The Second Western Novel

by Matt Rand

  Rance sat thoughtful for some minutes. He had been touched by the old man’s steadfast affection for his scapegrace son and his desire to provide for his future.

  “Mr. Gandara,” he offered at length, “I got a little suggestion to make—mebbe it’ll sound good to you.”

  Old Alfredo looked interested. “Uh-huh?”

  “S’posin’,” said Rance, a trifle diffidently, “you let me file that claim in my name. Fust, I’ll deed it over to yore son—that’s permitted, you know—and when he shows up it’ll be theah ready for him. You can lure somebody to do the assay work.”

  Old Alfredo beamed. “Now that’s mighty fine of you!” he exclaimed. “Mighty fine. I accept that offer and I’m sho’ much obliged. We’ll drop over to Benson’s office and fix up the papers, if yore ’greeable. And while yore at it, why don’t you file a claim for yoreself. I’ve a notion theah’s still some valyble ledges left.”

  Rance smiled, but shook his head. “I ain’t a miner,” he said. “I’m a Ranger, and I still owns a little int’rest in a cow factory. Guess I got too much hoss flesh and saddle leather and grass rope in my blood to ever be keen for much of anythin’ else.”

  Rance heard more news the next day—news of a disquieting nature.

  “It’s Pete Yuma,” Tumbleweed Turner told the Ranger. “Him and Dirty Shirt is makin’ big talk. They blame you for the Warner boys bein’ killed and they don’t feel so happy ’bout what happened to Saunders and Paulson. Pete says he’s gonna run you outa town or kill you; been spoutin’ it ’round ev’wheah.”

  “Bit talk don’t us’ally mean much,” commented Rance.

  Tumbleweed’s face was earnest; there was no twinkle in his eyes now.

  “Don’t be too sho’,” he warned. “Pete is bad, even though he has got a big mouth. He’s a killer and he shoots fast and straight, prefably in the back. Dirty Shirt’s the one to look out for, though. That half-breed’s got what I don’t believe Pete has when it comes to a show-down; Dirty Shirt’s got guts.”

  Rance pondered the warning and did not discount it. In saloons and dance halls as the day wore on he heard more about Yuma’s threats. He also received friendly warnings and advice. All of which caused his gray eyes to harden and his lean jaw to set a little tighter. Pete Yuma was shrewdly developing a situation that would force the Ranger to take action or lose prestige, and a peace officer of the Southwest who lost prestige usually lost his life very soon after. Rance went looking for Pete Yuma, and received another warning.

  “Keep away from the ‘Bottoms Up’, Ranger,” whispered a bartender as he poured a drink. “Pete Yuma and Dirty Shirt is theah, waitin’ for you to walk in the door. They been guzzlin’ all day long and Dirty Shirt’s smokin’ marihuana.”

  Rance’s eyes narrowed still more on receiving that last bit of information. Marihuana, a drug derived from a plant allied to cannibus indica, does plenty to the average white man; but it all too often changes the Indian to a merciless killer. Dirty Shirt was half Indian.

  The Bottoms Up was a small saloon of evil reputation that squatted where the more pretentious buildings of Lucky Cuss Street dwindled dejectedly to shacks and dirty tents.

  Rance nodded his thanks to the friendly barkeep, paid for his drink and walked slowly down Lucky Cuss Street. As he passed the last shop and entered the shack town, he noticed a rat-faced little man scurrying along in front of him. He grinned faintly as the man glanced shiftily over his shoulder and vanished between a couple of shacks.

  “Jigger hustlin’ ’long to tell Pete I’m headed this way,” chuckled the Ranger as he turned into an alley.

  Rance followed the alley for a short distance and then turned at right angles, taking a course that would put him past the back door of the Bottoms Up.

  The door stood slightly ajar. Rance pushed it a bit farther open and peeped into the dingy room. The setting that met his eyes was tableau-like.

  Several men, all looking one way, were ranged along the walls. The bartender, tense and alert, stood against the back bar, a sawed-off shotgun conveniently within reach. Dirty Shirt Jones stood in front of the bar, peering with muddy eyes. Pete Yuma lounged against a table, right hand caressing the black butt of his pistol. The attention of all was fixed on the front door. A grin quirked Rance Hatfield’s lips but his eyes remained cold.

  “Howdy, Pete!”

  Pete Yuma jumped a foot, clutching convulsively at his gun Dirty Shirt tensed rigid.

  “Oh, my Gawd!” whimpered the bartender.

  Turning they saw Rance Hatfield standing just inside the back door, hands on his hips, eyes glinting in the shadow of his wide hat. For a long moment there was utter silence. Then Rance walked forward until he was within three feet of Pete Yuma.

  “Heah’d tell you was lookin’ for me, Pete,” he drawled easily.

  Yuma tried to moisten Iris dry lips with a tongue that felt like leather.

  “I—I—” he began haltingly.

  “I’m heah!” Rance interrupted him coldly. “Speak yore piece.”

  Yuma glanced about desperately. The men along the wall avoided his gaze. The bartender had moved away from the shotgun and was busily polishing a glass. Dirty Shirt’s thick lips curled in a sneer.

  “What the hell would I wanta see you for?” Yuma mumbled querulously.

  “Thought you might have a little notion ’bout killin’ me, p’haps,” the Ranger said. “Well, get goin’!”

  Yuma’s shifty eyes refused to meet the bleak gray gaze that never left his face. His fingers curled away from the pistol butt.

  Rance Hatfield suddenly reached out a long arm. He gripped the gunman by the collar, shook him till his teeth rattled.

  “You little rattler!” he rasped, “you go spittin’ out any more pizen ’bout me ’round heah and I’ll tie you inter a bow-knot and hang you around yore own neck! Now git!”

  He whirled Yuma around and hurled him half way to the door.

  With a strangled scream Dirty Shirt leaped, steel glittering in his hand. Rance ducked under the knife, caught the halfbreed’s wrist and hurled him over his shoulder. Dirty hit the floor with a crash, writhed and lay groaning. Rance whipped his left-hand six from its holster and covered Yuma, whose gun was coming.

  “Pete,” he told the paralyzed outlaw, “yore leavin’ town in jest three hours. If you ain’t gone by then I’m comin’ lookin’ for you, and not with no opry glass, either. Git!”

  Yuma slunk through the door. Rance jerked Dirty Shirt to his feet and shoved him, stumbling and muttering, out of the saloon and up the street to the squat, solidly built little jail.

  “Lock this fangin’ sidewinder up till I decides what to do with him,” he told Tumbleweed Turner, who acted as turnkey.

  After the deputy had departed on some business of his own, Rance glanced at his watch and sat down in the little room that served as the jail office. With his feet propped comfortably on the table he smoked numerous cigarettes, looking at his watch from time to time. As the shadows lengthened he lighted the single wall lamp and resumed his seat, his lean profile etched by the yellow flame. Finally he looked at his watch for the last time and slipped it back into its pocket.

  “Time’s up, Pete,” he drawled, half-aloud. “Now I’ll just go see if—”

  Cr-r-rash!

  The building rocked to a terrific explosion. The heavy cell door flew off its hinges, smashed into the table and sent table, chair and Ranger to the floor in a splintering heap. Both barrels of a shotgun roared outside the window and blew what was left of the glass to bits.

  Rance heard the buckshot howl over his head and slam into the wall. He pawed from under the wrecked furniture and leaped to his feet. There was an instant of silence, then the click of fast hoofs fading away from the jail.

  Outside the building, men were running and shouting. The front door banged open.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on?” bawled Sheriff Bethune.

  “Pete Yuma jest left town,” Rance told him dryly. />
  Tumbleweed was peering amid the wreckage of the cell.

  “Dirty Shirts left, too,” he grunted, “but they ain’t much left. Johnny, wonder wheah we can get a broom and a dust pan?”

  Sheriff Johnny voiced profane comment. “Pete musta tried to help Dirty bust outa jail. The damn fool used enough dynamite to sink a battleship!”

  CHAPTER 9

  The news of the Silver Valley gold strike spread swiftly. Miners and prospectors poured into Coffin. After them came a pestilent horde of gamblers, sharpers and “dance-hall” women. The newcomers, most of them, brought money. The prospect holes in the hills were coughing gold at a lively rate. The already feverish tempo of life in the mining town stepped up. Saloons, gambling hells and dance halls flourished and grew arrogant. Fights and killings became more frequent. Sheriff Bethune, Tumbleweed Turner and the new town marshal, an energetic individual with a notched gun barrel, found plenty to do.

  Rance Hatfield held himself aloof from minor local disturbances and concentrated on the outlaws, whose chief victims were miners bringing in dust from outlying claims. Robberies, which had become of too common occurrence to elicit much comment, began to decline. Rance, heading a posse of miners and cowboys, fought a pitched battle with a raiding band from Mexico and made quite a bit of work for the grave diggers. Several gentlemen who had thought themselves artists with the six-shooter suffered from lead poisoning. Others languished in the new jail.

  “That damn Ranger with a gun,” complained one, “is ’zactly my idea of hell!”

  His views were accepted as authentic by others of the fraternity.

  One development relative to the gold strike gave the Ranger much food for thought. Among the newcomers there was a growing resentment against the Gandara family.

  “That damn outfit,” said a shifty-eyed individual who dressed like a miner-but spent most of his time at the gambling tables, “they hogged all the very best claims right in the beginning ’fore anybody else had a chance. I s’gest somethin bein’ done ’bout it.”

  His sentiments were heartily endorsed by others of similar ilk. Older miners who endeavored to point out that the Gandaras had merely exercised the right of discovery and had been the first to spread the hews of the strike were hooted down. Their argument did not appeal to newcomers who had been unable to stake paying claims.

  “Theah’s goin’ to be trouble sho’ as hell,” an old miner confided to Rance. “That gang is organizin’ and they’ll start somethin’ sooner or later. I done seen claim jumpin’s befo’ and they ain’t nice things to look at.”

  “Anybody tryin’ to jump the Gandaras’ claims is apt to meet with a sorta warm reception,” the Ranger said.

  “Uh-huh,” said the other, “but thirty or forty to seven is purty big odds, and once the gang gits sot in them diggin’s they can haul out all kinda things like blind leads and old monuments showin’ prior discov’ry to prove they got the right of it. Better keep yore eyes open, Ranger.”

  Rance “kept them open,” and he didn’t like the looks of what he saw.

  “We gotta get some vigilantes organized,” he told Johnny Rethuno, “fellers we can depend on when we need ’em. Hell’s gonna bust loose or I’m a sheepherder.”

  It broke a few nights later, in the Here It Is saloon. A friend of Tumbleweed Turner’s came to the sheriff’s office, where Tumbleweed and Rance Hatfield were squabbling amicably over a game of seven-up.

  “Guilermo Gandara is in town,” said the visitor. “He’s drinkin’ purty heavy and been doin’ quite a bit of talkin’. He met that jigger, Trainor, who’s been responsible for most of the ruckus stirred up ’gainst the Gandaras. Guilermo laid down the law to him purty plain. Trainor took water, but he’s been gettin’ his friends t’gether and I figger they’re aimin’ to jump Guilermo.”

  Rance riffled the cards together and placed the deck in a drawer.

  “Guess we’d better mosey down and look things over a bit,” he told Tumbleweed.

  They got word of Guilermo but could not locate him directly. He was not in the Here It Is, which they investigated first, nor in any of the other Lucky Cuss Street places. They had no better luck in the side streets. Their quarry seemed always just ahead of them.

  “Let’s go back to the Here It Is and wait on him,” suggested Tumbleweed at last.

  The Here It Is was booming as they approached. Fiddles whined, guitars strummed loudly. French heels clicked and heavy boots thumped on the dance floor. Glasses clinked. Roulette wheels whirred. Song roared through the windows.

  Then, just as Rance and the deputy reached the swinging doors, the uproar dwindled away in ragged fringes of sound. A woman screamed, once, a scream sliced off by the knife of fear. Rance leaped into the room.

  Standing with his back to the bar was Guilermo Gandara, his black eyes gleaming, a gun in his hand. Spread out fanwise, facing him, were six men, Ike Trainor, the leader of the claim-jumping advocates, slightly in front. Trainor was arguing with Guilermo, who watched him intently.

  There was a flash at the inner edge of the “fan,” a gun roared and Guilermo slewed sideways, pulling trigger as he went down. The man who had shot him doubled up with a scream.

  Instantly the saloon seemed to explode with the roar of six-shooters. Rance Hatfield, firing with both hands, leaped in front of Guilermo’s prostrate form. Tumbleweed Turner’s bullets raked the curve of the “fan.” Answering shots smashed the mirrors and knocked the glass from the door. Ike Trainor dived through a window and escaped, leaving three of his men on the floor and two with their hands in the air.

  Guilermo drew himself up against the bar and pressed reddening fingers to his left arm.

  “Not killed, eh?” grunted Hatfield.

  “Nope, jest a hole through the muscle,” panted Guilermo. “Hurts like hell but ain’t serious. Thanks, Ranger. ’Nother minute and they’da put so many holes in me I’da leaked all my vittles out and starved to death.”

  “You get fixed up and go home,” Rance told him. “This town ain’t healthy for you right now.”

  Guilermo rode out of town shortly afterward. Rance Hatfield went to bed. Tumbleweed Turner was pounding on his door before sun-up.

  “She’s busted right this time, feller,” chattered the little deputy. “Trainor and a bunch left town for Silver Valley durin’ the night. They left word they was gonna lynch Guilermo for killin’ that jigger, but what they’re really aimin’ for is to jump the Gandara claims.”

  “Get the vigilantes t’gether,” Rance ordered, hurrying into his clothes.

  Tumbleweed paused at the door.

  “I heahd the Gandaras are guardin’ their claims,” he said. “Mebbe them jiggers will get a reception they ain’t figgerin’ on.”

  * * * *

  The sun was high in the sky when the posse reached Silver Valley, with two hours of hard riding ahead of them before they could hope to come to the site of the claims.

  “I’m ridin’ ahaid to see what’s goin’ on,” Rance told Sheriff Bethune.

  All morning El Rey had been chafing at being held back to the slower pace of the other horses. Now, when Rance gave him his head, he snorted joyously, slugged at the bit and stretched his long legs. Soon the posse was but a dust cloud far behind.

  An hour passed, part of another. To the Ranger’s ears came a faint popping, as of crisply burning sticks. His eyes narrowed, he leaned forward and spoke to the horse. El Rey blew foam from his spreading nostrils and lengthened his stride. The popping became the spiteful crack of revolvers, with now and then the deeper voices of rifles.

  “The boys ain’t been pried loose yet,” muttered the Ranger.

  The trees that sprinkled the valley began to thin. They spaced out to solitary sentinels and Rance saw the raw gashes on a distant hillside that marked the claims. From behind mounds of earth and heaps of stone flickered little jets of flame, palely golden in the sunlight. Whirls and wisps of blue smoke drifted up before the reports reached his ears. From the valley
below, wherever a tree or a ledge or a clump of stones afforded shelter, answering smoke and flames spouted.

  “A reg’lar young war!” growled the Ranger, pulling El Rey down to an amble.

  A bullet screamed over his head. Another kicked up a patch of dust a few feet to his left.

  “Spotted us,” he muttered. “In behind them rocks, feller, ’fore you get a hole in yore hide!”

  Working up among the rocks, he reached a point where he could see and not be seen by the men in the valley. He cast anxious glances back the way he had come, straining his eyes for a glimpse of the posse.

  Suddenly he stiffened, staring toward where the crags and canyons of The Black Hell loomed darkly.

  “Now who the blazes is that?” he wondered.

  Horsemen were pouring from a distant canyon mouth. Rance counted a score or more.

  “It can’t be the boys,” he insisted. “Theah’s too many of ’em and ’sides they, never coulda got ’round that way.”

  On came the riders, toiling up a slope, thundering across the floor of the valley. Puffs-of smoke mushroomed up from their loosely-flung ranks.

  The men in the valley saw them now, and got a taste of their bullets. Flame vomited from behind the trees. Rifles and pistols drummed a thunder roll.

  Rance sent El Rey scrambling from among the rocks. Bullets or no bullets, he was going to see what was going on!

  Men were being knocked from the saddles, but sprawling figures among the trees showed that they were not walking across into Eternity by themselves. Rance Hatfield, riding swiftly toward the battle, swore an astounded oath.

  In the lead of the charging horsemen were two mounted figures that he recognized. One was trim and slender, a sweetly rounded little figure swaying lithely to the movements of her horse.