The ranch was bathed in white moonlight when they rode up and swung down at the door. They halted at the sound of voices.
“Now is the time we’ll sell, Hofer!” Kleinback was saying. “I’ll start roundin’ up tomorrow, and I’ll get shut of them cows right away.”
“I’ll have no part of it!” Hofer said. “You got me into this, but I’ll not get in any deeper.”
“I got you into it?” Kleinback sneered. “Who killed young Martin? You did! What was your reason? Tryin’ to rustle his cattle! There’s a bad case against you, Hofer, but there’s not a thing against me. I’ve got a clear trail behind me, and when I get the money for the cattle, I’ll be free! I’ll have plenty of money then, and not be tied to no two-by-four desert ranch!”
“You and Pipal,” Hofer said, “between you, you ruined me. Between you two you ran my hands out of the country, and then after Martin was killed, you forced me to take Pipal on as a hand, so’s he could spy on me and finish drivin’ off the rest of ’em.”
Roy Kleinback chuckled. “Sure. I’ve been running Block T stock back in the canyons of the Opals for the last couple of years. Holding ’em back there with no brands on ’em, so no evidence against me if somebody smartened up. Then when Martin came in and checked them draws and raised hob with you, I saw my only chance was to act fast. Then you up and killed him and saved my bacon.”
“No, he didn’t, Kleinback!”
The two men sprang to their feet, Bill Hofer startled and staring, Kleinback with a sudden wariness in his eyes.
Keeping his eyes on Kleinback, Tandy Thayer went on coolly: “Hofer, you never killed Martin! You were drunk and didn’t know any better, but old Jim Drew saw it! Kleinback killed Martin, then shoved the gun in your hand. He’d killed him with one of your guns that he lifted as he came alongside, and you too drunk to know better!”
Kleinback hooked his thumbs in his belt.
“That’s a foolish notion!” he said. “You couldn’t prove no such thing!”
“Jim Drew is alive, Kleinback,” Tandy said. “He saw it all, as you know. Pipal shot him and dropped him in the river, but he caught some brush and got ashore. He’s alive and able to testify to all he saw. You’re through!”
Kleinback’s elbow jerked back and his palm slapped the walnut gun stock, but even as the gun started to lift, Tandy Thayer shot him.
The big rancher sagged back, struggling to get his gun up while his eyes slowly glazed over and the gun fell from his fingers to the floor. Then Kleinback fell across it. For an instant there was utter stillness while the wheel on one of Kleinback’s spurs did a slow turn.
“It wasn’t me!” Hofer gasped. “Man, I—”
Clarabel was around the table and had him in her arms.
“It’s all right, Uncle Bill! Everything is all right.” She looked over at Tandy, and there was a smile for him in her eyes. “You were going to stay with old Jim?” she asked. “Why don’t you? It would be nice to have you for a neighbor.…”
In the morning, Red Ringo grinned at Tandy. “He should have knowed better than to draw against an hombre slick with a gun as you,” he said. “That was plumb suicide!”
“Luck,” Thayer said honestly. “Pure luck!”
“Huh!” Ringo was disgusted. “After that card I saw you shoot a hole into?”
Thayer reached in his pocket and took out another card.
“Look!” he said. Spinning it into the air, he drew and fired. “Now take a look at it.”
Ringo walked over and picked up the card. It was a trey, and all the pips were shot out. He stared at it.
“But you only shot once!” he protested.
“Sure.” Tandy Thayer reached in his pocket and pulled out a deck of cards with all the pips shot out. “I shoot ’em out first, then always have one around. You ain’t got any idea how many arguments they stop!”
The Guns Talk Loud
He rode into town on a brown mule and swung down from the saddle in front of the Chuck Wagon. He wore a high Mexican hat and a pair of tight Mex pants that flared over his boots. Shorty Duval started to open his mouth to hurrah this stranger when the hombre turned around.
Shorty Duval’s mouth snapped shut like a steel trap, and you could almost see the sweat break out on his forehead.
One look was all anybody needed. Shorty was tough, but nobody was buying any trouble from the drifter in the high-crowned hat.
He had a lean brown face and a beak of a nose that had been broken sometime or other. There was a scar along his cheekbone that showed white against the leather brown of his face. But it was his eyes that gave you the chills. They were green and brown, but there was something in the way they looked at you that would make a strong man back up and think it over.
He was wearing two guns and crossed belts. They were not Peacemakers, but the older Colt, the baby cannon known as the Walker Colt. Too heavy for most men, they would shoot pretty accurate for well over a hundred yards, which wasn’t bad for a rifle.
He wore one of them short Mex jackets, too, and when we looked from his queer getup to that brown mule that was all legs we couldn’t figure him one little bit.
Not many strangers rode into White Hills. I’d been there all of two months, and I was the last one to come. This hombre showed he knowed the kind of a town he was in when he didn’t look too long at anybody. In fact, he didn’t even seem to notice us. He just pushed through the doors and bellied up to the bar.
Bill Riding was in there, and some four or five others. Being a right curious hombre, I walked in myself. If this gent did any talkin’, I aimed to be where I could listen. I saw Riding look around when I come in. His eyes got mean. From the first day I hit town, we’d no use for each other.
Partly it was because of Jackie Belton’s cur dog. Belton was a kid of fourteen who lived with his sister, Ruth, on a nice cattle spread six or seven miles out of White Hills. That dog ran across in front of Riding one day and come durned near trippin’ him. He was a hot-tempered hombre, and when he drawed iron, I did, too.
Before he could shoot, I said, and I was standin’ behind him, “You kill that dog, Riding, and I’ll kill you!”
His face got red, and then white. His back was half toward me, and he knowed he didn’t have a chance. “Someday,” he said, his voice ugly, “you’ll butt in at the wrong time!”
Jackie saw me, and so did his sister, and after the way they thanked me, I figgered it would have been cheap even if I’d had to kill Riding.
White Hills was an outlaw town. Most of the men in town were wanted somewheres, and while it wasn’t doin’ any deputy much good to come in here, the town was restless now. That was because the bank over to Pierce had been stuck up and ever’ body in White Hills figgered the rangers would come here lookin’ for him. That was why they’d looked so suspicious when I rode into town.
It didn’t take no fortune-teller to guess that Harvey Kinsella had put Bill Riding to watchin’ me. Kinsella was the boss o’ that town, and he knowed everythin’ that went on around.
Riding wasn’t the only one had an eye on me, I knowed that. Kinsella had posted two or three other hombres for the same reason. Still, I stuck around. And part of the reason I stayed was Ruthie Belton.
The hombre with the high-crowned sombrero leaned against the bar and let those slow green eyes of his take in the place. They settled on Riding, swung past Shorty Duval, and finally settled on me.
They stayed there the longest, and I wasn’t surprised none. We were the two biggest men in the place, me and him. Maybe I was a mite the bigger, but that hat made him look just as tall. His eyes didn’t show what he was thinkin’, but knowin’ how a man on the dodge feels, I knowed what it was.
He had me sized up like I had him. Me, I growed up under the Tonto Rim, and when I wanted to ride the cattle trails, I had to ride east to git to ’em. I’d punched cows and dealt monte in Sonora, and I ain’t braggin’ none when I say that when I rode through New Mexico and hung around Lincoln and Fort Sumner and Sante F
e, not Billy the Kid nor Jesse Evans wanted any part of what I had to give. Not that I wanted them, either.
There wasn’t no high Mex hat on me. Mine was flat-crowned and flat-brimmed, but my guns was tied down, and had been for more than a little while. My boots was some down at the heel, and I needed a shave, but no man in that place had the power in his shoulders I had, and no man there but me could bust a leather belt with his chest expansion.
He didn’t need no second sight to tell him I was ridin’ a lone trail, either. They never cut my hide to fit no Kinsella frame. Anyway, he looked at me, and then he says, “I’ll buy you a drink!” An’ the way he laid that “you” in there was like layin’ a whip across the face of ever’ other man in the saloon.
Bill Riding jerked like he’d been bee-stung, but Kinsella wasn’t there, and Bill sat tight.
Me, I walks over to the bar and bellies up to it. Amigo, it done me good to look in that long mirror and see the two of us standin’ there. Y’ can ride for miles and never find two such big men together. Maybe I was a mite thicker’n him through the chest, but he was big, amigo, and he was mean.
“They call me Sonora,” he said, lookin’ at the rye in his glass.
“Me, I’m Dan Ketrel,” I said, but I was thinkin’ of what the descriptions of the bandit who robbed the bank at Pierce said. A big man, the descriptions said, a very big man, wearin’ two guns.
Sonora was a big man, and he wore two guns. For that matter, I did, too. There was even another big man in town who wore two guns. The boss, it was, Harvey Kinsella.
We looked at each other right then, and neither of us was fooled a mite. He knowed what I was here for, and I knowed what he was here for, and neither of us was in friendly country.
Bill Riding didn’t like me bein’ here. It was chokin’ up in him like a thunderstorm chokin’ up a canyon with cloud. It was gittin’ in his throat, the meanness of him, and I could see trouble was headin’ our way.
For that matter, I’d knowed it was comin’, soon or late. I knowed it was comin’ because I knowed I was goin’ to butt into somethin’ that wasn’t rightly my business. It had been buildin’ for days, ever since I got the lay of the land, hereabouts.
I was goin’ to tear down the fence that kept Ruth Belton’s cows from grazin’ in Reefer Canyon, where the good grass was.
You’d think, maybe, that tearin’ down one fence wouldn’t do no good. You’d think maybe they’d put it right up again. You’d be wrong.
If’n I tore down that fence once, it was goin’ to stay down, because after I tore it down, I’d have to kill Harvey Kinsella and Bill Riding.
They was the ones out to break Ruthie Belton. When her old man was alive, they left him strictly alone. He was old, but he was a ring-tailed wolf on the prowl, and they knowed it. Then he got throwed from a bad hoss, and they started to move in on the Bar B.
It wasn’t none of my business. Me, I was up here for a purpose, and rightly I shouldn’t think of anythin’ else, but sometimes a man stumbles into a place where, if he’s a man, he’s got to show it. And me, I was a-fixin’ to tear down that fence.
It would mean shootin’, and Kinsella was poison mean, and Riding damn near as bad. That was sayin’ nothin’ o’ the rest of that outfit. But I had me a plan now, and that plan was buildin’ around a certain tall hombre in a high-crowned hat, a man that rode a brown-legged mule and packed two Walker Colts.
Bill Riding got up and walked over to the bar. He was spoilin’ for trouble. As big a man as Kinsella in weight, he was a mite shorter than either of us, but nearly as broad as me. A big-handed man, and a dirty fighter in a rough-and-tumble.
“Stranger,” he says, starin’ at Sonora, “y’ seem kind of limitin’ in your offer of a drink. Maybe y’ think you’re too durned good to drink with us!”
Sonora had his elbows on the bar right then, and he didn’t straighten; he just turned his head and let those cold eyes take in Riding, head to foot; then he looked back at his drink.
Riding’s face flamed up, and I saw his lips tighten. His hand shot out, and he grabbed Sonora by the shoulder. Bill just had to be top dog, he just had to have ever’ body believin’ he was a bad hombre, but he done the wrong thing when he laid a hand on Sonora.
The man in the high-crowned hat back-handed his fist into Bill’s unprotected midsection. It caught Bill unsuspectin’, and he staggered, gaspin’ for breath. Then Sonora turned and slugged him. Bill went back into a table, upset it, and then he crawled out of the poker chips with a grunt and started for Sonora.
Just then Harvey Kinsella stepped into the room, and me, I slid back two quick steps and palmed a six-gun. “Hold it!” I said, hard-like. “Anybody butts into this scrap gets a bellyful of lead!”
Kinsella looked at me then, the first time he ever seemed to see me. “If you didn’t have that gun out,” he said, “I’d kill you!”
Me, I laughed. If’n it hadn’t been for Sonora, who was goin’ to town on Riding, I’d have called him.
Bein’ around like I have, I’ve seen some men take a whippin’, but I never saw any man get a more artistic shellackin’ than Sonora give Bill Riding. He started in on him, and he used both hands. He cut him like you’d chop beef. He sliced his face like he had a knife edge across his knuckles.
Me, Dan Ketrel, I slug ’em, and Pap always said I had the biggest fists he ever seen on a man, but Sonora, he went to work like a doc. He raised bumps all over Riding and then lanced ever’ one o’ them with his knuckles. Riding wanted to drop, but Sonora wouldn’t let him fall. He just kept him on his feet until he got so bloody, even I couldn’t take it. Then Sonora hooked one, high and hard, and Bill Riding went down into the sawdust.
Sonora looked over at me, standin’ with a gun in my fist. “Thanks,” he said, grinnin’ a little. We understood each other, him and me.
Harvey Kinsella looked at Riding lying on the floor; then he looked from Sonora to me. “I’ll give you until sundown,” he said. Then he turned to go.
“I like it here,” I said.
“I’ve told you,” he replied.
Sonora and me walked outside. Me, I figgered it was time to talk. “There’s been talk,” I said, “of a ranger comin’ in here after that hombre what done that Pierce bank job. Don’t let it worry you none. Not for right now.
“Down the road a piece there’s a girl, name of Ruth Belton. Her old man was a he-wolf. He’s dead. This here Kinsella, he’s tryin’ to run her off her range. Scared to tackle it when the old man was alive. He’s done put up a fence to keep her cows from the good grass. I aim to cut that fence.”
He stood there, his big thumbs in his belt, listenin’. Me, I finished rollin’ my smoke. “When I cut that fence, there’s goin’ to be some shootin’, but I aim to cut it and aim to kill Harvey Kinsella. He’s got word out that ary a hand on that fence and his guns talk loud.
“I aim to cut it. I aim to kill him so’s he won’t never put it up again. But he’s got a sight of boys ridin’ for him. One or two, I might git, but I don’t want nothin’ botherin’ me when I go after Kinsella.”
“Where’s the fence?” he asked quietly.
“Down the road a piece.” I struck a match on my pants. “I reckon if’n we was to ride that way, Ruthie would fix us a bait o’ grub. She’s quite some shakes with a skillet.”
Me, I walked out and swung onto the hurricane deck of that big blue horse o’ mine. Sonora lit his own shuck and then boarded his mule. He went down the street and took the trail for Ruthie Belton’s place.
Neither of us said no words all the way until we got up to Ruthie’s place and could see the flowers around her door, and Ruthie waterin” em down.
“I reckon,” Sonora said then, “that ranger could hold off doin’ what he has to do ’til a job like this was over. Don’t reckon he’d wait much longer, though, would he?”
“Don’t reckon so,” I said grimly. “A man’s got his duty. Still,” I added, “maybe this ranger never seen the hombre he’s look
in’ for. Maybe he ain’t sure when he does see him, so maybe he rides back without him?”
“Wouldn’t do no good,” Sonora objected. “Too many others lookin’, and he’d be follered wherever he’d go.”
Ruth looked up when she heard our horses and then turned to face us, smiling. She looked up at me, and when I looked down into those blue eyes, I figgered what a fool a man was to go lookin’ into guns when there was eyes, soft like that.
“You’re the man,” she declared, “who protected Shep!”
Me, I got red around the gills. I ain’t used to palaverin’ with no women-folk. “I reckon,” I said.
“Won’t you get down and come in? We were just about to eat.”
We got down, and Sonora sweeps off that high-crowned hat and smiles. “I’ve heard some powerful nice things about the food you cook, ma’am,” he said, “and thank you for a chance to try it.”
We went inside, and pretty soon Jack come in. He smiled, but I could see he was plumb worried. It didn’t take no mind reader to figger why. Those cows we’d seen was lookin’ mighty poor. It wouldn’t take much time for them to start dyin’ off, eatin’ only the skimpy dry, brown grass.
When she had the food on the table, Ruthie looked at me, and I could feel my thick neck gettin’ red again. “You boys just riding, or are you going some particular place?”
Sonora looked over a forkful of fried spuds. “Dan here, he figgered there was a fence up here needed cuttin’, and he ’lows as how he’ll cut it. I’m just sort of ridin’ along, in case.”
Her face whitened. “Oh no! You mustn’t! Harvey Kinsella will kill anybody who touches that fence—he warned us!”
“Uh-huh.” I picked up my coffee cup. “We ain’t got much time here, ma’am. I got a little job to do, and I reckon Sonora has, too. We sort of figgered we’d take care o’ this and Kinsella, too. Then when we rode off up the trail, you’d be all right.”
When we finished, I tipped back in my chair. It was right homey feelin’, the sort of feelin’ I ain’t had since I was a kid, me bein’ a roamin’ man and all. I got up after a bit and saw Sonora look at me. That mule-ridin’ man never had a hand far from a gun when we were together. For that matter, neither did I.
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 3 Page 17