Blood on the Moon

by Luke Short

  He’d met Carol and Amy Lufton that night, along with twenty other girls. Carol had cornered all the men, as she always did with her beauty, but Tate had seen it was no pleasure to her. She was restless and bored and a little desperate, and when he’d been introduced to her that night she had looked at him with a rising, provocative interest. Tate had wanted her on sight and had set about getting her in his own, always oblique, way. He had not danced with her that night. The whole evening he ignored her, dancing with all the other girls and the married women, and because he was a stranger, he took the party away from her.

  Two days later she’d ridden up to the sorry shack he’d bought as his excuse for being here. Tate had seen her coming and sent his men to the barn, and when she rode into the yard he greeted her coolly.

  “I came about that,” Carol said and explained. “The way you spoke, I mean—so unfriendly. The other night too. Why?”

  “I never bother with a beautiful woman,” Tate had said bluntly.

  The flattery drew the sting from the offense, as he knew it would. Carol had laughed and asked him why.

  “You can buy them in honky-tonks,” Tate drawled. “I like a woman who doesn’t want the world, doesn’t expect it, wouldn’t take it.”

  “And you think I want the world?”

  “I think you’ve got it,” Tate said bluntly. “Why bother with me?”

  Carol had ridden off in anger. Two days later in Sun Dust, Carol had met him on the street, and she smiled almost shyly. Tate stopped and was pleasant to her. At parting he said, “That’s the last time you’ll have a smile for me, Miss Lufton. I think I’m going to fight your father.”

  That had done it. Carol had ridden over next day. Tate, curious, wanted to see if he could kiss her, and he tried and succeeded. The easy way she came to him puzzled him. She wasn’t trash, and he knew it, and he knew also that he was probably the first man who hadn’t groveled before her. It explained much about Carol, and he saw that as long as she couldn’t get him she would be his.

  The choice was put up to him then, as it was put up to him today. He could marry Carol and talk softly and walk into a share of the Blockhouse. Or he could play out his hand as he’d framed it.

  Tate Riling was a shrewd man, and he knew himself, and he made his choice with a faint regret. Carol was nice, but the nicest things palled—except one, money. That was his choice.

  Billings’ place, the Broken Arrow, lay between a couple of bald hills above the alkali flats, and when Riling cut past the hill he saw Carol’s horse in the weed-grown yard. Carol was sitting on the ruin of a porch, and when she saw Tate she rose.

  Tate rode into the weed-grown yard and stepped down, and Carol was in his arms. He kissed her indifferently and walked with her to the shade of the stone house and squatted there. She sat beside him, her eyes anxious and a little afraid.

  “Did I do wrong, Tate?”

  Tate shoved his hat back off his forehead. His short blond hair burred straight up and, together with the look of worried bafflement in his eyes, gave the impression of a small boy hugely puzzled.

  “Wrong? Wrong how, Carol?”

  “I didn’t know it was a trick, Tate! I swear I didn’t, until I heard Amy say it.”

  “How could you?” He put a big hand on hers. “Forget it. It’s done, dammit, and now we’ve got to fix it.”

  “But I’m glad, Tate, in a way,” Carol said in a low voice. “I couldn’t bear it this morning when I thought that maybe you and Dad were fighting!”

  “It’s not pretty,” Tate conceded slowly. “It’s not easy for you. But I do what I have to do, Carol. You can see that?”

  “Not—quite,” Carol said hesitantly.

  Tate held her hand and fixed his clear, bland blue eyes on her, his face utterly sober. “I’m a poor man, Carol. Money has come hard to me, and what little I’ve got is sunk in a handful of cull cows, a jag of grass and a shack that I bought from a homesteader. Your dad wants that grass, and he’s got the men to take it. Do I tuck my tail between my legs and run, or do I join up with men like myself and fight for what little I’ve got?”

  “Is it that simple?” Carol asked.

  Tate made a rough, flat-palmed gesture with his hand, a gesture of dismissal. “To me it is. Your father has got his truth, and I’ve got mine. I’ve got to stand or fall by it.”

  Carol hung her head a moment, so he couldn’t see the tears that were making her eyes glisten. “I’ve got to accept this,” she thought; a woman has always got to accept her man’s truth, or he isn’t her man.

  She said gently, “Now what? He’s across.”

  “We’ll shove him back.”

  “But how, Tate? He’s got as many men as you have, and he’ll fight.”

  Riling snapped off a weed stem and chewed thoughtfully on it, looking out at the blue fall distances of the alkali flats.

  “I want to know first,” he began doggedly, “if you’ve made your choice, Carol. I’ve got to know that. Is it me or is it your father?”

  “It’s you, Tate!” Carol said swiftly. “It’s you!”

  “I won’t ask you to risk your father’s life,” Tate said stubbornly. “You’d hate me for that. But I’m asking you to help. I need you.”

  Carol nodded, misery threaded through the happiness she felt at his words.

  Tate said bluntly, “Then ride back and find out where the herd he crossed is being held. Ask him where. When he tells you, pretend you’re worried. Then confess to him; tell him you circled back and watched us this morning, and we lined out to find his cattle, like we meant to drive them back.”

  Carol was following his words with close attention. “And did you?”

  “No. But he’ll fear a raid and draw the reservation crew over to help him.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Carol said slowly.

  “That’ll leave his other two herds under light guard. We’ll stampede them from hell to breakfast, and he’ll have to call every available man back to round them up again. That’s when we’ll drive the Basin herd back across the Massacre.”

  Carol considered this slowly, with a kind of breathless attention. She could see no fighting here, no threat to her father’s safety. And when she couldn’t she felt a vast and rising relief.

  “I can do that, Tate! It won’t harm him.”

  Tate rose, and she rose with him, and he folded her to him. He kissed her then, and he had his moment of doubt again. She was beautiful and she was his and she was desirable. She put a spell on a man that was a drug and made him want to forget everything but her. But that distant coolness in his mind, a kind of gray-andiron knowledge that he wanted more than this, checked him, and he moved her gently away from him.

  “I’ll want to see you soon, Carol.”

  “Shall I come to the rock tomorrow?”

  “There, or if I’m not there come to my place. Good-by, darling.”

  She watched him ride out, and she was utterly and completely happy.

  Chapter Four

  After skirting the dunes they dropped down into the Basin level, and inside of an hour Jim Garry knew enough about the two men with him. He knew about Joe Shotten when they jumped a band of antelope. They didn’t see the antelope, but the dust funneling up beyond the low ridge to the south and the faint rataplan of quick hoofs were the giveaway.

  Joe Shotten touched spurs to his horse and galloped toward the ridge. He was riding a bay with four white stockings, and it was a pleasant sight to watch the horse run. Shotten had drawn his rifle from its scabbard on the way over. On the back of the ridge he slipped from his saddle, bellied down and presently fired. He shot once and came back, smiling a little.

  “Can still do it,” he bragged with pleasure.

  He was a plain hard case, Jim thought. His hands were rope calloused, and he chewed tobacco with a patient violence. It bulged the left cheek of his concave face and seemed to draw his small eyes even closer together by widening his face. He stank of horse sweat, and its sweet,
acrid smell, mixed with the even sweeter smell of the chew, clung to him like a sickening aura. A man of average height, he had narrow slanting shoulders that set his big head in bold and ugly dominance.

  They crossed the ridge, and far ahead on the amber flats Jim saw the downed antelope blending almost imperceptibly with the grass. It was three hundred yards, he calculated, and he knew that Joe Shotten knew he was calculating it and he said nothing.

  Tom Riordan didn’t even look up. A decade of hard living had frozen his slanted face into a vicious indifference. He had a cough that he was constantly trying to smother. It started softly, like low gears meshing, and he seemed to be shaken with silent laughter. At these times he would put his bright feverish glance on anyone watching, and there was a murderous dare in them. Two circles of color stained his cheekbones above the stubble of his beard, helping the illusion of doll-like delicacy that was in his slight frame and thin hands. It was when they pulled up at the antelope that Jim learned about Tom Riordan, the consumptive.

  Shotten had killed a doe. It lay formless and deflated, the long grace gone from its legs, its eyes smeared with death.

  Joe said placidly, “It was a hard shot,” and contemplated it with quiet pride for a moment and touched his horse with his spurs.

  Riordan said in a soft voice, “Take a quarter, Joe.”

  Shotten looked at him and laughed. “Hell, we’re headed for town.”

  Riordan said with deceptive gentleness, “God damn a man that leaves game to rot! You’ll eat some of it. Get down!”

  He had braced Shotten as easily and gently as a woman talks, but it was deadly. Jim stayed silent, watching Joe Shotten weigh his chances and immediately refuse the fight.

  “I like a tongue,” Joe muttered. “Why not?”

  He dismounted and cut out the tongue, and Riordan seemed satisfied. Shotten put it in his pocket and mounted, and in a few moments he was whistling, the incident forgotten.

  Jim had his hour of bleak disgust after that. In Tate Riling’s eyes the only difference between Jim and these two was the price he was paying for each. Jim understood that and the reason for it. These two were unstable as the weather. At another time a sudden flare-up like this would bring gunplay that might leave them both dead. Tate Riling needed them, but he needed judgment, too, and it was Jim’s job to have it, to keep these two apart and think for them. He was like Riordan—only with brains. It was a new picture of himself, and Jim pondered it with a gray and bitter distaste. Amy Lufton had not been very wide of the mark; she had named him truly—a gun hand.

  They came afterward to a dry lake bed where a half-dozen seeps still held the grass green. Beside one of these, off to the south a half mile, was a log shack. Its grounds were barren of trees, and it stood stark and sun-baked in the noon heat.

  Shotten said, “I’m thirsty,” and pointed his horse toward the shack.

  “Whose place?” Riordan asked.

  “That big one—Titterton.”

  They rode across the yard to the well frame by the seep and dismounted. Shotten had his drink and then stood aside, hands on hips, regarding the shack. It presented a windowless wall of logs at the back. The plank door was closed. Beside it, hanging over a bench, a tin washbasin glistened brightly in the sun.

  Shotten viewed it with rising interest and then pulled his gun. He shot without aiming, and the basin boomed and leaped off its nail and clattered to the ground.

  “Chase it,” Riordan challenged, and he was smiling.

  Shotten emptied his gun. By the time he had finished he had chased the basin around the corner of the house. Riordan nodded mild approval and lifted his gun from its holster.

  “Let’s leave a card,” he said.

  “What kind?”

  “Blockhouse, right on the door.”

  He raised his gun and shot five times. Four of his shots made a square; the fifth was above the square. “There’s the top half and the ridgepole,” he said softly. He looked obliquely at Jim to see if he was watching.

  Shotten had reloaded by now. He lifted his gun and now he shot four times in swift succession. Below the big square and joined to it was a smaller square. The Blockhouse, as Lufton branded it, was outlined. Shotten now looked at Jim. “It needs a door, don’t it?” It was both invitation and challenge.

  “You mean like this,” Riordan drawled. Again he fired four times, rapidly and seemingly without looking. His four slugs picked out a small rectangle in the lower square against the base line. He had outlined the door. At this distance it was shooting, and he knew it and Shotten knew it, and they both regarded Jim, sly elation in their faces. They were feeling him out, impressing him, and behind all lay the implied threat of their expertness.

  Jim walked beyond them, so he was clear of the horses, and lazily, almost indolently, pulled his gun. The interval between the gun leaving the holster and the shot was imperceptible.

  “There’s the latch,” Jim murmured. To the right center of the smaller rectangle that was the door was the mark of Jim’s slug.

  It was the kind of cheap bravura these two understood, and Jim watched their faces. Riordan regarded the door thoughtfully, looked curiously at Jim and walked toward his horse, indifferent again. Shotten was more transparent. His mouth opened slightly as he studied the door and then it clamped shut. He spat, said, “Sure, sure,” approvingly, and went over to his horse, not looking at Jim.

  The ride into town brought no further comment from the two. They rode into Sun Dust in midafternoon and went straight to the Basin House.

  Jim tramped downstreet and ate alone and afterward returned to the hotel porch. He dragged a chair to the rail and slacked into it, putting his feet on the rail. As he watched the sleepy street his face settled into moroseness. Presently he lifted a cigar from his pocket and fired up. He stayed with it for a dozen drags, and then it went sour for him and he tossed it away. Across the street, in front of a saloon, Riordan and Shotten lounged idly.

  Jim felt the gray depression settle on him, and he hunkered down in his chair, a long, restless man with defeat in his gray eyes. It was the old pattern again, this long waiting for trouble out of which he would profit. For what? A few hours at the tables and the old driving restlessness that pushed him into trouble again. He watched Riordan across the street, back to the wall, hot eyes raking every passer-by, every interplay of movement, interpreting them only as they affected his ultimate survival. That was himself in a few years, when the edge of his conscience had blunted even more. A hired gun hand, who balked at nothing that would pay for his whisky and his taste in horses or women and his pride. A man with no roots, who could know the lifetime of a town and its people in a few hours and reject its ways and theirs. A man with no stomach for anything except trouble.

  He knew now that he would have to leave here, but his mind did not answer the question of when it would be. “That will come, too,” he thought bitterly; “I’ll be having a drink and see myself in the bar mirror, and then I’ll walk out and get on my horse and ride out, sick of myself and what I am, but with a little hope for what I’ll meet over the next hill.”

  He was thinking this when he saw the buckboard stop in front of the hotel and John Lufton step down from it and come toward him.

  John Lufton rode into Blockhouse with one of his crew around noon. Amy saw him and ran for the horse corral. The three men left to guard the place were already there when Amy reached him.

  Her father was dismounted, beating the gray dust from his clothes when Amy came up. Even his mustache was gray. He looked up at Amy and grinned swiftly.

  “Dad, what’s happened?”

  “Nothing. We’ve got cattle in Massacre Basin again.”

  Amy waited impatiently while he inquired of Ted about things at the ranch, and then he joined her. He took her elbow lightly and squeezed it and said, “I could eat.”

  Amy knew she wouldn’t hear much about it until after he was fed, but she was happy. John Lufton wouldn’t admit it, but this had been ri
ding him for the last month, had been riding them all.

  While he washed in the kitchen Amy put the meal on the table. There was little talk between them, and it had always been like that. With Carol and her father it was different. In Amy’s place, Carol would have learned all there was to know before she left the corral. With Amy, there was a man’s patience, a knowledge that news would keep until a man’s hunger was worn off, a kind of thoughtfulness. She demanded little, and because of it John Lufton was apt to give her more consideration than he did Carol.

  When the first edge of his hunger was gone Lufton began to talk. He told of moving the cattle across the river this morning. It was unexciting; they were primed for trouble and it didn’t come.

  “And I know why,” Lufton chuckled. “Did a loose rider drift in here yesterday with a note to you?”

  “Garry? Yes.”

  “I pegged him for one of Riling’s gun hands,” Lufton said dryly. “I think I’m right. I think he read the note, like I hoped he would, told Riling, and Riling was waiting at Ripple Ford this morning.”

  “I know he was,” Amy said. She told her father about the morning ride. He listened attentively, eyes alert and curious. She didn’t tell him about Garry shooting at her at the river; she was afraid of what he would do.

  “So he’s joined Riling,” Lufton murmured. He went on eating then, but his mind worked carefully. He saw here the excuse for which he had been hunting, the excuse to take the fight to Riling and take it hard. Garry had been warned; he’d been given a choice of joining Blockhouse or riding on through, and he had done neither. Lufton arrived at his decision with a somber reluctance. He didn’t have any gun hands and he was asking his men to go up against some. But it was root hog or die, even for them, and it had to be done. It had better be done by himself, he thought.