by L. P. Holmes
An hour before dawn came the sound Bruce was waiting for—the muffled tempo of many hooves. He went out onto the store porch. Carp Bastion said from the dark, “Here’s everything, Bruce. The whole kit and caboodle.”
They moved to the grim work. Mostly they laid stiffened figures in a row on the porch. Two wounded men were brought inside, laid on the floor. A renegade with wrists tied stumbled in.
Butte Allen looked at Bruce. “Spelle?” he said.
Bruce nodded.
“Well,” said Butte, “that just about does it, I reckon.”
Bruce turned to Donovan and Otten and Pete Martin. “You’ve got Cashel Edmunds locked up in Pat’s storeroom. And here are three more who will live. What happens to the four of them is up to the settlers. It’s their chore from here on out. We’ve given you a start in this thing called law and order … a rough one, but necessary. You can build from here. See that the story is told just as it was. I guess the boys and I can call it a day now … or a night. From now on we’ve got plenty of ranch business to attend to. Let’s ride, gang.”
At Button Willow Ford on the river, Bruce turned off. “I’ll be along later, boys. Go get some rest.”
“And grub!” exclaimed Carp Bastion plaintively. “Great Moses. Am I hungry.”
Bruce followed the river and, with dawn breaking, rode into the Clebourne camp. Kip was astir, lighting the fire. He looked at Bruce with surprise. “You ride early, cowboy.”
“Or late,” answered Bruce, swinging down and spreading his hands against the first heat of the flames. “Been a big night, kid. You can forget Pitch Horgan and his crowd.”
Jeff Clebourne, yawning, came up to the fire. Bruce sketched the night’s events briefly, then hunkered, still and weary before the flames. Cadence came down from the big wagon where she slept and heard the story from Kip, who pulled her aside.
“The big fellow did it,” murmured Kip. “I knew he would. It’s in him to curry the wild ones. But it’s left him beaten and dark and bitter inside. Do what you can for him, honey.”
For all her slim girlishness, Cadence Clebourne knew deep wisdom. Her smile was bright and quick as she moved up beside Bruce and laid an arm across his shoulders.
“It’s always pleasant to have you with us, Bruce.”
He reached up and captured her hand. “When is it going to be big brother, youngster?”
She colored warmly. “Not long. As soon as the cabin is done.”
“We’ll throw a celebration to date time from,” Bruce declared. “You make Kip toe the scratch. If he doesn’t, yell for me. I’ll slap his ears back.”
She laughed softly. “I don’t think I’ll have to. Kip’s grand. Now I’ll get breakfast.”
Warm food and the simple order of this camp were just the things Bruce needed to lift him out of the worst of his moods. When he made ready to leave, just after sunup, Cadence had won a glimmer of his old, slow-breaking smile. Kip walked with him over to his horse.
“I know I don’t have to say thanks for Horgan,” Kip said gruffly. “If you ever have cause to wonder about the price, there’s this you can be sure of. You’ll never have cause to worry about me again, big fella.”
Bruce dropped a hand on Kip’s shoulder. “I’m certain of that, kid. Last night closed the book.”
He climbed the trail to Rocking A headquarters slowly, a big man on a weary black horse. Hack Asbell was stamping around by the corrals.
“Where in Tophet have you been?” demanded Hack testily. “You worry a man to death.”
“Just stopped by to say hello to my kid brother,” explained Bruce.
“How was I to know that?” growled the old cattleman. “For all I knew, you mighta decided to drift outta Indio Basin, just like you drifted into it. Which is something I got to know. How long you going to work for me?”
“How long do you want me to?”
Hack chewed the stub of a stogie. “From now on,” he said bluntly. “This is your home, this ranch. Remember the time you snagged me away from that bunch of crazy sodbusters? Well, I asked you why you bothered to. You gave me a few reasons, but there was another one that you held back. What was it?”
Bruce busied himself, unsaddling, giving no answer for some time. Then he said quietly, “My father was just such another as you. You reminded me of him.”
“Humph!” grunted Hack. “Humph!” But his old eyes gleamed softly. “It’s all settled then. Here you are, here you stay. The boys told me all about last night. Good job … damn good job. Knew you’d do it. Now forget it, son … and think of better things. Come along and meet the Carlings … all of ’em. Brink, he’s making the grade, fine. Missus Carling, well, there’s nothing in those fine eyes of hers but what was there when we first knew her. And Tracy, she’s my girl. Ain’t been so damned happy and satisfied with life since I don’t know when. Turned my cabin over to them folks. First time it ever had anybody worthwhile living in it. Now, come along.”
Aunt Lucy met them at the door. She put both hands on Bruce’s shoulders and smiled her old sweetness. “It’s good to have you back safely, Bruce … good! Brink’s awake. I know he wants to see you.”
Brink Carling was pale and gaunt. But there was no mistaking the quickening vitality in his eyes. Bruce took his hand. “This is the best possible news, Mister Carling. And smooth trails ahead.”
Carling murmured, “My thanks for everything, boy.”
Tracy Carling, coming in from a back room, said nothing. She just looked at Bruce, then moved softly about some household task. But there had been a depth and mystery in her glance that Bruce couldn’t understand.
Leaving the cabin, Bruce said to Hack Asbell, “The loot taken in the raids has been recovered. It was in the pockets of the different members of that gang. The money Brink Carling lost will be returned to him. Pat Donovan and Otten and Pete Martin will take care of all that. Now, me for some sleep. My eyes feel like they’d been burned into my head.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The days ran along. Ranch work fell into its usual groove. Bruce stuck to the limits of Rocking A range, but Hack Asbell was in and out of town regularly.
“They like us down there,” he told Bruce one evening. “No more cussing and growling and acting like they’d like to tear my ears off every time I meet up with a bunch of them settlers. Donovan and Otten and Martin have done a good job of spreading the real story and proving the truth of things. They had a mass meeting and decided on that feller Edmunds and them other three bad ones you and the boys brought in. Decided to let the government take care of Edmunds. The other ones will get floaters out of the basin when they’re able to travel, with the promise of a quick and sure rope around their necks should they ever show in these parts again.”
Bruce said, “That’s fair enough.”
“Hired me a couple of men who know how to finish up the Carling cabin,” declared Asbell. “I know Brink and his missus will want to get into their own place as soon as they can. And it’ll be damned lonely around this cussed ranch if Tracy goes with ’em.”
“Where else would she go?” asked Bruce.
Hack Asbell snorted. “Some ways you’re the smartest feller I know, son. Others, you’re the most thickheaded.” He stamped away.
There were ten days of fall branding to be done, and Bruce lost himself in the driving work of it, yet found keen wine of pleasure in the hard riding, the dust, the smell of the cattle, and the vital worth of it all. And when the chore was done he came out of it loose and cool and cheerful, with all the old shadows gone.
Back at headquarters he found that Brink Carling was well enough to be moved and that the next day he and Aunt Lucy were going down to their old camp with the recently completed cabin waiting for them. Hack Asbell was irascible and gloomy.
“Damn it!” he growled. “I sure hate to see them folks go. Feel like they sorta belong to
me, now.”
Bruce had not spoken a word to Tracy since his return from the darkest night of his life. And while he made no conscious effort to avoid her, she always managed to avoid him. Now he saw her going into the cook shack, where she was a popular visitor with old Muley, the cook.
Bruce went to the door of the shack and called, “Hey, Muley … come here!”
Muley came to the door. “What d’ya want?”
Bruce jerked a commanding thumb. “Scatter!” he mumbled. “Get out of here. Go someplace else.”
Muley grinned widely and obliged, limping off to find Hack Asbell. And when he did, the pair of them got their heads together like grizzled and hopeful conspirators.
Bruce went into the cook shack and announced bluntly, “You and I have got to have a talk.”
Tracy stood over by Muley’s big cooking range. She faced Bruce quietly, hair shining with all its old glory in a beam of pale sunlight lancing through a window.
“You,” accused Bruce, “have been dodging me like I was poison. Why?”
She studied him with soft, level eyes. “Maybe I wanted to wait until the grim, dark you had gone, and the happier man came back.”
“And has he?” Bruce asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think he has. I’m wondering if he’s come to stay.”
“That is up to you, Tracy.”
“Then,” she said, a little singing tone in her voice, “he will stay.”
Some time later they left the cook shack, hand in hand. And Hack Asbell and Muley, observing from a distance, immediately went into a war dance, beating each other over the shoulders lustily.
Bruce, grinning, pointed to them. “You see, they want you, too. I give you the same words Hack gave to me. This is your home.”
the end
About the Author
L. P. Holmes was the author of a number of outstanding Western novels. Born in a snowed-in log cabin in the heart of the Rockies near Breckenridge, Colorado, Holmes moved with his family when very young to northern California, and it was there that his father and older brothers built the ranch house where Holmes grew up and where, in later life, he would live again. He published his first story—“The Passing of the Ghost”—in Action Stories (September 1925). He was paid half a cent a word and received a check for forty dollars. “Yeah … forty bucks,” he said later. “Don’t laugh. In those far-off days … a pair of young parents with a three-year-old son could buy a lot of groceries on forty bucks.” He went on to contribute nearly six hundred stories of varying lengths to the magazine market as well as to write numerous Western novels. For many years of his life, Holmes would write in the mornings and spend his afternoons calling on a group of friends in town, among them the blind Western author Charles H. Snow, who Lew Holmes always called Judge Snow (because he was Napa’s Justice of the Peace in 1920–1924) and who frequently makes an appearance in later novels as a local justice in Holmes’ imaginary Western communities. Holmes produced such notable novels as Somewhere They Die (1955), for which he received the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. The Sunset Trail (2014), a California riverboat story, marked his most recent appearance. In L. P. Holmes’ stories one finds the themes so basic to his Western fiction: the loyalty that unites one man to another, the pride one must take in his work and a job well done, the innate generosity of most of the people who live in Holmes’ ambient Western communities, and the vital relationship between a man and a woman in making a better life.