by E. R. Slade
“He didn’t waste no time,” Yolen said emphatically. He was chewing tobacco and he spat a dark silent stream ten feet and hit a cow flat dead center. “He ain’t been back to the Ledge with them two deadbeats yit?”
“No,” Coe told him.
“Strange,” Quait said.
“Odd,” Yolen agreed.
“Odder’n a three dollar bill,” Quait said.
“It don’t figure,” Yolen said, “unless they warn’t the outlaws. Or unless they kilt him.”
“That would explain it,” Quait said. “But Mulberry is pretty tough. It’d take a mighty lucky bandito to notch his gun with Mulberry’s knife.”
The two cowpokes sat pondering. They were making good use of Coe’s visit.
“But it would explain it,” Yolen said. “And it could have happened. Things like that do happen sometimes. I recall when ...”
“Well, thanks,” Coe said, swinging into his saddle. “Much obliged for the info. I’ll be going now.”
Quait stood up, tossed away his cigarette.
“Hold on a minute, Dolan.”
“Don’t go runnin’ off, Dolan,” Yolen echoed.
“It’s been four days,” Quait said. “I reckon another hour won’t make you much difference. Why don’t you stay around and have somethin’ to eat? Then maybe we can talk the ramrod into lettin’ us go ’long with you. You ought to have some help maybe. No tellin’ what you might walk into.”
It was plain that these two were looking for something more exciting to do than build water troughs. If they were true cowpokes, it was a wonder they’d stood for it at all. The average rider considered himself only a rider, and wouldn’t do anything that called for being afoot, except maybe rope his horse in the corral. These two were just itching to get loose on the range and be doing something interesting.
Coe considered. The chances were, if what these men had told him was true, that the holdup men had either given Mulberry the slip, and he was riding blindly north trying to pick up their back trail, or else they had killed Mulberry, and were long gone and impossible to find. Either way, it wasn’t likely that Coe would need their help. On the other hand, if Mulberry had walked into an ambush, it was possible they’d be looking for someone to come after him, and be ready to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you’re right. If you can get away, I’d be stupid to turn down your help.”
Quait beamed. Yolen pushed off the fence post and looked more eager than even a hound dog could.
Since there was nothing else for him to do, Coe helped with the water troughs, and he was willing to bet that in the hour until the lunch gong sounded outside the cook shed the three of them did more than Quait and Yolen had done all morning before he arrived.
The ramrod rode in just on time for the midday meal, having been not far away with a small crew of horsemen. Quait and Yolen took the ramrod aside and there followed a long conversation, during which the square-jawed, iron-haired foreman rubbed the back of his neck with a dirt-ingrained paw and eyed them and Coe alternately. Finally he came over to Coe, the two eager hands at his heels like a pair of hunting dogs.
“You Coe Dolan?”
“The same.”
“Eli Hennesey.” Hennesey took Coe’s measure as if he were sizing up a new saddle or a cut of beef. He had sun-squinted eyes and a face like something off a tannery scrap heap. “What’s your business with the sheriff?” he asked.
“Brother’s missing.”
“No law at all in town now?” Hennesey looked surprised.
“The deputy. But I need Mulberry’s help. It’s a long story. No business of yours in any case.” He didn’t make it unfriendly, but he did make it firm.
Hennesey nodded. “Sheriff ain’t been back to town, the boys tell me. That so?”
“That’s so.”
Hennesey chawed his lip thoughtfully.
“That don’t sound good. Shouldn’t oughta have tooken him that long to haul them outlaws back to town. Something’s gone wrong.”
“I hope not,” Coe said sincerely. He was thinking of Lynn and wondering how he would tell her if that was true. It would be hard on her, was his guess. Hell, it had to be. They were each other’s only living relatives.
“Looks like it has though,” Hennesey said. He chawed his lip some more. “The boys said you’d like them along. That so?”
“If Mulberry walked into a trap, the outlaws could be waiting for somebody to come looking for him. It’d be handy to have a couple of men along to even the odds. But I’m not in desperate need. You do as you see fit. They offered. I didn’t ask their help.”
“I sort of figured that,” Hennesey said wryly, looking at the two hands. “But them two can shoot middlin’ good, as well as anybody here. It ain’t anything fancy, but it’s a lot better than nothing. You take ’em along. They’re good fellows, though you’ll get sick to death of their talk. They’ll like gettin’ in good with the law in the Ledge, savin’ up points against the next time they get drunk and shoot up the town.”
It was nearly half past twelve when they rode north over the range.
“You know this part of the country pretty well?” he asked them.
“Like the back of my hand,” Quait said.
“Like the face of my favorite whore.”
“You don’t mean her face, Joe.”
“I know this country, Ready. That’s the point.”
“So do I. So do half a hundred other men hereabouts.”
“I’m just tellin’ the man. He asked, and so I’m tellin’ him.”
“So you done it. So shut up.”
They lapsed into silence. Coe saw what Hennesey had meant about the way these two talked. Seemed like it was just to hear themselves. They weren’t really angry at each other. Probably boredom.
Pretty soon, Quait said, “Fine fishing up in the mountains over west of here. The best stream in the whole of the Calicoes is right over there. Called the flume, though it ain’t one.”
“A flume’s a trough full of water loggers send timber down a mountain in,” Yolen explained to Coe.
“Don’t you reckon Mr. Dolan knows what a flume is?” Quait said, with a sidelong glance at Coe. “Don’t insult the man’s intelligence.”
“I warn’t insultin’ him. I was just trying to tell him what a flume is, so he’d know.”
“I’ll bet you already did know though, didn’t you?” Quait said to Coe.
“I’ve seen them before a couple of places. Interesting things, flumes. Fellow offered me a ride in a special kind of boat made to go in a flume one time. Made my hair stand on end. That was way up north.”
“There now, what’d tell you?” Quait said triumphantly.
Coe’s thoughts had turned to the letter Lynn had given him to give her uncle. It puzzled him why she should bother with a letter. What couldn’t wait until Mulberry returned to town? It wasn’t his business, but the question lodged in his mind like a root in a hip-hollow. With it was lodged the suspicion that it was a letter of introduction to her uncle for Coe. Trust this man, Uncle. Coe didn’t much like that idea. He wanted his case to stand on its own merits, not on his friendship with the sheriff’s niece. Yet the letter was sealed, and he wouldn’t have read it anyway. So the best he could do would be to talk to Mulberry first, and then hand over Lynn’s letter after Mulberry had thoroughly made up his mind one way or the other.
“It was a real flume though,” Yolen was saying. “There was a company that cut timber up the mountain and sent it down that way. That made it a flume.”
“Naw,” Quait disagreed. “A flume is made of wood, built on stilts. I seen one when I was in Colorado.”
“But they used it for one. I don’t see the difference.”
“It ain’t what it’s used for, it’s what it is. If you had a saddle, and you decided to wear it like a hat, would that make it a hat? Course not. It would still be a saddle.”
“This is different.”
/> Coe remembered what he had been about ask these men before they took over the discussion for themselves.
“Either of you fellows got an idea where a couple of outlaws with a lawman on their tail would go from here?”
“Would depend on where I was headed for,” Quait said.
“It would make a difference where I wanted to go,” Yolen said.
“But if you were them, and you knew Mulberry was inside an hour of catching up, and your horses were worn out, what would you do?”
Quait looked around. Yolen looked around.
“Wal, if it was me,” Quait said, “I’d swing west and find me a good handy rock pile alongside the pass trail, and I’d lay for Mulberry. When he come, I’d shoot him down, and then I’d ride for the border and I wouldn’t come back.”
“Well, if you’re askin’ me,” Yolen said, “I’d ride over into them mountains to the west and find me a good spot to hunker down and wait. When the sheriff come along, I’d knock him down, final-like, and then I’d ride south. The only safe place for a killer is south of the border.”
Coe nodded. If these two agreed on it, it stood a reasonable chance of being what the outlaws had decided. The idea certainly made sense.
“Let’s go hunt up this trail then,” he said.
~*~
The Calico range began by rumpling the high desert grassland into row after row of progressively higher hills, and then the hills got so big they outgrew the name and became mountains, craggy and massive and yet small under the big sky full of parading shags of white clouds with slaty bottoms. These mountains were not really all that big, as mountains out here went, but they were big enough. The lower mountainsides were dotted with piñon and juniper and scrub oak, and then as the mountains grew tall around them, in the deep canyons there were fluttering stands of bigtooth maple along streams.
Coe let his companions go first. They led him confidently along a trail that wound deeper and deeper into the mountain range through valleys and canyons. They argued about everything they passed, but they didn’t argue about which way the trail went. Coe watched carefully for some sign of a struggle that might have gone on, for a body lying beside the trail. He hadn’t much hope of finding either, this long after the ambush would have occurred.
They rode up out of a canyon along towards nightfall, the craggy peaks above them seeming close enough to reach out and touch, and Quait pointed ahead across a little meadow, spiky with grasses, to a wind-ruffled pond. Beyond was a grove of golden aspen with some fir trees mixed in.
“We can stay there tonight, if you want,” Quait said. “It’ll be cold, and it looks like it might rain, but there’s a rock I know where we can sit in under and build a fire. Got your poncho?”
“Always carry it,” Coe said. “Let’s go.”
Yolen quietly disappeared while Coe and Ready Quait were gathering wood and getting a fire going. Coe had a sack of dried beans, some salt and some sourdough biscuits, but Quait said he’d brought along some beans from the cook shed which only needed to be warmed up.
Pretty soon, Yolen came back with a pair of rabbits. Coe hadn’t heard a shot and said so.
“Joe’s part Indian, I figure,” Quait said. “Get’s ’em with a club.”
“A club?” Coe was surprised.
“I ain’t neither any Indian,” Yolen protested. “I’m pureblood American. I just been around long enough to learn the ways of rabbits.”
“No white man would go after rabbits with a club,” Quait said with evident disgust, as he skillfully set to work cleaning one of them. Yolen went to work on the other one, and they argued on and on about whether Yolen had any Indian in him or not. Coe thought about Mulberry and wondered where he was right now.
It did rain, as Quait had predicted, just as they were finishing up their meal. They retreated under the rock overhang and watched the bright glow of the embers in the dark, and listened to the rain hissing in them and spattering in the aspen leaves.
In the morning they set out at first light. The trail led up more steeply towards the pass. Shreds of clouds went by in an ice blue sky. They passed the timberline. The trail was rocky and rough. Yet there were wagon ruts. Ahead the pass was narrow and cliff-sided. Coe called a halt.
“That looks to me like a perfect place to ambush from,” he said.
“It is,” Yolen agreed.
“I think we oughta check it out before we go through, just in case,” Quait said.
“You know a way to do that?” Coe asked.
“Now would I be suggestin’ it if I didn’t?”
They left the horses in a jumble of rocks where only an eagle was likely to spot them, and Quait led the way to the left, up over a steep rock face that looked impossible to climb but wasn’t hard at all. They arrived at the top of the southern cliff above the pass and looked down.
“Nothing,” Yolen said briefly, and Quait said, “I don’t see anythin’.”
Quait led on to a point where they were overlooking the western side of the pass, and down below they could see rocks which appeared to have been made to order for ambushers. But ambushers were not there now.
Coe’s eye ran along the pass the way the men sitting in the rocks below would shoot, and in a moment he saw something.
“That looks like a body,” he said heavily.
“It does,” Quait agreed.
“Torn up some by wolves,” Yolen said.
“I’m surprised there aren’t any buzzards,” Coe said.
“There’s nothing left for them no more,” Quait said. “Can’t you make out the bones? It’s just torn up clothes and bones.”
It was a long way down there and the body, or whatever it was, was in deep shadow.
They climbed down and found Quait was right; there were just bones and clothes. Nobody said anything now. Coe knelt and began checking through the bloody and torn clothing. Presently he came up with a wallet and a pocket watch and a Smith and Wesson .44 and some ammo. The holster had been chewed up and wasn’t worth salvaging. He looked over the pocket watch, saw G.M. engraved on the cover, and then looked in the wallet. There was twenty dollars in gold backs, rain soaked, and a card with a request to return to the owner if found: Gerald Mulberry of Killer Ledge, Arizona T.
Coe sat on his haunches looking at it a while, and then went hunting through the blood-stiffened clothing again for the star, found it, and then stood, feeling as though he was suddenly twice as heavy as before.
The doggoned business. No closer to finding out about Pete, either. Just more trouble.
“Gerald Mulberry,” he said dully. “Guess we’re too late.”
Chapter Seven
There was no way to tell which way the killer or killers had gone on the hard rock. The trail, wherever it might show, was cold and rain washed. Not even an Indian could track them, Coe guessed.
“Let’s take a look in those rocks,” he said.
They scrounged around a while, but they found exactly nothing.
“Took their shell casings with them, I guess,” Quait commented. “If they used Winchesters.”
“Maybe they just used their pistols,” Yolen said. “Didn’t bother to reload before they left.”
“All right,” Coe said, sitting on a rock, “you’ve killed the sheriff who was after you. You’ve got a little time. What do you do? Where do you go?”
Yolen shrugged. “The border’s where I’d go. Like I said before.”
“Yeah,” Quait agreed. “The border. Unless I figured nobody’d ever know who I was. Then I’d just go home. But it would be risky. I think I’d rather try my chances in Mexico.”
Coe mused. “I guess the first thing to do is gather up those bones and find a decent place down the mountain somewhere and bury the sheriff.”
“I ain’t handlin’ human bones,” Yolen said warily.
“They won’t bite,” Quait said.
“It ain’t holy.”
“It ain’t holy?” Quait shook his head in amazement.
/> Coe, meanwhile, was gingerly wrapping up what was left of the skeleton in the torn clothing. He tied it into a bundle and tried picking it up. He felt ready to be sick, but managed to keep control. He set the bundle back down.
“Which way do you think the road agents would go from here, if they were headed for the border?” he asked, as they walked down to get their horses.
“If it was me, I wouldn’t go back the way I came,” Quait said. “In case there was somebody in the sheriff’s tracks. And because it would be just askin’ for trouble to be on the same side of the Calicoes as the stage road and the people in Killer Ledge. No sir, I wouldn’t go back that way. I’d go down the west side of the pass and swing a wide arc way around the southwest end of the Calicoes and across the flats and make for mañanaland as fast as I could go. Although it would be shorter and almost as safe to cross back over Goat Pass onto XBT range—at night—and go south from there.”
“You’d do the same?” Coe asked Yolen.
“Well, what I’d do,” Yolen began, and launched into a repeat of what Quait had said. It seemed neither of these fellows could be content to agree with the other, but had to make it sound like he was disagreeing, even though he said more or less the same thing.
“Then we ride down the west side of the pass,” Coe said. “At least, I do. You fellows have been a big help. But Hennesey will want you back, I reckon. He wanted you to help the sheriff. Well, it’s too late for that. You can go back and let out word of what’s happened. I’ll keep going, see if I can see anything, at least as far as Goat Pass.”
“You’ll never find Goat Pass by yourself,” Quait said quickly.
“You won’t find it,” Yolen said.
“If you do catch up with those killers, do you want to waltz right in on an ambush?” Quait asked. “That’s why we’re here in the first place. And I’m sure the ramrod wouldn’t want us to quit on you.”