by E. R. Slade
“He’s missing. I was having trouble getting the deputy to believe my story instead of Turner’s and Gordon’s, and he told me to get out of town.”
“Oh my, an outlaw!” Maria said, flashing her black eyes at him.
“I went looking for sheriff Mulberry, hoping he would listen to my side with more sympathy. He was chasing a pair of road agents who made off with some loot from the Tucson stage. At the third ranch I came to on Mulberry’s trail, the Lazy Eyeglass, I got offered help from Quait and Yolen, and on their advice I went northwest into the pass—they never told me the name of it, come to think of it ...”
“Must be Slash Pass,” Tower said.
“Slash Pass. We went up there and found where somebody had ambushed Mulberry and left his body for the wolves and buzzards.”
“It must have been awful,” Maria said, wrinkling her nose up. “What did you do then?”
Coe looked at her, noticing that red marks where Justin had cuffed her were still there and visible even by low lamplight. Yet she didn’t otherwise show any effects of the killings. He wondered what sort of woman she was that neither the killings nor being cuffed made much impression. He wondered what kind of man Justin was that he would so casually treat a woman that way. And what kind of man her father was that he had not even commented on it.
“We found bones and rags,” Coe went on. “We buried him in a meadow on the western side of the pass. We were shown tracks of two unknown horsemen on a ranch in a valley between the two passes, and then we came over Goat Pass and here. Any of your hands mention seeing a couple of horsemen riding south across your range? Would have been, let’s see, probably Wednesday, three days ago.”
Tower shook his head. “I never saw or heard nothin’,” he said. “And I’ve tole all my boys to let me know, they see anybody on my range, I want to know about it. None of ’em said a word, so I guess you can take it they didn’t see nothing either. Why would they hold it back? No skin off’n their noses.”
“Unless a couple of your boys pulled the holdup.”
That brought silence that made the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner sound like approaching footfalls.
“Are you accusin’ somebody in particular?” Tower finally said.
“I’m not accusing anybody. I’m just mentioning a possibility. Was anybody missing on Wednesday?”
“Nobody’s been missing all week,” Tower said shortly. “I see why Underwood sent you packin’. You got a way of stirrin’ up trouble wherever you go.”
“If you call looking for my brother stirring up trouble,” Coe said tersely. He was tired and it didn’t look like Tower was going to be helpful, and he was having difficulty keeping his patience with this thing.
“Well, trouble’s been followin’ you around like a hound a meat wagon since you showed your nose in Killer Ledge,” Tower pointed out, waving a brawny fist in the air. “First you accuse a couple of my boys of attackin’ you, then you go after Mulberry and he’s dead now, and then you come here, and your friends get themselves killed in my livin’ room, practically. Trouble’s just been followin’ you everywhere.”
Coe took a close look at Tower. The man was blustering, but Coe didn’t think he was really thinking about what he was saying. What he was saying wasn’t making much sense, except superficially, even from Tower’s viewpoint. Tower’s face looked old. His eyes kept flicking towards his daughter and Justin.
Coe decided he wasn’t going to get any further with Tower right now, and a change of subject was the best bet.
“So, Mr. Justin,” he asked, “where you from?”
“Tucson.”
“Friend of the family?”
“You might say that.”
Talkative type, Coe noted.
“What’s your line? I’m a cowpoke myself, but maybe someday I’ll settle down and ranch. You a rancher?”
“Sort of.” Justin’s eyes were forbidding and he was not warming to the company.
“He’s just visitin’ for a while,” Tower said. “Kind of.” He looked into his plate.
That was about all Coe was able to get out of anyone about Justin. After the meal was over, Justin said, “I reckon there’s no need of Mr. Dolan ridin’ all the way back to the Ledge in the dark. Ought to let him bed down in the spare bedroom.”
Tower jolted at that.
“With you?” he demanded, surprised.
“No,” Justin said, and looked at Maria greedily. “I got another place to stay.”
Tower took a step towards Justin, halted, and then rubbed his forehead with his hand.
“Come on, Coe,” Tower said, and led the way through a doorway on the far side of the room. There was a short hall with three doors opening off it, one on the right, two on the left. The second one on the left Tower waved at impatiently. “You can use that one.”
“You mind if I talk to a few of your boys?” Coe asked. “Maybe one of them saw somebody riding by on neighboring range, and never told you because it wasn’t on the XBT.”
Tower’s mouth straightened into a grim sort of half-grin. “Most of the boys’ll be halfway to town by now. Saturday night. Won’t drag their butts back here until tomorrow sometime. Old Tate may still be around. But he just stays to home and works on saddles and suchlike. He won’t have seen nothin’.”
Coe decided he was just as happy. Enough was enough for one day.
~*~
It was along in the night sometime when Coe awoke at the click of the door latch. He opened his eyes, but didn’t otherwise move a muscle. His gun was under his pillow, a precaution he’d taken feeling only a little foolish. Now he was glad the gun was there. He thought through the move he was going to make twice before he decided to put it into action.
Whoever was in the room with him had started very quietly across towards the bed.
Coe let it go on just so long. Then in one smooth motion he grabbed his gun, cocked it and swung to his feet. One step and he had the intruder by the collar of a nightshirt, his pistol barrel firmly pressed against the intruder’s belly.
“Relax, Coe,” Buckeye Justin said, calm as a toad in the sun. “I ain’t carryin’ iron. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“You always wake people up in the middle of the night to talk to them?”
“I didn’t want nobody knowin’ we’d talked. Kin I set down?”
There was a crescent moon throwing a vague pale light through the window onto the bed. Coe stepped to one side, but didn’t lessen the pressure of the gun in Justin’s midsection. Buckshot Justin was one man he didn’t know how to figure. There were only two things about Justin he knew: one was that he had very coolly killed Quait and Yolen; the other was, he wouldn’t trust Justin anywhere but at the far end of a pistol barrel.
He let Justin sit down, but remained standing himself, his gun aimed at Justin’s heart.
“Keep your hands in your lap, palms up,” he said. Then he said, “Okay, you got my attention. What can’t wait until daylight to get talked about?”
“I want to help you.”
Of all the things Coe had a notion Justin might say, this was nearly the last.
“Really. Do what?”
“Find out who killed Mulberry. Who robbed the stage.”
“Why?”
“Reward. You got to figure there’s a reward.”
“I see. Is that what you do, then? Some kind of bounty hunter?”
“I’ve done a little of everything. You strike me as a man who’d understand that.”
“Why should I go in with you?” Coe asked, to see what Justin would say.
“Because I live here. I hear things. Things you wouldn’t never hear. I figure we split the reward fifty-fifty. It’s my guess that somebody from the XBT did pull off the robbery and Tower suspects it, but doesn’t want it gettin’ out and lookin’ bad for the ranch as a place that hires deadbeats and road agents to punch cattle.”
“Why do you figure that way?”
“Come on, don’t
be a flathead. You musta seen the way Tower acted when you said it was possible somebody here pulled off the robbery. It was just like he heard the tramping of the dead of a sudden.”
“You got somebody in mind then?”
“Not really. Not yet.”
“Just what are you doing here at the XBT anyhow?”
“Social visit. Knew Tower some years ago, and happened to be passin’ through this way and stopped in.”
“On real friendly terms with his daughter, I take it.”
“Goin’ to be hitched to her sometime soon,” Justin said offhandedly.
“Funny kind of respect you got for the girl you plan to marry, sleeping with her beforehand. Tower doesn’t seem to like it, anyway.”
Justin waved a hand impatiently. “He’ll come around.”
“I noticed he’s scared of you. He acts as though you could shoot bullets out of your eyes any time you want.”
Justin chuckled. “His daughter is old enough to decide for herself, and Tower knows it.”
It didn’t add up somehow, yet for all he knew it could be just the way Justin said it was.
“Why ask me to share the reward, if there is one? If you’ve got information, or think only you can get it, why bother with me at all?”
“I figure you been over the ground, and it’ll probably take a lot of little pieces put together to prove anythin’. It usually does with these kinds of things.”
That made sense, in a way, but still ...
“I don’t see it,” he said bluntly, trying for a reaction.
Justin was sitting back-to the window, and his features were very hard to make out, but Coe could feel the eyes on him like two draughts of cold air.
“All right,” Justin said. “There’s something else. I don’t figure you for a fool. You look like you’ve been around long enough not to take it good if I was to waltz in and claim the reward and cut you out of the thing altogether. I don’t need you on my back trail huntin’ me down for half the reward money. I figure we do it together, split the reward up front, and we’re all even and comfortable and nobody has to make a dive for a rock.”
It held together. It did. Yet, Coe just didn’t trust the man somehow. Maybe it was too late in the night for him to think clearly, and he was bothered by something that didn’t exist. Or maybe he’d think what the flaw was tomorrow after he’d had some rest and some breakfast.
“I’ll sleep on it, tell you in the morning,” he said. “Now get out of here.”
“Sure thing.”
After Justin had gone, Coe sat in the moonlight a while thinking, and then drew a long, deep breath, shoved the gun under the pillow and lay down. He was asleep almost immediately.
In the clear bright light of morning, he was almost not sure whether Justin’s visit in the night had been a dream brought on by too much killing and too many questions. At the breakfast table, Buckshot Justin was as cold-eyed as ever, and seemed more concerned with Maria’s unabashed interest in Coe than anything else.
Tower looked like he hadn’t gotten any sleep. He appeared to have a hard time looking at his daughter without it setting off a downward twitching of his mouth, yet also had a hard time not looking at her, and at Justin, whom he glared at balefully. Coe could almost feel sorry for Tower, only there were so many questions about who was involved in what that it seemed better to reserve judgment until all the facts were in.
Coe decided to check out what he could of Justin’s story.
“I gather you’re getting hitched to Buckshot,” he said conversationally to Maria, as the Chinese cook served flapjacks.
“I ain’t said yes to that yet,” she informed him, ignoring Justin’s tautened mouth and her father’s tormented expression. “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” She brushed back her hair and licked her lips, her bright eyes exploring his face. “So you want to be a rancher,” she said.
“Someday.”
“I like ranchers. Takes a man to be a rancher.”
Justin said, “The lady likes to think things over, but she’ll marry me. Don’t think she wants you getting ideas.”
Coe realized that one thing that bothered him about Justin was that for all his talk about marrying Maria, Coe wasn’t convinced Justin was the marrying kind.
“Speak for yourself, Buckshot Justin,” Maria was saying, a snap in her tone. “I like men with ideas.”
“Shut up!” Tower bellowed.
Maria wrinkled her nose. “It’s all right, Pa. I’m a big girl now.”
Coe said to Tower, “I gather you’ve known Mr. Justin here for a while. Go back to old mavericking days? Knew an old hand used to talk about mavericking, in Texas.”
Tower seemed to have trouble figuring out what Coe was asking and he fiddled with his food. “Yeah, I’ve known him a while.”
Justin’s cold eyes swung to Coe, expressionless.
“Well,” said Tower, getting up, “guess you’ll be wantin’ to get on back to town. Tell Underwood about Mulberry and these other two hands from the Lazy Eyeglass.” He was making an effort to be brisk, but it went stale as an old drunk’s clothes.
Coe had finished eating, and he stood up.
“Help you with your hoss,” Justin said, also getting up. He got a hard look from Tower, but ignored it.
Coe and Justin went out to the corral, where Coe’s dun was nibbling oats from the feedbox. Coe swung the blanket and saddle off the fence rail and set about rigging his mount.
“We got a deal, Coe?” Buckshot Justin asked. There was conniving in the hard eyes.
“No. I’m not after reward money or anything else but finding out what’s happened to my brother. I find out that, I’m leaving this part of the country for good.”
“There was forty thousand dollars stole from that stage. And there was two holdups before that, likely done by the same men, twenty thousand and thirty-six thousand. Reward on that’ll run quite a pile, of change, I’ll wager. Course, if we found the gold, we could just keep it ourselves, and we’d be a good deal richer than the reward money could make us.” Justin covered it with a laugh, but Coe thought he was probably testing the waters.
“Not interested.”
“Not interested in ninety-six thousand dollars?”
Coe led his dun out of the corral, swung up.
“You figure out who stole it, you keep the reward. But let me know who it is.”
Justin’s smile went.
“Sure,” he said. “But you just mind one thing. If there’s any trouble about them two I had to kill in self-defense yestidy, you won’t be hearin’ anything he’pful from me.”
They looked at each other, and Coe tried to decide how to add up Justin, couldn’t, and tugged his horse around.
He did have the strong notion that the only reason Justin had wanted to become partners in hunting down the road agents was to keep Coe from telling Underwood that there was some question about whether it was really self-defense. Both Tower and Maria had agreed it was self-defense. Coe was the only one who hadn’t.
Technically, it might be self-defense, but the way it had been done still bothered Coe somehow. It was so cold-blooded and final, as though Justin was in the habit of doing things that way. He certainly hadn’t been upset in the least afterwards.
As he rode out of the yard, Justin, Tower and Maria watched. Like a bunch of hungry wolves watching a gored steer, Coe thought.
Chapter Nine
“Well now,” Buckeye Justin said, “I reckon it’s time me and the little filly here got ready for church.”
Bert Tower pulled his gaze from the small dancing figure of the man on horseback riding down the valley. He looked into Justin’s face. Was the renegade joking?
“Church!!” Maria exploded. Her eyes bugged out like those of a horse caught in a burning barn.
“You ain’t goin’ to make much of a lady, lessen you go to church,” Justin said sardonically.
Tower kept looking at Justin, and he realized his eyes must be bugging out as fa
r as Maria’s. Maria’s mother had been a Catholic. If she had lived after her daughter was born, she would probably have made sure Maria never missed a Sunday in her life. He himself hadn’t cared whether Maria went to church or not. But the way Maria was turning out, maybe he should have made her go himself. She sure hadn’t put up any resistance to Justin. Anymore than she had to other men who took an interest in her, which included just about every man in the county. She was becoming no better than one of those girls at Madame Hastings’.
But Justin go to church? There was something peculiar with that.
“I ain’t goin’ to church,” Maria said with an air of finality. “Not me.”
“Reckon you are,” Justin said, and Tower felt rage coming up his throat at the sight of the cold that came into Justin’s eyes. Justin had hold of Maria’s arm.
Maria tugged, trying to get free. “Let go,” she screeched. “Get your paws off me.”
Justin didn’t let go. He cuffed her one on the cheek. She kept struggling, and so he backhanded her on the other. She suddenly became sullen.
Then Tower had it figured. This was his chance, if he was right.
“You go on to church, Maria,” he said. “Good for you. Your mother would have wanted it. Maybe it’ll put you on the straight path. I’m sick of seein’ you act with no more control than a heifer in heat.”
“You’re one to talk,” she said. “You bulled more than one of Madame Hastin’s’ girls in your time.”
Justin hauled her off into the house then. If he hadn’t, Tower might have lost control and slapped her himself. Hadn’t been enough of slapping her at times past when it would have done the most good, he reflected, and headed for the bunkhouse. Though he’d never thought of himself as coming up short in that department at the time. Of course, it was too late now: you could slap her till your hand was all over blisters, and it wouldn’t make any more difference to her than it would to a block of granite.
Pole Turner and Frank Gordon left the window and turned to him as he stepped in.
“Where’s old Tate?” Tower asked them.