The Second Western Novel

by Matt Rand

  “Woulda been a hell’s mercy if he was,” he said softly.

  Abruptly he strode to his horse, mounted and rode toward the curve beyond the dynamited cliff, the big black picking his way daintily among the shattered stones. The bruised and battered fireman watched him go.

  “After seein’ the way that feller looked, somehow I feel sorta sorry for Cavorca,” he mumbled through his cut lips.

  CHAPTER 21

  Rance quickly picked up the bandits’ trail, and just as quickly lost it. Less than half a mile beyond the curve, the canyon sprawled into a jumble of buttes, low mesas and lesser canyons. The soil was iron hard, almost impervious to hoofs shod or unshod. Rance patiently quartered the ground, investigating canyons and gorges, but it was more than an hour before he hit upon the right track.

  It was only a few drops of blood spattered on a white stone, but plenty for the trained eyes of the plainsman. From time to time other drops of blood appeared, then hoof marks in a soft place. Rance was grimly alert as he rode into a narrow canyon whose damp floor was deeply scored by a recently passing body of horsemen.

  “Damn little more’n an hour ahead of me,” he growled. “All right, hoss, get goin’!”

  The black stallion snorted, slugged his big head above the bit and fled through the canyon.

  Rance’s watchful eyes suddenly noted a number of black dots wheeling and circling in the air a mile or so ahead.

  “Vultures,” he muttered. “Mebbe that wounded jigger they took along’s done cashed in. Mebbe—”

  The unspoken thought tightened his lean jaw still more. He scanned the trail ahead, dreading the sight that might at any instant be revealed to him. He was totally unprepared for the horror of the thing he finally did see.

  The perpendicular walled canyon opened abruptly onto a stretch of sand and cactus and mesquite.

  The vultures were wheeling and circling. One swooped low above the mesquite as the Ranger rode from the canyon, then abruptly planed upward again.

  ‘Whatever they’re after mustn’t be dead yet,” muttered Rance. “I wonder what—”

  The words trailed off soundlessly behind lips suddenly stiff. Rance jerked the black horse to a halt with a roughness foreign to him, swung to the ground and walked swiftly toward a little mound. His feet scuffed to a leaden standstill and for a terrible moment he stood and stared.

  The low mound was an ant-hill, from which the huge ants were swarming in millions—swarming onto the thing o! Blasted horror pegged across the hill. A pitiful thing that had once been a man! As Rance stared with graying face, an ant scurried into one empty eye socket and out the other! And the men still lived!

  “God!” breathed the Ranger, and reached for his gun.

  Lean jaw set like iron, lips still and bloodless, he drew the heavy Colt for a purpose the horror of which he had never dreamed. With a hand that shook convulsively, he lined the sights on the almost fleshless skull. His finger curled the trigger.

  But the bullet of mercy was not needed. The half-eaten form suddenly stiffened, reared against the thongs that held it and relaxed. A dry rattling sounded in its bloody throat. The eyeless head lolled sideways and was still.

  With a quivering sigh of thanksgiving and relief, Rance holstered his gun. He looked down upon what was left of the man who had been his fellow Ranger, his friend. The tortured form of dead Wes Farley seemed to cry out for vengeance. Rance raised somber eyes to the hard blue sky; his lips moved:

  “God, mebbe you let Manuel Cavorca get away with this, but I won’t!”

  CHAPTER 22

  Captain Morton listened gravely to Rance’s report, nodding his head from time to time.

  “Pedro, my Mexican, got a tip that Cavorca had crossed the Line,” Rance told him. “I was cuttin’ ’crost country when I heahd the explosion. I figgered Cavorca might have somethin’ to do with it and headed toward the sound. Got heah too late. You know how much they got off the train?”

  Morton’s face grew even more grave. “Rance,” he said, “It’s plain hell. Theah’s a lot more to it than jest a train robbery. Theah was a Silver City bullion shipment on that train, Rance. The Silver City people were keepin’ it dead secret, or thought they were. Nobody but the messenger was s’posed to know what was bein’ carried. Hell knows how Cavorca got wind of it, but he did. Rance, theah was more’n a million dollars in that shipment!”

  Rance whistled his amazement. “A million dollars! And Cavorca got it all!”

  “Ev’ry last peso,” nodded Morton. “Rance, you know what that means?”

  “It’s liable to mean most anythin’,” guessed the Ranger.

  Morton leaned forward and tapped the table top with an earnest finger. “I’ll tell you what it means. It means that Cavorca has at last got money to finance his revolution plans. It means fire and blood and gunsmoke below the Line and up heah, too. It means plain hell on both sides the border. Things are ripe for it down theah and the fightin’ and the robbin’ and the murderin’ll backwash inter Arizona—plenty! It’ll mean soldiers heah and more trouble because of them. It may even mean war ’tween the United States and Mexico ’fore it’s finished. And who in hell’s gonna stop it?”

  Rance Hatfield stood up, and the dapper little Captain with the icy gray eyes noted how he seemed to tower in the low-ceiled room. He spoke two quiet words:

  “The Rangers!”

  Morton grunted. “It’s damn liable to finish the Rangers, too,” he growled. “Walsh Patton and his Cochise crowd is still after our scalp. You downin’ Fuentes that-a-way and bustin’ up Cavorca’s old outfit sorta put a knot in their rope, but this train robbery bus’ness’ll give ’em somethin’ new to work on. You got any plan?”

  “Rifles,” said the Ranger tersely, “they’re what Cavorca is gonna need. He’s got the men and he’s got the money, but he ain’t got near enough long guns. Now wheah’s he gonna get them?”

  “From this side the border,” replied Morton instantly.

  “Uh-huh,” agreed Rance, “and wheah’s he gonna get ’em t’gether and run ’em across?”

  Morton hazarded a guess, “Silver City?”

  Rance shook his head decidedly. “Nope, it’s too easy to get ’em t’gether in Silver City and too easy to slip ’em across the Line from theah.”

  “Hell,” protested Morton, “ain’t them jest the reasons why he would use Silver City?”

  Rance’s only reply was a grin. Morton looked blank a moment, then grinned back.

  “Uh-huh, yore right,” he acknowledged. “Cavorca’ll figger we’re gonna figger him shippin’ through Silver City, and he won’t.”

  Rance nodded. “Jest the same, Boss, don’t take no chance on Silver City. Put a good strong patrol theah and don’t make no bones ’bout it. We’ll block that hole and then Cavorca will sho’ hafta hunt him another one; and I got a hunch I can drop my loop on the one he’ll use. He’ll ship through Brazos.”

  “Hell, feller, theah ain’t no trail south from Brazos! The Black Hell hills is plumb in the way. He’d hafta run his string northwest fer close to fifty miles and then swing south.”

  “Uh-huh, and what’s to stop him? Theah ain’t a town or even a ranch in that whole god-forsaken stretch. All he has to do is get outa Brazos ahaid of ev’body and foller the Canyon Trail. Theah ain’t no way to cut in in front of him and theah’s a hundred places along the trail one man could hold off a posse. Theah’s somethin’ else to consider, too: the Gandara ranch ain’t far from Brazos, and Cavorca has allus sorta kept in touch with—with—” Rance could not bring himself to say it, after all. Morton said it for him:

  “Uh-huh, with that cousin of his’n, Gypsy Carvel. Theah’s gonna be a warrant served on that gal yet.”

  “She ain’t never done nothin’ contrary to law,” Rance defended, “and she sho’ saved my bacon a couple times.”

  Rance abruptly changed the subject. “Boss,” he said, “I’m ridin’ to Brazos.”

  “I’d jest about as soon be ridin’ to
Hell!” growled Morton.

  Rance held something of the same opinion, but he kept it to himself. He found nothing in Brazos to cause him to change that opinion.

  Sprawling in the shadow of the Black Hell hills, Brazos had mushroomed from a straggling cattle town that owed its existence to the fact that the C.&P. railroad had shipping pens there, to a roaring city of thousands. Gold was the reason for its growth—gold that men clawed out of the Black Hell hills. A year before, a gaunt prospector had staggered into Brazos, thumped a poke of dust on a bar and called for drinks for the house. Twenty men had followed him back into the hills and in less than a week twenty men thumped twenty sacks on the bar and fought for the privilege of buying drinks for the house.

  That was the beginning. The devil alone knew what the end would be, and he wasn’t telling.

  Where, less than a year before, there, was the single bar in which the twenty “old-timers” had wrangled, now there were a score of bellowing saloons that had thrown the keys away the day they opened. Gold poured into Brazos from the frowning hills to the south. Whiskey and women and gamblers and gunmen poured in over the trails from the north and east. Bearded miners, bronzed cowboys from the great ranches across which the trails ran, pasty-faced card sharps and dance-hall girls with calculating eyes rubbed shoulders in the crowded streets. Whiskey flowed like water. Blood flowed free as the whiskey. Gun smoke swirled coldly blue in the hot sunshine or under the blazing Arizona stars. Brazos glittered like a knife reaching for an unprotected throat and screeched like a paw-fast panther.

  Into this welter of passion and lust and curses and song rode Rance Hatfield with two black guns tapping his muscular thighs and a warrant in his pocket.

  “Manuel Cavorca—MURDER,” read the warrant and Rance knew that the only way it would be served was at the muzzles of those black guns.

  Only once did he run across a man who recognized him. Late one afternoon, while ambling along Crippled Cow street, he bumped into a white-bearded old fellow dressed in a rusty black suit and carrying a small black case.

  “Why the hell can’t you look wheah yore goin?” sputtered the oldster. “You punchers—well, I’ll be damned! Rance Hatfield!”

  “Hold it, Doc!” cautioned Rance. “I’m s-posed to be a maverick heah. Wheah’s a place we can have a little pow-wow?”

  “I got a office down the street,” replied Doc McChesney.

  McChesney was a former coroner of Cochise county and Rance had last seen him at the county seat.

  “I didn’t run agin last election,” Doc explained as he poured a drink. “People was gettin’ too damn healthy over to the county seat and things was so plumb peaceful theah waren’t nobody gettin’ shot. I come over heah wheah a doctor can make a livin’. Been thinkin’ of openin’ a undertakin’ ’stablishment, though—that’s the best bus’ness in this town. Now tell me what the hell you doin’ heah. Guess you know I can keep my trap shet.”

  Rance left the office with Doc an hour later and walked into another surprise.

  The surprise, mounted on a pinto pony and riding swiftly out of town to the south, was slim and graceful with great dark eyes and wavy hair that caught and held coppery glints of sunlight. Rance stood in the middle of the sheet and stared, and had Gypsy Carvel looked anywhere but straight ahead she must have seen and recognized him.

  “That’s Jim Carvel’s gal on that paint hoss,” said old Doc, giving the Ranger a quick, keen glance.

  “She’s been livin’ with her uncle, Alfredo Gandara, up to a month or so ago. All of a sudden she moved back to the Lazy-E ranch—that was Carvel’s brand, you know. She moved her stock offen Gandara’s range and started the Lazy-E workin’ again. Guess that gold mine claim of his on the Gandara place had brought in money enough to let her get the Lazy-E goin’. It’s a darn good spread, all right, and I don’t guess the big cattlemen hardly wanta start a war on a gal by herself. Most evbody felt purty bad ’bout how the Hoskins-Carvel row turned out, anyway. I was coroner and made out Jim Carvel’s death certificate, ’member?”

  Rance nodded absently. He remembered, all right, but he was thinking of other things. Was there more to Gypsy’s move than appeared on the surface? Why should she leave her uncle’s comfortable home right at this time? Rance had not seen her since that day, months before, when Manuel Cavorca had vanished in the waters of Shadow Creek, although he had talked with Alfredo Gandara and a couple of the Gandara boys.

  Rance worried about the matter all the rest of that day. The following morning he saddled up and rode to the Lazy-E ranch, south of Brazos. For a long time he sat his horse in a manzanita thicket and watched the little ranch-house. He saw a couple of punchers ride away, and a Mexican woman of some three hundred pounds gross tonnage hang up a washing. Of Gypsy he saw nothing. Then something caught and held his attention.

  Two men were riding along the trail that wound in the shadow of the Black Hell hills. They turned toward the Lazy-E ranch-house and Rance saw that they were flashily dressed Mexicans. They dismounted, jingled up the steps and knocked. Gypsy Carvel opened the door and stepped onto the porch.

  The Mexicans swung their sombreros low in salute and started talking. The girl listened until they had finished and seemed to protest. She shook her head doubtfully as they earnestly urged something. Finally she appeared to give reluctant consent. The Mexicans bowed low again and rode away. The girl watched them out of sight and re-entered the house listlessly, her curly head drooping.

  For a long time Rance Hatfield sat staring at the closed door. It did not open again and finally he turned his horse and rode away, carefully keeping the thicket between him and the house.

  “Now what’s the answer to that?” he wondered. “Them Mexicans is up to somethin‘—somethin’ that they need that girl’s help with. She didn’t want to give it. Looks like she had a notion that what they was proposin’ waren’t jest what they claimed it was. Smooth lookin’ hombres, too. Wouldn’t be a bit s’prised if they was puttin’ somethin’ over on her. But what?”

  That night Rance saw the two dark-faced riders talking earnestly to the proprietor of a particularly vicious saloon whose trade was almost wholly Mexican. The Ranger, sitting in the shadow and sipping a glass of mescal, caught a word or two.

  “Tomorrow night—when the moon has set—not many this time.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Sitting on his horse in the mouth of a dark alley the following night, Rance watched shadows moving about the rear of the frowsy saloon in which he had overheard the whispered conversation. It was too dark for him to see what was going on. When, a little later, hoofs clicked softly, he tightened his grip on the reins and spoke to the black horse.

  A faintly darker blotch in the night, the big stallion eased out onto the trail. Trained to step softly, he picked his way among the loose boulders with uncanny ease. Rance gave him his head, knowing that he would follow the sound and scent of the geldings.

  “They’re slantin’ south, feller,” he breathed. “Begins to look like we made a mistake. If it was Cavorca’s gun runners, they’d be swingin’ nawtheast by now. Ain’t no hoss livin’ what can climb that cliff wall to the south. You sho’ yore on the right track?”

  A bit of open prairie a little later proved the soundness of the cayuse’s judgment. Drifting along like swift shadows were a half-score of riders. Rance could even make out bulky packages tied back of the saddle cruppers. His eyes brightened and his jaw set a little tighter.

  “Long guns wrapped in burlap,” he deduced; “but wheah in hell are they takin’ ’em?”

  More and more to the south turned the ghostly brigade. The gloomy wall of the Black Hell cliffs began to jut up against the star net that Arizona calls the sky. Straight-up-and-down were those cliffs, forming a barrier that not even a mountain goat could climb. There were gorges and passes beyond them, but none clefting that somber granite battlement.

  “Hoss, it jest don’t make sense!” wailed the bewildered Ranger.

  Rance rode thr
ough a grove and abruptly a single light glowed in the star-drenched dark. For a moment he was at a loss to account for it; then the solution thundered across his mind.

  “The Lazy-E ranch-house! Now what? Are they—sho’ as yore a foot high they are, hoss! They’re turnin’ toward the ranch-house. Now this does beat hell!”

  From the shadow of the same thicket that had sheltered him the day before, Rance saw the men ride to the ranch-house and dismount. They began fumbling at the bundles their horses bore.

  A shot rang out. Another, and another. The dismounted men seemed all yelling together. Rance saw the ranch-house door swing open in a blotch of yellow light. Boots clattered on the porch as men leaped for the shelter of the building. Others tried to mount the plunging horses. Some succeeded and rode madly into the night.

  From the shelter of a nearby grove swept a tight group of riders, shooting and yelling. They charged toward the ranch-house and were met by a storm of bullets. Red flashes spurted from windows and doorway. Then the door slammed shut as the foremost of the raiders flung themselves onto the porch. Rance heard a woman scream.

  The Ranger went into action like a thunderbolt. Guns blazing, he charged the group milling about the porch. An instant of wild confusion ensued, then a frenzied mounting and riding. As thoroughly surprised as had been the first group were the raiders. Not waiting to learn the number of their attackers, they drove their spurs home and went away from there; but they took the burlapped bundles with them, all but one.

  Rance hit the ranch-house door with a big shoulder and barged into the room. Grim tragedy was in the making there.

  To one side, head up, fearless, stood Gypsy Carvel facing two flashily dressed Mexicans.

  “You double-cross!” one was raging. “You betray! You sell us to Zorrilla! Die!”

  A pearl-handled gun flashed down and roared!

  But it was a dead hand that pulled the trigger. Even before Gypsy Carvel crumpled up in a pathetic little heap, the Mexican pitched forward, Rance Hatfield’s bullet through his heart.

  The other Mexican whirled, gun spouting flame. He knocked Rance’s hat from his head, ripped the sleeve of his shirt, and died! Rance slammed his smoking guns into their holsters, leaped across the two bodies and gathered Gypsy in his arms.