by Lauran Paine
He took up his shirt, donned it, and began to button up slowly. “Your uncle wants to know why he was shot like that. So do I.” He finished with the shirt, walked over to her, and stopped, looking down into her eyes. “I reckon you want to know about the fight,” he said. “Well, it was about as everyone thinks. Atlanta, tell me something. Did Bass have a right to feel as he felt about you?”
“If you mean, did I encourage him. The answer is no. He was helpful and he was friendly. There was nothing more in my mind.” She started past. He detained her with a quick, outflung hand. “One more question...have you regrets about that kiss?”
She looked at him for a long time before answering. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and, like most range men, he was slim of hip and loose moving. He wasn’t a polished man. He wasn’t flamboyant or spectacular. He was quiet and, she knew from the burn of his lips, he was powerfully motivated.
These thoughts came to her now and couldn’t be brushed from her mind. He was a person, like her uncle, who she watched with an interest that never diminished. He had a way of reassuring her simply by standing close, of binding her to him with his quietness and his strength. Behind his silence, his easy-going patience, there was something about him that never failed to lift her heart. She had thought about what he’d told her that other time — about men facing ostracism for the things they believed in — and she thought he was wholly right about what he’d done, even though being in agreement with him made her feel, in some way, as though she were a traitor to her own kind.
Finally, she said: “No, Case, I don’t regret that kiss.” Then she left him standing there, retracing her way back toward Ruben’s wagon.
By the time Case got back, Ben and the others had placed young Will in his grave. They were covering him now. When they were finished, Ben got his Bible from the wagon and read from it.
Off in the hazy west that afternoon a reddish glow was firming up, was winnowing heat from baked earth, and softening full daylight’s yellow harshness.
Having come in from the herd, Ferdinand joined the others. They now stood, bareheaded, as Ben finished, closed his Bible, and then stood there looking far out on to the plains in a manner that made it appear that he could hear distant voices.
Ruben sniffled, ran a limp shirt sleeve along his upper lip, then stepped away, heading to his chuck wagon. There, he grunted up over the tailgate, was gone from sight for a bit before reappearing. He had a little fire going, so he poured out five cups of black coffee and then waited for the others to come along.
Bass Templeton walked with Ben as far as the wagon. Case and Atlanta strolled silently behind them. There were peculiar currents in the camp atmosphere now — roiled and confusing and overlapping.
Ben put away his Bible and took a cup from Ruben. He leaned in the reddening shade at the side of the wagon to sip his coffee. Eventually, he said very quietly, without looking at either man: “Bass, you and Case go saddle up. We got a long ride ahead of us. Ferd, get back out to the herd after you eat something.”
Case saw Atlanta gazing steadily at him. He hesitated, returned that look for a moment, then moved out, trailing Templeton, toward the rope corral Ruben had thrown up to hold their saddle stock.
Atlanta glided over to her uncle’s side. She said: “Please be careful, Uncle Ben. Please don’t make it any worse.”
He emptied the cup and tossed it into one of Ruben’s water buckets. His saddled horse was tied close at hand. “How,” he asked the beautiful girl, “do you make a murder worse?”
“By another murder,” she murmured to him.
He bent to untie his reins. “Not murder, Atlanta,” he said. “I never was a part to anything like murder in my life. I hold that to be the worst crime a man can commit.” He faced her, holding the reins. “Whoever fired that shot was a murderer. Young Will had no chance at all. That man is a murderer and I want to see him pay for that. It’s got to be like that, girl...else every coward in Texas can shoot his enemies from behind.”
Ben mounted up. He looked along where Ruben was banking his fire. In a louder voice, he called forward: “Ruben, you keep a sharp eye, you hear? You’ll be responsible for Atlanta till we get back.”
Ruben sprang up, wiped his palms upon his legs, and bobbed his head up and down. “Yes, sir, Mister Ben,” he replied. “Yes, sir. I’ll keep a sharp watch.”
Bass Templeton and Case Hyle rode over to Ben. Case looked down into Atlanta’s face, but Bass, his expression grim and toughly set, kept his stare fully ahead upon Ben.
“Ready?” Templeton said.
Ben nodded, and the three of them wheeled, loping southward through that thickening red glow.
Chapter Nine
Tough Texas horses can cover a lot of ground when they have to. Ben Albright and Bass Templeton and Case Hyle crossed the Trinchera where the four Lansing’s Ferry riders had crossed earlier.
It was here that Bass made a good observation. “Even if we rode unshod horses, too,” he said, “it still couldn’t have been any of us. None of our crew has crossed the creek since Lansing’s Ferry.”
They rode along, following the southbound tracks as long as daylight permitted. They had covered a goodly distance by then. Dusk did not come to the Staked Plains in summertime until early night was upon the land.
When it was no longer possible to see the tracks, they held steadily to the same course those other riders had held to, and halted only once to smoke a cigarette, rest their animals, and stand in gloomy silence, each thinking their own private thoughts.
Then they pushed onward again, and on the sundown side of midnight came across their first soddie with its slab-sided noisy dogs, its miserly little orange lamp glow, and its squalid wretchedness.
Templeton wrinkled his nose. Pigs,” he said distastefully, and halted when Ben drew down to gaze ahead, orienting their position in his mind.
“Never could understand why people would pen-up pigs.”
The settler’s barking dogs were in a frenzy now. They did not, however, make any rush out upon the plain where the three Texans quietly sat their saddles.
“A little east of here,” murmured Case. “Then south.”
Ben nodded, lifted his rein hand, and led them along in a gallop far out and around the homestead, bearing in the direction Case had mentioned.
It was after midnight when they approached Lansing’s Ferry from the north, riding slowly down upon it with a scimitar moon over their shoulders and the diamond-like glitter of countless stars putting a gentle, soft light over everything.
“I want to see their marshal or sheriff or whatever they call him,” said Ben, steadying his horse into a dusty pair of wagon ruts, which marked a north-south roadway into the village. “We’re not here for trouble...yet. So, let’s be careful.”
There were very few lights in Lansing’s Ferry as the three of them came swinging along, passing through the environs, and slowly pacing their way down over the main roadway. A few dogs barked, sensing the strangeness of these riders in the quiet night, but otherwise they went unheeded.
“There,” Case announced suddenly, pointing with his free right hand. “Where those carriage lamps are mounted on either side of the door. That sign says ‘Town Marshal.’”
Ben reined toward a badly cribbed hitch rack and got down. He stood, while waiting for Case and Templeton to come alongside, and looked up and down Lansing’s Ferry’s central thoroughfare.
“It’s changed a lot since last summer,” he said idly to his riders. “Old Lansing wouldn’t recognize it now.”
“Smells different, too,” mumbled Bass, and, having dismounted, stumped up onto the boardwalk to look at the town marshal’s office. “This used to be old Lansing’s storage shed, didn’t it, Ben?”
Albright nodded, passed up to the door, opened it, and blinked at the quick rush of orange light that rushed over the three of them.
A thickly made, slovenly looking man was sound asleep in a tilted-back desk chair, his low-heeled settler boots delicately balanced upon a littered, scarred old roll-top desk.
Ben went up to this man, considered the dull badge upon his vest, and put forth a gloved hand.
“Come alive, mister,” he said, gently shaking the town marshal. “Come alive, there.”
The burly man opened both his eyes without moving any other part of his body. He looked impassively at all three Texans, then slowly took down his feet, squared around in the chair, and yawned mightily. “What’s on your mind?” he said to Ben, then flung up his head quickly, putting a wide stare forward.
Case watched the cobwebs leave the man’s mind in a flash. The lawman had recognized Albright in that second and was suddenly and awkwardly alert and wary. He sat there looking quickly from one face to the next, before his expression changed, becoming hard and unpleasant and tough.
“You got a lot of nerve coming here,” he told Ben.
Albright continued to regard the lawman for a moment before saying to him: “Mister, a settler shot and killed one of my riders this afternoon. Slipped up on us in the brush along the Trinchera and shot my rider in the head...from behind.”
The town marshal listened to this with his look still wary. Then he began to scowl. “I don’t believe that,” he grumbled as he got to his feet. He was shorter than any of the three Texans but he was broader than any of them. “A settler you say. How do you know that...did you see him?”
“If we’d seen him,” responded Bass Templeton in a growl, “we wouldn’t be here now. And he wouldn’t have ridden off afterward, either.”
The marshal looked at Bass. “Then how do you know it was a settler?” he demanded.
“We found the tracks of this man and his three companions,” answered Ben. “We trailed them. That’s how we know.”
“No,” muttered the lawman, “you gotta have better evidence than that.”
“And one of my men saw them from a distance. They looked to him like men from Lansing’s Ferry.”
The marshal gradually assumed a troubled look. He said: “Mister Albright, this town is het up against Texas herds and herders. There’s been bad trouble, and your man whipping Charley Connelly’s boy, Patrick, the other day didn’t help none. But I can’t imagine anyone here trailin’ you, and then bushwhackin’ one of your cowboys. Hell, if folks felt like that, they’d have bushwhacked some of Higgins’s crew, or some of Colonel Bee’s riders, last year. Those two trail bosses did a heap more to cause bad blood than you’ve done.”
“That,” said Case Hyle, speaking for the first time, “is exactly what’s got us puzzled. Marshal, the man who shot Will Johns was a settler. We’re satisfied about this. What we want to know is why he shot him?”
“From behind,” Templeton added coldly. “The way a coward shoots a man.”
The village law officer looked at Ben, then at Bass, and finally at Case Hyle. “You’re sure it wasn’t one of your own men?” he said. “You’re plumb sure of that?”
“Plumb sure,” stated Ben Albright. “And we’re sure he was shot and that he’s dead.”
The lawman twisted around, felt behind for his desk, eased up onto it, and perched there, swinging one thick leg. “Who would’ve done it?” he asked.
“You say that lad our man whipped was Connelly’s son?”
“He was.”
“Well, Marshal,” Ben said coldly, “that man we lost was the same lad who whipped Connelly’s boy. Does that bring anything to mind for you?”
The marshal looked incredulous. He squinted over at Ben. “Are you sayin’ Charley did this?”
“I’m saying he might have thought he had a reason for doing it, but I don’t know who actually shot my rider. I only aim to find out who that murderer was and why he did it.”
“I see. And when you find out...what then, Mister Albright?”
Ben began drawing on his gloves. He concentrated upon this chore while he answered, saying: “Marshal, I believe in the law. Maybe not your kind of law, but in legal justice. All I’ll tell you now is that whoever shot my rider is going to pay for it...to the hilt.”
Ben put a cold glance upon the marshal, watching his face. Off to one side, Bass Templeton and Case Hyle stood in solid silence.
The marshal stopped swinging his leg and ran a hand over his face, then put a brittle glare upon Ben.
“You hear what happened to Colonel Bee last year?” he asked. “Well, don’t you go and make the same mistake he did, Mister Albright. There are too many here in Lansing’s Ferry for you people to ride roughshod over. They mostly got their bitter memories, too. The war hasn’t been over so long we’ve forgotten which side Texas was on.”
Albright heard the lawman out, then in a soft tone he said: “Marshal, I’ve been wondering if that mightn’t have been behind that murder. If I was sure of that....” Ben checked himself. He stood there looking from uncompromising eyes, before he continued: “If anyone is making a mistake, you are. There are six Texans with my drive. They are equal to fifty of your sodbusters. If they want to renew the war, why I reckon Lansing’s Ferry is as good a place as any other to do it.” Ben was moving toward the door now, his eyes iron-like.
The marshal slipped down from his perch on the desk. “Wait!” he called swiftly. “Just a minute, Mister Albright. You couldn’t win, but that’s not what’s in my mind right now. I don’t hold with murder...not even of a Rebel. Tell me something...how far north did this happen?”
“Twenty, twenty-five miles.”
“And you said there were four men involved?”
“Yes.”
“And you tracked them here?”
“No,” corrected Ben. “I didn’t say that. I said we tracked them, determined they rode big, unshod settler horses. They came south in this direction, but when it got dark we couldn’t follow them any farther.”
The marshal was silent for several moments. He paced once across his little office and back again. Wearing a full scowl as he came to a halt, he said: “Mister Albright, I want you to go on back to your camp. Don’t stay the night here in Lansing’s Ferry. It’d get folks all fired-up again. You go on back and lie over tomorrow. I’ll hunt you up after I’ve done a little nosin’ around.” He stopped, turned, and gazed steadily at Ben. “Will you do that for me?”
Ben Albright nodded. “We’re camped west of the creek. You can’t miss us. The herd is scattered out over a considerable distance. We’ll be waiting, Marshal,” Ben said, and reached for the door latch. “One more thing, Marshal. I’ll have men posted as sentinels. When you come up, make some noise. I don’t propose to be caught off guard again in case someone other than you comes slipping up with murder in mind.”
Ben passed out of the office. Bass Templeton was right behind him. Case Hyle, just before leaving, said: “Marshal, what’s your name?”
“Conrad Beal, cowboy. What’s yours?”
“Case Hyle.”
“And that other big feller?”
“Bass Templeton. He’s Mister Albright’s herd boss.”
Marshal Beal nodded. “Don’t let them stop for the night anywhere around here,” he warned. “I’ll see you fellows again.”
Outside the office, Case was the last man to mount up. On either side of him Bass Templeton and Ben Albright sat waiting, studying the town carefully.
The three of them eased around and rode north out of Lansing’s Ferry. Beyond town a mile, Bass said: “I could use some strong black coffee.” Neither of his companions said anything to this. Bass slumped in his saddle, silent and looking frustrated.
They cut west to the creek and followed it for several hours. As they neared a wide, scarcely moving pool silvered by the moon, Ben slowed and swung down to water his animal. When his companions were on the ground, he lit a cigar and said: “I got t
he impression that sodbuster marshal had something on his mind after we’d talked for a spell.”
“Me, too,” echoed Bass. “I also got the impression he didn’t like what he was thinking.”
Case made a smoke. He listened to the horses sucking aerated water around the crickets of their spade bits for several seconds before saying: “He seemed like a fair man. Not particularly friendly toward Texans, but fair,” he observed. “I guess, being like he is, we couldn’t expect him to feel different.”
Bass Templeton regarded Case steadily. It was the first time he’d done this since their fight. He appeared to be agreeing with what Case had just said. Then he turned away, led his horse north a little, trailed out to the length of the reins, and got down belly-flat to drink. He was upstream from the other two men. Ben and Case also tanked up after their mounts were full.
After mounting, the three of them splashed over to the west bank and turned north again, riding through a night full of shifting creek-side shadows and deep silence.
It was some time before they heard the faint lowing of cattle, intermittent and drowsy sounding. They sighted the first critters shortly before they saw Ruben’s little fire burning steadily and set their course by this beacon.
As they came onto the main herd, Ben declared: “Owen should be at Fort Alert by this time. With luck, he’ll be back tomorrow morning with a patrol.”
“Maybe we won’t need Yank soldiers,” said Bass.
Case shook his head at this. “It’s peaceful now, but I’ve got a feeling about this thing,” he commented. “A man doesn’t kill like that unknown settler did, then just forget it. He had three others with him. The four of them were all cocked and primed. I think we’ll need those soldiers all right.”
Bass heard Case out, then exclaimed in a thin, antagonistic way: “If they come again, I hope it’s before the Yankees get here! That way maybe we can get in our licks. After the soldiers arrive...no chance for evening up the score for Will.”
Albright rode along, listening but saying nothing. When they were close enough to make out Ruben’s wagon, he sang out an identifying call, got back a mightily relieved cry from Ruben, who had heard riders approaching and who had snatched up his saddle gun and taken a position under the chuck wagon. Then, when they rode in, Ruben came scrabbling out from under the wagon, wearing a broad and satisfied grin.