Raw Land

by Short, Luke;

  By midmorning next day Pres and Tomás had worked their way carefully to the top of one of the red hills hard to the east of Will Danning’s Pitchfork, and from there Pres looked the place over. He regarded the small horse pasture, which held only one horse, and the corral, which was empty, and then the house, where smoke was rising from the cookshack wing. His hunch was right. Will Danning, on his second day home, would have ridden out to locate his cattle and boundaries and get a look at the place he had left ten years ago. Pres cursed when he thought of it. This was a sorry excuse for a ranch, yet he wanted it more than anything he knew.

  He said to Tomás without turning, “Vamos!” and heard the Mexican scramble down to his horse ground-haltered in the wash.

  Presently Tomás rode in from the east and pulled up in the yard and yelled, puncher-fashion, “Hello—the house!”

  The cookshack door opened, and Pablo, Will’s cook, stepped out. Tomás pulled his horse over. As compatriots will do in a strange country, Tomás and Pablo shook hands, and Tomás dismounted. Pres watched impatiently. If he remembered rightly, there was a ceremony for them to go through—cigarettes to be lighted, some courteous, leisurely talk, and then the hunting of shade in which to squat and resume their palaver.

  It all worked out that way. In a few minutes, Tomás gestured to the horse trough. Pablo followed, and they wound up in the shade of the barn.

  Pres grunted with satisfaction and started his circle of the house behind the shelter of the clay hills. When he was on the north side of the house, he tied the horse he had been leading, climbed the hill, then cautiously descended the other slope. It levelled off directly in back of the house. Pres approached the west corner, listened, heard nothing; he made sure the barn hid the two Mexicans, then stepped around the corner and into the open door of the bunkhouse wing.

  Once inside he paused, looking around at the double tier of bunks and the heavy table in the middle of the room. Now that he was here he felt a little foolish. In his mind last night there had been room for only anger and a single idea—he had to get Will Danning off this place by any means he could. The most obvious way, by violence, had failed, and the next most obvious way was legal eviction. For that, of course, he’d been prepared. Ever since he’d heard Chap Hale had bought the place, he’d been watching the county records in town for the recording of the deed. It had not been recorded, which meant that either Will or Chap had the deed. And last night he wondered if a search of the house would turn up the deed. If he could steal it, then it would give him the time it took Will to get another deed in which to plan some way of getting the place. But this bunkhouse didn’t look as if it held any deed.

  Nevertheless, he was going to look. Half the bunks were unoccupied; the rest held blankets and clothes. Hanging from the post of each occupied bunk was the war bag of its occupant. Since Pres didn’t know which was which, he set about looking through all. He would dump the contents of the war bags on the floor, look through them for any papers, and then put the stuff back.

  He had gone through two of them and found only old letters and pictures from magazines and catalogs, beside a change of clothes. On the third bunk, he found a newer war bag, shook it out, and knelt over its contents.

  This war bag reflected a different type of owner, and he thought he had Will Danning’s. For instance, there was a good pair of gloves; there was a magazine he’d never heard the name of before, and there was also a can of a good and different tobacco. Besides what was in a deerskin sack.

  Pres opened the sack. There was a thick silver watch, a cameo pin and a small painted miniature of a woman, framed in glass. There were no papers.

  In disgust, Pres threw the stuff to the floor. The miniature hit the boards, and its glass shattered with a small tinkle. It came open, also, and Pres picked it up angrily. Maybe the absence of the glass wouldn’t be noticed if he cleaned up the shards of it. He tried to shut the back of it, and it stuck; he turned it over to get a better grip. Curiosity prompted him, then, to look inside. There was another miniature there, of a man with mutton-chop whiskers. Engraved on the inside of the back was this message: To Murray, from Mother and Dad, on his fifteenth birthday.

  Pres read it, scowled, and closed the lid, but the message set his mind ticking. Murray. There was no Murray in this outfit, unless Milt Barron had lied to him that first day. Maybe Pinky was really named Murray.

  And then it came to Pres in a flash. Murray—Murray Broome! That was the man Will Danning worked for, and who had a reward of five thousand on his head for the murder of a senator!

  Pres stared at the miniature, his mind working swiftly. Then his glance traveled to a shirt lying on the floor. This was the shirt Milt Barron had been wearing yesterday. This wasn’t Will Danning’s war bag; it was Milt Barron’s!

  Pres stared again at the miniature, a thousand things running through his mind. Yellow Jacket, to a man, was wondering why Will Danning wanted the Pitchfork. Here was the answer—to hide Murray Broome!

  But which man of them was Murray Broome? Pres didn’t have to wonder more than a few seconds, and then his mind settled unerringly on Milt Barron. Something about him, his look, his speech, his clothes, told a man he wasn’t an ordinary puncher. Yes, it was Milt Barron.

  For one long minute Pres stared at the object in his hand, his swollen face creasing into a smile. He wasn’t thinking of the five thousand dollars reward; it was too late to use that money for the only thing he wanted. But better than money, better than anything he could have invented, was the knowledge he held.

  It was the pry he needed. At long last he saw a way to get Will Danning’s place.

  Chapter Four

  BLACKMAIL

  It was late morning when Will and Milt rode into Yellow Jacket. It looked like any cow town drowsing in the hot summer sun—one main street, dusty and wide, a cross street bisecting it. The buildings were all frame, with their false fronts scaling paint under the blistering sun and winds of the bench. On one of the four corners, Will noticed, was a new bank, across from it Dunn’s General Store. Hal Mohr’s big saloon was in the middle of the block where Dunn’s used to be, and downstreet a few doors and across the way was the sheriff’s office and jail, converted from Mohr’s old saloon. Across from the new saloon and in the middle of the block the hotel still stood at its same dark location. The only trees in town grew on the back streets where the homes were. The whole town seemed to point to the station at the head of the street, and it was dominated by the long tangle of dirty stock pens next to it. Yellow Jacket was a cow town, living for cattle and dominated by cattle.

  Cow ponies were tied in clusters at the rails, and an occasional team and buckboard or spring wagon added variety.

  Will and Milt pulled in at the tie rail a couple of doors down from the hotel.

  Will said, “Want to meet Chap?”

  Milt shook his head. “I met him once, a long time ago. And he looked like he had a memory. No, I’ll look around.”

  Will said briefly, “You got to face it some time. Go ahead.”

  He watched Milt tramp across the dusty street, whistling carelessly, and he was troubled. This furtive hiding, the bleak spread, the barren red-clay badlands, and the long hours of riding were galling Milt, he knew—Will even made himself think of Murray as Milt now.

  The night of the shooting, months ago, when Will had taken a horse out to him where he was waiting in the old stage station east of Mesilla, they had settled this. Milt had told him briefly about the fight, how he was crowded into going for his gun, and how he had killed old Senator Mason. Milt had been bitter and discouraged that night, and had seen himself as the victim of a cheap political frame-up. It was then he had asked Will to hide him for a year until the next elections. Then, Milt was confident, a reform party would be elected, his reward would be lifted, and he could come out of hiding. It was all politics, he had insisted, and he was being savagely persecuted for his crusades to clean up the Territory. And Will, who was a loyal friend, knowing not
hing of politics and caring less, had remembered old Harkins’s place, lonely and remote and unfriendly. He had made his decision that night, and he had never questioned the rightness of it. Milt was his friend.

  Five years before, when Milt’s father had given him the ranch and the newspaper, Milt had hired him, a lonely, broke puncher riding the grub line. During those five years and countless week-ends, they had come to know each other on pack and hunting and fishing trips. And Milt, because he knew a man with cow savvy when he saw him, had promoted Will to foreman of his Double Bar O. It had been a strange and deep friendship of a volatile, brilliant, and educated young man with a taciturn, hard-to-know young puncher. It was a friendship that few suspected, for they were both careful to guard it as something private.

  But a friendship it was. Will had proven that when he had taken his savings to buy this place where Milt was to hide. Will had accepted Milt completely as his friend, and he saw nothing strange in running a constant risk, of spending all his money and a year of his life in helping Milt. Milt was his friend; it was as simple as that.

  He turned away, his face sober. Before it was over, Milt would be a lot sicker of hiding, a lot more impatient, and inclined to carelessness. Then the real trouble would begin. This was only the beginning.

  Three doors down from the hotel, Will swung into the entrance of a covered stairway that lifted to Chap Hale’s office.

  He found Chap in a musty room lined on three sides with law books and smelling of good cigars and dust. Will was shocked to see Chap in daylight. Ten years had done a lot to him. He was frail as old china, and his skin was almost transparent. His white hair was thin, and his eyes had lost some of their sparkle.

  He shook hands with Will without getting up, and waved Will to a chair.

  “How does it look?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “Just like I thought it would,” Will murmured.

  “Worth a life’s savings?”

  Will nodded. He smiled a little, the skin around his eyes wrinkling with some inner amusement.

  Chap said, “Funny, your liking that place, after Broome’s Double Bar O.”

  “That was a big ranch. It cost a hundred thousand and grazed eight thousand head of beef. This is—well, it’s a poor man’s start, Chap.”

  Chap said, “I read about this Broome business in the papers.” He looked out the window. “Young Murray Broome must have been a thorough-going scoundrel.”

  Will said nothing, and presently Chap looked at him. “You don’t say anything.”

  “He was a good boss,” Will said quietly. “Outside of that I don’t know or care what he was, I reckon.”

  “He libeled Senator Mason, and when Mason won the suit he killed him. What do you think of that?”

  Will shifted impatiently in his seat. “I don’t think about it, Chap. I don’t care about it.” He had himself under control and he knew it. But he was sorry and a little angry to hear Chap say what he was saying.

  “Well, no matter,” Chap said, sighing. He looked keenly at Will. “You’re finished with him, I hope.”

  “I’m a rancher,” Will said flatly.

  Chap grinned then. “You’ll need to be, out there. You’re determined to stick it out?”

  Will nodded.

  “With Case a poor neighbor to you and suspicious?”

  Will nodded and said slowly, “What about Case, Chap? You’re his friend, you say.”

  Chap nodded. “Angus is a good man. But he’s suspicious. He remembers Harkins and the rustling. And he’s crazy on one subject, like all of us.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “He’ll kill a man who steals a steer of his. He’d kill his mother if she stole one. He’ll put up with anything from his crew but stealing. And sooner or later, Will, he’s apt to think you’re a thief. And then you’ll have trouble, real trouble.” Will only nodded, and Chap said in a tired voice, “You’re willing to risk that? You still want to go through with it?”

  “I do.”

  “All right,” Chap said. “I’ll sign it over to you, then.”

  “Sign it over to me?” Will echoed.

  Chap nodded. “I bought the Pitchfork in my name, with my own money. I thought—I hoped—you’d change your mind. If you had, it didn’t matter that I’d bought it and was stuck with it. I’m old, Will, and money’s nothing. I just don’t want you to get a wrong start.”

  “I want the place,” Will said. “Sign it over, Chap, because I’m here to stay.”

  Chap murmured, “I can remember a fifteen-year-old kid I singled out of a bunch of so-called rustlers brought into the sheriff’s office. I can remember thinking he looked pretty stubborn. When I pleaded his case privately with the judge, and the judge asked to see him, he still looked stubborn. The judge said so, when he dismissed charges.” Chap shook his head. “You haven’t changed much, Will.”

  “No,” Will said.

  Chap turned to his desk. “Well, I’ll sign it over to you.”

  Will rose, ready to go. Chap said, “Oh, I almost forgot, Will. There’s a young woman in town staying at the hotel. Her name is Norman. She asked me about you. She wants to talk to you.”

  Will scowled. “Norman? I don’t know any Norman. What’s she like?”

  “Young. Pretty in a hard way. She wouldn’t state her business. I told her you’d see her.”

  Will nodded. They chatted a few minutes longer, and then Will left.

  His lean face was grave as he hit the boardwalk and turned down it. He was touched by old Chap’s effort to get him to reconsider buying the place, and he was disturbed by what Chap had said of the Murray Broome-Senator Mason fight. Chap was wrong, of course.

  Milt was tying a package across the cantle of his saddle when Will came up to the tie rail.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Will said.

  Milt looked at him, saw his scowl, and asked, “Bad news?”

  Will laughed. “No. Only damn these people who don’t give a man credit for knowin’ his own mind.”

  “Meanin’ what?”

  Will said grimly, “Chap Hale was so sure I wouldn’t want to buy the place after I looked at it that he bought it in his own name. Now I buy it from him.”

  Milt laughed with quiet irony. “Chap’s right, Will. It’s a damned sand pile. If you can do better, don’t buy it.”

  “Damned if I won’t,” Will growled. “I don’t care what kind of graze it is. We’re buyin’ it because it’s lonesome.”

  Milt said quietly, “On my account, isn’t it, Will?”

  Will said briefly, “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” Milt nodded bleakly, and Will said, quick to change the subject, “Go get a drink. I’ll pick you up at Mohr’s,” and went on toward the hotel.

  At the hotel desk he inquired for a Miss Norman and was told to go up to room ten.

  Upstairs, at the door of the room next to the last he knocked, and a woman’s voice said, “Come in.”

  Will stepped inside, yanking off his Stetson. A girl was standing by the bed, a girl he had never seen before. Will caught the faint scent of cigarette smoke in the room, but he couldn’t be sure. He immediately thought of Chap’s description of her, “Pretty in a hard way,” and he thought that described her. She was dark-haired, and her dress was of a dull-red silk that closely molded her figure. Her brown eyes were watchful and smiling.

  “Mr. Danning? I’m Mary Norman.” She smiled and extended her hand, and Will shook hands with her. She offered him a chair by a connecting door into the next room and then sat on the bed facing him. He was more curious than ever about her as he sat down and waited for her to begin.

  “I understand you’ve bought a spread around here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a lovely country,” Mary Norman said, and smiled a little. “A lot better cattle country than where you were, isn’t it?”

  “Why, yes,” Will said. His gray eyes were searching, and the girl returned his leve
l stare.

  “I saw you around the Double Bar O,” she said. “That’s how I happened to know of you.”

  “I see,” Will said. He didn’t remember her.

  Mary Norman seemed calm enough, but Will noticed that she was pleating the goods of her skirt with nervous fingers. Suddenly, she said, “Oh, I’m no good at hiding anything, Mr. Danning. I’ve come to ask you a question.”

  Will nodded, still puzzled.

  “Have you ever heard Murray Broome speak of me?” she asked quietly.

  Will felt a vague uneasiness as he shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

  “He and I were—well, good friends,” Mary Norman said.

  Will said nothing, and his silence seemed to embarrass the girl. She looked away from him, and her cheeks were slowly coloring, Will saw.

  Suddenly, she blurted out, “You know, we were going to be married.”

  “I didn’t know,” Will said blankly.

  The girl stood up and turned her back to him. “I don’t know how to say this with you looking at me that way. But Murray and I were more than friends. He—he was going to marry me when all this trouble was over.” She whirled now, and her skirts billowed as she turned. “I—you can guess now why I want to see him,” she said defiantly.

  Will didn’t speak, only inclined his head. It was a nicely acted mixture of embarrassment and a declaration of love, intended to be a show of maidenly modesty. Only it didn’t quite carry; it was too expert, Will thought.

  “I can’t guess, no,” he said slowly.

  “I want to see Murray,” Mary Norman said.

  Will said, frowning, “I understand that, yes. But I don’t understand why you came to see me. You want me to find him for you?”

  “Yes,” the girl said swiftly.

  “And where should I look?” There was a faint touch of irony in Will’s voice.

  “You must know where he is!” the girl cried. “Somebody does, and you were his closest friend!”

  Will shook his head and came to his feet. “Sorry, ma’am. But I’m not workin’ for Murray Broome any more. I’ve got a spread of my own. Murray’s disappeared, so I’ve heard.”