The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 3

by Louis L'Amour

  Disgusted, they trooped, grumbling, back to their horses and rode back to the ranch.

  Wiley Dunn was irritated. The continued resistance of Tanner was not only annoying and disconcerting, but was winning friends for Tanner. Even his own lawyer made a sly comment on it, but to Dunn it was not amusing. He had hoped that Tanner could be pushed off without any real bloodshed, but it appeared that the only way to be rid of him was to kill him. Ten years ago he would not have hesitated, but the times had changed, and people were looking askance at big outfits running roughshod over people.

  He was tempted to turn Ollie Herndon loose, but hesitated. There should be some other way. If he could only catch Tanner on the road and destroy his place while he was gone.

  Somehow the story had gotten around that Dunn’s hands had failed in an attack on the Lonetree nester and he had repaid them with watermelons. The next time Dunn appeared in town Ed Wallis asked, “How were the melons, Wiley? Didn’t upset your stomach, did they?”

  Dunn’s smile faded. “That nester’s askin’ for it. He’s been warned to get off my place!”

  “It ain’t like it was, Wiley. Why don’t you let him be? A man like that might prove to be a good neighbor. He seems a decent sort.”

  “Look, Ed, if I allowed Tanner to stay on that place my range would be overrun by squatters. Besides, in a bad year I’d need that water.”

  Wallis shrugged. “It’s none of my affair, although folks are saying that with two hundred thousand acres you should let a man have enough to live on. As for water, you’d have plenty of water, and grass, too, if you didn’t overgraze. You’ve got more cattle on that grass than it can carry.”

  “You tellin’ me my business? I’ve been in the cow business twenty-five years, and no small potatoes storekeeper is going to tell me how to do it.”

  Ed Wallis turned abruptly. “Sorry I spoke to you, Dunn. It is none of my business. You handle your own affairs.” He returned to his store.

  Wiley Dunn stared after him, angry at Wallis but even more angry at himself. What was he getting mad at Ed for? They had been friends for fifteen years. But that talk about carrying too much stock was stupid, although, in a year like this when he was going to be in a tight spot for feed, it might make sense. It was that damned nester’s fault, he decided. If Tanner hadn’t moved onto that range he would have been all right.

  He started along the street to the post office, and was just turning in at the door when Tanner and his wife came out.

  Tanner was no more than thirty at best, his wife a good ten years younger, a quietly pretty girl whose eyes widened when she saw him. That she was frightened angered Dunn even more. What kind of a person was he supposed to be, that a young woman should be afraid of him? What had Tanner been telling her?

  “Tanner,” he said abruptly, “have you moved yet?”

  Tanner smiled. “Why, howdy, Mr. Dunn! No, we haven’t moved and we don’t plan to. That’s government land, Mr. Tanner, and you’ve no rightful claim to it. On the other hand, I’ve filed on it for a homestead. All we want is to make a livin’, so leave us alone, Mr. Dunn.”

  People were listening, and Wiley Dunn was aware of it. There was such a thing as prestige, and by simply telling the Tanners they might stay on undisturbed he could have established a reputation of another kind; on the other hand, he had lived so long with the psychology of the feudal baron it was not in him to change quickly. This Tanner had to be put in his place.

  “Now, you see here, Tanner. I am not going to fool around any longer. You’re on my water and I want you off. You get off now, or you’ll answer to me. I’ll send my men around to take care of you.”

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Dunn?” Tanner’s voice was suddenly soft, but something in it brought Wiley Dunn up short. “Can’t you fight your own battles? Have you been hidin’ behind Ollie Herndon so long you don’t remember what it means to get a bloody nose?”

  Wiley Dunn stared at Tanner. Not for years had anyone dared challenge him. Not for years had he had a fight of any kind. He was a burly, husky man who had won many a rough-and-tumble fight in years gone by, but there was something about Tanner that warned Dunn he would be hard to handle. Yet Dunn had had the reputation of being a fighter, and he had won it the hard way.

  “I don’t mix in dirty brawls, Tanner. It won’t be a matter of fists if I come after you.”

  Tanner was no longer smiling. “Mr. Dunn, I have never hunted trouble with any man, although here and there trouble has come to me. I’ve not hunted trouble with you, but your boys have attacked my home twice.

  “Now, Mr. Dunn, I’ve always hoped I’d never have to kill another man, but if it is guns you want it is guns you can have. Right now, right here at this minute, if you want it that way. I’m carrying a gun, Mr. Dunn. Are you?”

  Wiley Dunn felt butterflies in his stomach. Maybe he was getting old. “No,” he said honestly, “I am not carrying a gun, but—”

  Sheriff Collins had been watching and now he stepped in. “All right, break it up! There will be no talk of guns while I’m sheriff of this county.” Collins looked at Tanner, his expression harsh. The sheriff was a cattleman himself. “Do you hear that, Tanner?”

  “I hear it,” Tanner replied calmly, “but while you’re at it, you tell Dunn to keep his men away from my place. They’ve attacked me twice, with guns.”

  “I know nothing about that,” Collins replied stiffly. “If you want to file a complaint, I will act upon it.”

  “I’ve always fought my own battles, Sheriff, but I would like to call your attention to something. You were standing here listening when he threatened me and ordered me off land on which I have legally filed. If there is a court case I’ll certainly have you called as a witness.”

  He turned to his wife. “Sorry, honey; I didn’t mean to keep you waitin’.”

  Slowly the crowd dispersed. Only Collins and Dunn remained.

  For a few moments nothing was said, then Dunn spoke. “I wish the damned fool would move off that place! I don’t want trouble, Jim, but I need that water.”

  “You’ve got water elsewhere. You’ve a lot of land, Wiley. Maybe you should pull in your horns.”

  “And let him whip me?”

  “Can’t you see, Wiley? Tanner ain’t tryin’ to whip you. He wants to stay. Why don’t you slap him on the back and tell him if he gives you a piece of side meat from time to time he can stay.”

  There was good sense in what Collins advised, and Collins was a good man. “But I can’t let him get away with this, Jim. He called me a coward to my face. Nobody has done that since the Powell boys.”

  Wiley Dunn had killed the Powell boys, all three of them. He had been fourteen years younger then, but he was still, he told himself, a tough man.

  “You’re asking for it, Wiley, but let me give you a word of advice from a friend. Don’t get the idea that Tanner is easy. He ain’t.”

  On his way back to the ranch, Wiley Dunn mulled that over, and he had to admit his impression was the same. There was something in Tanner’s manner that warned Dunn that the man was no pilgrim. And what was that Tanner had said? That he did not want to kill another man?

  Suddenly, he remembered what Rowdy or somebody had said about there being no tracks leaving Tanner’s place. What could that mean?

  His curiosity aroused, Dunn turned the bay off the trail to the ranch and cut across the hill to the county road. It took him only a few minutes to find the tracks of Tanner’s returning buckboard, his saddle horse tied behind. For three miles he followed the tracks and then, suddenly, they were gone.

  Puzzled, he reined the bay around and rode back. Crushed grass told him where Tanner had turned off, and he followed the tracks over a low hill and alongside a dry wash. He was now not more than five miles from Tanner’s cabin, but separated from it by the bulk of Wildhorse Mesa, a huge block of basaltic rock some four hundred feet high by eight miles long, and at least two miles wide. If this was the route Tanner took to his home, it was
far out of the way.

  Turning back, Dunn reached the trail and started for the ranch. Frowning, he considered what he had learned. It seemed stupid for a man to go so far out of his way to avoid trouble on the trail, yet going over the mesa was an impossibility. It was true, he had never skirted the mesa on the north, but he had been within a quarter of a mile many times on the south side, and the steep talus slides ended in an abrupt cliff, at least a hundred feet of sheer rock.

  Maybe he was being a damned fool. After all, Lonetree lay far from the home ranch and they had rarely watered there, holding it rather for emergencies than otherwise. He could let it go and never miss it. Irritably, he shook off the thought. The land was his, and he was going to keep it.

  Had he persisted in trailing Tanner he would have had a further surprise. In such broken, rugged country, even a man who has lived and ridden there for years sometimes misses things. Had he been skirting the mesa on foot, something no cowhand would dream of doing, he would have discovered it was not, as it seemed, a continuous wall.

  A few days after Tanner had completed the building of the stone house in Lonetree Canyon, he had taken his rifle and ridden out to hunt for a deer. Picketing his horse on a patch of grass, he had taken his rifle and walked up a tiny creek toward its beginning at the mesa’s base.

  He drank from the spring, then straightened up and turned west. He was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when he realized he was looking at a break in the wall of the mesa. Moreover, there was a dim game trail leading from the spring back into the notch.

  The trail entering the opening went in parallel with the mesa’s wall, which was fractured, leaving one point of rock extended along the face of the mesa so that from a short distance away it appeared to be one unbroken wall.

  Following the dim trail through talus and broken rock and pushing through brush, he found that it turned sharply south, and he was standing in a gap where the mesa was actually separated into two. Lying before him was a meadow at least a hundred yards wide. Following it, he discovered that at one place it became almost a half-mile wide, then narrowed again as it neared the north side. At the lowest point there was a small lake, almost an acre in extent. The opening on the far side emerged in a thick stand of aspen, and in the distance, he could see the smoke from Algosa. Not only had he discovered a private trail out of his ranch, but added grazing and a much shorter route to town.

  From the Bar 7, a ranch several miles to the west, he bought twenty young heifers, and turned them into the grassy basin. Then he prepared a pole gate and fence at the far end, and another at his own end of the opening.

  Each time he used the route through the mesa he took care to cover his tracks, wiping them out near a shelf of rock so the tracks seemed to vanish on the rock itself. Over the way into the aspen he placed a dead tree, still attached to its base by a few shreds of wood. This he could swing back and forth, making the route seem impassable to a buckboard.

  When Morgan Tanner returned to the stone house, he helped Ann from the buckboard. For a moment she stood close to him. “Will they ever leave us alone, Morgan?”

  “I believe they will. There will be trouble first, I think. Ollie Herndon is hunting trouble, with or without orders from Dunn. We’ve got to be careful.”

  During subsequent days he explored the rift in the mesa, finding several ice caves, and in one of them a stone hammer. He prowled the canyon, often alone, but sometimes with either Johnny Ryan or Ann. He did a lot of thinking about what he had discovered.

  Algosa was no longer just a cow town. Mines were being opened in the backcountry, and although not very rich they had large ore bodies and gave evidence they might last, turning Algosa into a market town.

  Morgan Tanner had come from mountain country where cattle were more valued for milk, butter, and cheese than for beef, but so far as he was aware the only milk cow in Algosa was owned by the postmaster.

  What Dunn might be planning he could not guess, but the raids ceased. Tanner rarely went to town, and the place was never empty. When he did go into town he met people, and he asked a few questions, listened a lot.

  Johnny Ryan, his wife’s brother, was a hardworking youngster of thirteen. With Johnny helping, Morgan Tanner handled the cattle and strove to improve the place. When he did go to town he wore a gun, but avoided places where there might be trouble. Several people made a point of telling him what Dunn had done to the Powell boys, and he knew they all expected a showdown between Dunn and himself.

  Yet none of the Dunn riders appeared, and as long as he was left alone, Tanner was satisfied. The sun came out hotter each day, and the sky was cloudless. Wiley Dunn rode his sorrel out on the range beside his worried foreman. “What do you think, Ollie? Is the range all as bad as this?”

  “There’s places that are better. Back up in the breaks and in the deepest canyons. The water holes haven’t slacked off too much yet, except that one down to Spur. That’s gone dry.”

  There was silence, and Herndon asked cautiously, “Boss? D’ you reckon we might sell a few head? Ease up on the grass a mite?”

  Wiley Dunn stiffened. “No. Anyway, the price is off. We’d lose money to sell now.”

  Ollie Herndon said nothing. Gunman he might be, but he was also a cattleman. It was hard to sell when prices were down, yet better to sell now while they had beef on their bones than to let them lose weight. But he knew better than to make suggestions. Wiley Dunn had always had a fixation on numbers.

  “If we had that Lonetree place it would help,” he suggested. “You give me the word and I’ll tackle Tanner.”

  Dunn waited while a man might have counted ten, staring out over the long brown miles of his range. He was wishing this affair had never come up. The expression in the eyes of Tanner’s pretty wife had hurt him more than he would have admitted to anyone. He had grown more sensitive, he reflected, as he grew older. And if he faced Tanner now there would be no telling the outcome. If he died, what good would all these vast acres be? And if Tanner died, what would become of that lovely girl?

  “No,” he said finally, “not yet.”

  He saw nothing of Tanner. Twice he rode up the valley, keeping well out of sight, and another time he rode along a ridge overlooking the place from a distance.

  Lonetree was more lovely than he remembered it. There had always been water there, but now there were long, perfectly lined rows of planted crops, and over against the far side there was a field of alfalfa, or what seemed to be alfalfa.

  Tanner was no fool. He had a good thing there. He stared at the hay. Yet that was a lot of feed for the stock he had.… Suspicion leaped into his mind. Had Tanner turned to rustling? Had he, like other nesters in the past, started stealing cattle?

  Suppose he had a small herd of Hat cattle that he was secretly fattening? With sudden decision, Dunn turned away. This was the explanation. There could be no other.

  In the stone house against the cliff Morgan Tanner looked across the table at his wife. “Honey, I’ve been thinking. If we had us a Jersey bull now, a right fine Jersey from good milk stock, we might crossbreed those heifers into better milkers in a few seasons.”

  Ann Tanner looked at him thoughtfully. “You want to use that money Uncle Fred left us? Is that it?”

  “It’s your decision. It’s up to you and Johnny. He was your uncle.”

  “But he left it to all of us! What do you think, Johnny?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it, Sis. Morg never spoke of it before, but it’s been in my mind. There’s a market for milk and butter down at Algosa. This country has plenty of beef.”

  “All right,” Ann agreed. “Buy a bull whenever you can find one you want.”

  “I’ll go into town tomorrow,” he said.

  Morgan Tanner reached town at ten the following morning, and a few minutes earlier Wiley Dunn, Ollie Herndon, and twelve Hat hands swept down on the Lonetree ranch. It had been shrewdly planned, for Ollie had been watching the ranch with glasses and had seen the boy ri
de off on some mission. Instantly he was down off the ridge and they were riding.

  There was no one about when they rode into the yard. Dunn shouted and, white-faced, Ann Tanner came to the door. “Just what is it you want, Mr. Dunn? Have you taken to fighting women now?”

  His face flushed but his jaw was set. “I’m fighting no one, but we’ve come to search the range! That damn no-good husband of yours has taken to rustling cows. We seen some of them.”

  “We have no cattle but our own! Now I am ordering you to get off this place at once!”

  She turned quickly to grasp the shotgun, but Herndon leaped from his horse and caught the barrel as she was swinging it up. He wrenched it roughly from her hands. “Right purty, ain’t you? Maybe you could do with a good man after we string up that husband of yours!”

  She slapped him across the mouth and Herndon struck her. She had stepped back, but the blow caught her on the forehead and knocked her down.

  “Ollie!” Dunn was white-faced with anger. “For God’s sake, man! Get into your saddle now, and be damned quick about it. I’ll have no man strike a woman in my presence!” He pointed. “Get into your saddle, do you hear?”

  Turning to Ann he said, “Sorry, ma’am, but you shouldn’t have reached for that gun.”

  “And let you steal our cattle. You’re asking for trouble, Mr. Dunn. You don’t know Morgan as I do. Morgan Tanner’s mother was a Lowry, from the Nueces country. You may remember what happened to the Fullers.”

  Wiley Dunn stared at her, shocked. Every detail of the twenty-five-year feud was known to everybody in cattle country. The Fullers, or some people who called themselves that, had killed a Lowry boy in an argument over horses, and every Fuller had died.

  Suddenly, with startling clarity, he remembered the scene from years before. He himself had witnessed the final shoot-out. He had been visiting in Texas, planning to buy cattle, and four of the Fuller outfit had cornered two Lowrys, Bill Lowry and some youngster of sixteen or seventeen. They had shot Bill Lowry in the back, and then the kid turned on them.