had his name from the dozens of stories he had to tell of his youth on the Sulphur River of northeast Texas and of such gunfighters as Cullen Baker, Bob Lee, and the participants in the Five County feuds.
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He was a tall man, his high, thin shoulders stooped and crossed by suspenders over a red flannel undershirt. He rarely shaved, and his sandy walrus mustache was stained by tobacco. For a man with so many stories of gun battles to tell, Sulphur Tom was remarkable for his own skill in avoiding trouble.
His strict neutrality was backed up by a conveniently located shotgun which he had never used so far as anyone knew. Even when raiding Apaches came around he managed to remain neutral by offering them gifts of sugar and tobacco.
As a normal thing three or four loafers squatted on their heels under the awning or, if the weather permitted, alongside the fence of the nearby corral. There, amid much smoking and spitting, they lied about horses they had broken, steers they had branded, and bears they had killed.
Only two of the four were holding down the position outside the door when the man called Kettleman appeared. He came from the west and he was riding an old mare and she was walking.
When the big man in the flat-heeled boots swung down at Horse Springs, eyes went from him to the ancient brand on the mare. The brand was a fair representation of a six-shooter.
He stepped down from the saddle and, without a glance at the waiting men, went inside. Sulphur Tom had been at the door, but he retreated to his bar and waited. The stranger ignored the bar.
“I’m calling for mail,” he said, “mail and a large box.”
Sulphur Tom veiled his eyes. “Name?”
“Jim Flint,” he said quietly.
Sulphur Tom had his head down, washing a glass, and he completed the job before he looked up. He looked straight at the newcomer. Guiltily, he averted his eyes.
“Been expectin’ you,” he said. He went behind the barred window that did duty for a post office and took several letters from an open box.
The man who now intended to be known as Jim Flint merely glanced at them and thrust them into an inside pocket of his coat. He looked around, then indicated some saddlebags. “I’ll take those, and I can use a couple of burlap bags, if you have them.”
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