by Abel Short
The only thing that did, and but vaguely, was Silver himself. Sometimes when he looked at him, as he shadowed him according to orders, he had the sensation of having known him before. Silver's name meant nothing; it was his face. And somehow that face was associated with prison…
CHAPTER 7
They turned off up a branch of the stage road where a leaning signpost with drunken-tilted arrow pointing straight ahead said "To the Pothook." From a knoll came the idiotic howl of a coyote. They climbed a long slope, skirted the edge of a ravine, and swung straight west. Silver drew up to don his pillow-case mask. Putting on his, Big Joe had to tear the slit of the left eye wider. They hung their sombreros on their saddle horns. Where the trail dropped between cut banks, Silver left the others and went on with Big Joe.
They moved slowly through the ranch yard gate and a harsh voice hailed them from the dark house. "Stand where you are and state your business!" Silver shoved empty hands up to shoulder height. Big Joe noticed that he had discarded his gray frock coat for a black one with the collar now turned up.
"Shandy Smith sent us," Silver called back low. Then he walked his pony on up the drive. Big Joe aped his moves. A bluish scimitar of moon hung in the southern sky and stained them in a soft effulgence of light.
Poking a double-barreled shotgun before him, Buck Lennore emerged after a couple of minutes. "My man down at the bunkhouse has got you covered in the back," he snorted. "So if this is a trick…"
Silver said again he was sent by Shandy and got down and went up on the porch and talked. They parleyed in low tones so Big Joe could catch only an occasional word. Lennore said a couple of men wouldn't do any good. Silver told about the others waiting down in the road.
"Who're you?" Lennore asked.
"We're here… like Shandy promised… What you don't know—you won't have to lie about." Silver had his voice down hard and tight in his throat so it wouldn't be recognized. He asked if Lennore had served notice on the Ventares that he wasn't going into their pool.
Lennore said he had, nodding vehemently. Scar Ventare had got pretty mad behind his easy smile. Said a man was practically playing along with the bandidos by not joining. Said that those who wouldn't pitch in and help the common cause couldn't expect to be helped when trouble came. And that it probably would come again.
Silver wanted to know how they'd come last time and the rancher pointed out the way they'd taken the place in a three-way crossfire. He said he supposed he'd better remain in the house, not trusting any hooded hombres too much.
"Sure—and be killed," Silver said. "This time they'll rattle lead into her till she's inside out to be sure and get you. Get your man outa the bunkhouse too. They'll ventilate that like the winds of Hell blew through it. Now-w… you and your man go up there." He pointed to the old smoke house up the slope a ways from the side of the main house. Then he jerked down his hand quicklike when the blue moonlight glinted on the diamond of his ring. Silver Linn had a way of giving orders like a natural leader.
Lennore whistled and the bunkhouse hand took shape out of the night and came over. "You ain't saying who you are, huh?" he put it again.
"Bullets don't have names on 'em," Silver grunted. "But the ones aimed at your enemies are fired by friends. Ain't that a good bet?"
Lennore rubbed his stubbled chin so it made a rasping sound and headed off for the smoke house. Silver and Big Joe went back to the others in the cutbank. Silver set his men around, figuring on the way the masked riders had come last time. He put Nick up in the trees overhanging the bank where they'd probably work their riflemen. Stub and another he sent down with their ponies to wait behind the bunkhouse when they hit for the corral as they had before. Big Joe and himself he took into the brush right smack across the trail from the house. Silver Linn packed nerve all right; he'd be right in the thick of it when the gun-slinging broke out.
His last order was, "No shooting till you hear me whoop."
An hour passed. Time seemed endless. A hot wind raked the prairie and sent the sweat rivering down a man's face under the pillow case mask. Down by the bunkhouse Stub moved around with a quirly cupped in his hand. Big Joe squatted on a low rock beside Silver. Joe's head throbbed again; he was trying to think. He had worked it out laboriously. He had been traveling with Silver, the way Silver himself told it, and everybody in the Golden Stirrup knew Silver all right. But nobody knew him, Pony Grimes.
He poked at Silver's sleeve and tried to put it into words. "How is it nobody much seems to know who I am—even my name?" he ended.
Silver Linn's eyes snapped behind his baggy mask. He opened his mouth, simultaneously locking fingers around a gun butt. And Nick's coyote wail, the warning signal, floated out from the trees. The masked ones were coming.
They appeared in the cutbank below Nick, more than a dozen of them, the leader snapping his red mask up over his eyes a moment before he rode out into the moonlight. They milled in a tight bunch, studying the dark ranch house. Two of them dropped to the ground and moved down for a closer look at the bunkhouse with its saddle-backed roof.
"We want to capture one of 'em—even dead," Silver muttered. "Then we can hang the deadwood on—"
Three of them seemed to have vanished. Big Joe saw the legs of the last one of the trio disappearing over the top of the cut into the trees where Nick was stationed. But Nick was too smart for them. Moments passed and they did not come upon him. Then one of them, afoot, came along the road past Silver and Big Joe, Winchester crooked in his arm. He skirted the ranch yard, hunched, to get set to throw down a crossfire. A shape detached itself from the smoke house and a lifted gun barrel gleamed briefly. That masked one sank in the tall grass.
Rejoined by the pair that had scouted the bunkhouse, the rest, mounted, swung toward the ranch yard. "Drag your tail out and put your pants in saddle leather while you can, Lennore, you ol' tickbird!" the leader bellowed. They waited for response. None. "Come out, Lennore, or we'll smoke you out!" The empty house stared back blackly at them. "All right, boys!"
They poured up the driveway, slamming lead into the place so that the night boomed with thunder. Window glass tinkled. Splinters flew and the board walls rattled with the chunk of slugs. Part of the front door was chopped away and a post of the gallery buckled. The men backed in the trees on the road bank pumped rifle bullets into the second story.
There was a lull as they swirled before the house. Some of the men were punching exploded shells from their guns. It was the moment Silver awaited. Lifting his mask, he let go with a warwhoop. It would have made a full-blooded Comanche turn handsprings in his grave with envy.
Livid spears of muzzle flame hosed from his and Big Joe's weapons in almost the same instant. Lennore and his remaining cowhand began to bang away from up behind the smoke house. Stub and the other house guard from the Stirrup came piling out around the corral, driving lead before them. The red-masked ones were in a deadly crossfire for a change. Two toppled from their hulls. One horse was wounded and went shuffling and stampeding around the corner of the house, rider clinging for dear life. They were in one hell of a fix, most of them with emptied guns.
Panic hit them and they stampeded for the yard gate, spurring like mad, coat-tails straight in the wind.
"Now we got them dirty leather-slappers!" Silver yelled and jumped out into the road. He had two guns spitting.
Big Joe was like his shadow, guns mute a few brief moments as he snatched fresh shells from his belt. Lacy clouds latticed the moon silver and it was like drawing bead on ghostly shadows. Silver and Joe rushed down the trail but they couldn't seem to drop another man. The red masked riders larruped into the cutbank.
One of their mates, left in the trees, came plunging out and went toppling over the bank. Nick's weird-looking pillow-cased head showed through the foliage a moment. He could bat them out of the saddle like ducks on a rock from that vantage point. Silver screeched and grabbed his arm where a slug had vented his sleeve and seared the flesh.
They
turned as the earth vibrated with fresh hoofs pounding. Another batch of the red-masked ones who had been stationed back from the barn were busting past the house. The tables had been reversed. Silver and his men were caught between chopping gun-fire now. It was sudden as the flip of a cow's tail in flytime.
Nick twisted into view from the trees, guns sagging from his hands. Then he threw himself back out of sight as the first pack of riders tore through below. Big Joe and Silver were running like crazy on their spiked heels. Screaming curses, the latter waved toward the bank. They scrambled up it into the trees as the moon blossomed full again. Back by the bunkhouse, Stub was dragging his wounded companion through the doorway.
It was like walking the rim of a grave blindfolded there in the trees for the next few minutes. The second parcel of red-masked ones fanned out and drove in from two sides. The first bunch that had passed through the cutbank came wheeling back to take them in the rear. Working from tree trunk to bush clump, Big Joe's bucking guns grew hot. He spat through the eye-stinging gunsmoke, saw one of them go to his knees as he tried to slip in afoot. It was almost a relief to Big Joe. There was no thinking now, and there was something good about chopping down these snakes out to run a decent man off his place.
Shot gashed the hole of a yellow pine inches from his shoulder and he glided away from it. A figure reared from a thicket a foot away. Big Joe slashed with a hot gun barrel and the man stumbled away. He ducked back and found himself in a small clearing. In the center of it, big hands clawed into the grass, Nick sat dazedly. His pillow-case hood had been ripped off and blood snaked down the side of his face from a scalp gash where he had been just creased. Joe saw he wasn't shot badly.
Silver ducked through the trees at the far side of the clearing, two of the red-masked ones after him. Instinct directed Big Joe; he was across there with a tigerish spring. One of the pursuers twisted to meet him. Joe's left gun spattered twice and the man dived into the shadows with a smashed shoulder. Joe went on after Silver to trigger at a rider who had gone through the cut and was half-circling back.
It was Stub who saved them. He had worked up from the bunkhouse to the bank across the road. He piled lead at the pack ringing the clump of woodland from the unexpected angle. There was a piercing whistle on the night and they larrupped out of there down the trail.
"Guess they got their traveling clothes on," Silver snarled almost at Big Joe's side. Joe waited, watching the log down the slope where he'd seen one of the snakes drop. But shortly tornilla stalks jerked at the bottom of the rise and a rider slammed away around the bend of the trail. Big Joe looked around. Silver was gone.
Joe walked back to the clearing with the drumming of hoofs waning on the night. Stub was standing there, hood pulled off. The leg-wounded man came limping up from the bunkhouse. He stopped and looked down too. Nick was flat on his back, one leg twisted up under him awkwardly. There was a ruby splotch on his shirt that had stopped spreading. Nick wasn't ever going to buy that little horse ranch over Nevada way…
Silver Linn came striding in from the ring of trees. "What happened to Nick? Soldiering on the job again?"
Stub said, "When I passed before, Nick only had a head cut."
Stub and Big Joe saw it at the same moment, the whitish rectangle of paper that lay half propped on a stone beyond Nick's head. It had some kind of a picture on it. Joe bent toward it and Stub stepped quickly to it.
"Wait—" Silver snapped. One of his guns had hopped up level.
Stub moved his left hand to the back of his neck. Joe saw the tip of the hilt of a knife slung there.
Then there was a snapping in the brush. They wheeled, the never-sleeping intenseness of the gun-slinger ruling them. Skin taut over cheekbones, mouths clamped, eyes wheeling in their heads like polished stones.
Buck Lennore came into the moonlit patch, fanning himself with his slouch hat. Stub and Joe twisted back to the spot beside dead Nick's head. Silver stood smiling vaguely, gun in his scabbard. The picture on the ground was gone.
CHAPTER 8
Maddox was crawling with folks the next morning like a kicked anthill. The sidewalks and paths beside the newly laid-out roads teemed with jostling bunches of men. A jasper came careening out of a whiskey-mill down by the hook of the river, bouncing off the toe of a bartender's boot. The man fumbled out a pair of sixes and blasted at the sky, hat over his eyes. One of Dinby's deputies fetched him a clip over the ear that left him sitting in the gutter dazedly. The nearby gents who had turned to look were already moving on about their business.
It was the same way when an old man went down under a kicking bronc at a tie-rack. They threw some water on his bloody head and sent a boy running for Doc Hilder. Then the blacksmith put his ear down against the old man's chest to listen to his heart and let him sag back to the ground. He rose and told somebody to go down to the undertaker's store. The doc wouldn't be needed. The little ring that had formed broke up in a matter of minutes to leave the corpse to the ministrations of the green bottleflies. Wasn't that a special extra stage swinging down from the north with the overflow of passengers perched on the roof? A couple of wagonloads of newcomers rattled over the Snake River bridge too.
Maddox was leaping. New tent stores had sprung up since sunrise. Speculation in land and building sites was rife. Homes were so scarce that some of the hardier tribe had built dugouts up from the river bank, rigging patches of canvas at the mouths for privacy. After all, the new railroad junction was going to be at Maddox, with the line coming in from the southwest to join the spur of the W. & C. down from Timmons. There would be no more cattle drives up the arduous track to the latter place now to load for market.
And there was that second silver strike up at old Cutter's Bonanza in the Yellow Dog mountains to the east. Instead of trekking in tools and supplies and toting out the silver across the desert beyond, everything would come and go through Maddox once the steel rails got in. It was a boom a-building. Men flowed to Maddox as if drawn by a lodestar. And with them came the vermin and locusts and buzzards. The tinhorns and card sharps. The painted ladies. And the chill-eyed leather slappers, gunmen.
Marshal Dinby came out of his house where his office was. He turned toward the jail in the human tide eddying in Maddox, a-grin but cocking a worried eye at it. Then he changed his mind and reversed down the road to the Golden Stirrup. He needed a drink more and more often these days. He thought he understood what brought these men to the town just as he understood it would bring trouble.
But there were a few men who knew of something else, a secret something, that was going to boom Maddox. Two of them sat their ponies down at the end of the moiling main street. Scar and Duke Ventare. Scar didn't wear his catlike smile now. And the bluish scar running from his eye kept jerking. Behind them lurked the ever-present Largo. He held his left arm a little crooked. There was a lump of bandaging beneath the sleeve.
Another of those men who knew "the thing" was Silver Linn. He paced the second-story gallery of the Stirrup that overhung the sidewalk. When he put his tailor-made cigarette to his mouth the bandage on his left wrist showed. He pulled his coat sleeve over it quickly. Cold anger was stamped on his dour face, thinning the lips. He wasn't satisfled about last night at all. True, they had saved Buck Lennore's ranch, but Silver Linn had never operated under the altruistic system before in his career and wasn't starting now.
They hadn't pinned the deadwood on anybody, much less the Ventares. The bunch that slammed up from the barn had picked up the wounded men in the yard. They had found one dead man at the edge of the cut, but he was a newcomer to the country. So there was no way of proving to folks he was on the Pothook payroll. And the Ventares had to be ousted from the country before he could rule Maddox and dominate the Spit.
Doc Hilder came out onto the gallery. He had a knack of walking silently and Silver started at sight of him; Silver's right hand flipped down hard against his trouser seam. But there was no need for him to have worried. Quirly smoke drifted from the doorwa
y. Big Joe, Pony, was there.
"You lost the pot last night, Silver," Doc said bluntly.
Silver spat over the rail. "You got buzzard blood in yer veins somewheres, Doc. You always show up when they's trouble—like bad news! Well?"
"Tab Hobart and his two uncles is quitting the Spit. Went through the road at the settlement early this morning, all the stuff they had left packed in a wagon. One of the uncles was wounded right bad, too."
" 'All the stuff they had left?' Why, Hobart had a sizable herd!"
Doc shrugged. "Did have. 'S gone, rustled off. Buildings burned to the ground. The Ventares' bank has a mortgage on the place and Tab says they can have the whole shebang, lock, stock and barrel. His wife's with baby, you know."
"What happened?"
"The red-masked riders you went after—they struck his place last night. Wiped him out and told him to pull his freight or they'd be around again and string him up from a wagon tongue. He pulled."
"The double-crossing snakes!" Silver cried, grabbing off his hat and beating the railing in his fury. "The dirty—"
"Hey! Hey!" Doc jabbed a finger toward Silver's head.
Silver leaped fingers to his white hair. He glanced toward the door. Big Joe was inside it, back toward the jamb on that side. Silver went on cursing out the red-masked riders and the Ventares. He blued the air with all the honest rage of a duped righteous man.