L'Amour, Louis - SSC 32

by The Collected Short Stories Vol 3

  He turned to his wife. “Sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to keep you waitin’.”

  Slowly the crowd dispersed. Only Collins and Dunn remained. For a few moments nothing was said, then Dunn spoke. “I wish the damned fool would move off that place! I don’t want trouble, Jim, but I need that water.”

  “You’ve got water elsewhere. You’ve a lot of land, Wiley. Maybe you should pull in your horns.”

  “And let him whip me?”

  “Can’t you see, Wiley, Tanner ain’t tryin’ to whip you. He wants to stay. Why don’t you slap him on the back and tell him if he gives you a piece of side meat from time to time he can stay.”

  There was good sense in what Collins advised, and Collins was a good man. “But I can’t let him get away with this, Jim. He called me to my face. Nobody has done that since the Powell boys.”

  Wiley Dunn had killed the Powell boys, all three of them. He had been fourteen years younger then, but he was still, he told himself, a tough man.

  “You’re asking for it, Wiley, but let me give you a word of advice from a friend. Don’t get the idea that Tanner is easy. He ain’t.”

  On his way back to the ranch, Wiley Dunn mulled that over, and he had to admit his impression was the same. There was something in Tanner’s manner that warned Dunn that the man was no pilgrim. And what was that Tanner had said? That he did not want to kill another man?

  Suddenly he remembered what Rowdy or somebody had said about there being no tracks leaving Tanner’s place. What could that mean? His curiosity aroused, Dunn turned the bay off the trail to the ranch and cut across the hill to the county road. It took him only a few minutes to find the tracks of Tanner’s returning buckhoard, his saddle horse tied behind. For three miles he followed the tracks and then, suddenly, they were gone.

  Puzzled, he reined the bay around and rode hack. Crushed grass told him where Tanner had turned off, and he followed the tracks over a low hill and alongside a dry wash. He was now not more than five miles from Tanner’s cabin, but separated from it by the bulk of Wildhorse Mesa, a huge block of basaltic rock some four hundred feet high by eight miles long, and at least two miles wide. If this was the route Tanner took to his home, it was far out of the way.

  Turning back, Dunn reached the trail and started for the ranch. Frowning, he considered what he had learned. It seemed stupid for a man to go so far out of his way to avoid trouble on the trail, yet going over the mesa was an impossibility. It was true, he had never skirted the mesa on the north, but he had been within a quarter of a mile many times on the south side, and the steep talus slides ended in an abrupt cliff, at least a hundred feet of sheer rock.

  Maybe he was being a damned fool. After all, Lonetree lay far from the home ranch and they had rarely watered there, holding it rather for emergencies than otherwise. He could let it go and never miss it. Irritably, he shook off the thought. The land was his, and he was going to keep it.

  Had he persisted in trailing Tanner he would have had a further surprise. In such broken, rugged country, even a man who has lived and ridden there for years sometimes misses things. Had he been skirting the mesa on foot, something no cowhand would dream of doing, he would have discovered it was not, as it seemed, a continuous wall.

  A few days after Tanner had completed the building of the stone house in Lonetree Canyon, he had taken his rifle and ridden out to hunt for a deer. Picketing his horse on a patch of grass, he had taken his rifle and walked up a tiny creek toward its beginning at the mesa’s base. He drank from the spring, then straightened up and turned west. He was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when he realized he was looking at a break in the wall of the mesa. Moreover, there was a dim game trail leading from the spring back into the notch. The trail entering the opening went in parallel with the mesa’s wall, which was fractured, leaving one point of rock extended along the face of the mesa so that from a short distance away it appeared to be one unbroken wall.

  Following the dim trail through talus and broken rock, and pushing through brush, he found that it turned sharply south, and he was standing in a gap where the mesa was actually separated into two. Lying before him was a meadow at least a hundred yards wide. Following it, he discovered that at one place it became almost a half-mile wide, then narrowed again as it neared the north side. At the lowest point there was a small lake, almost an acre in extent.

  The opening on the far side emerged in a thick stand of aspen, and in the distance he could see the smoke from Algosa. Not only had he discovered a private trail out of his ranch, but added grazing and a much shorter route to town.

  From the Bar 7, a ranch several miles to the west, he bought twenty young heifers, and turned them into the grassy basin. Then he prepared a gate and fence at the far end, and another at his own end of the opening. Each time he used the route through the mesa he took care to cover his tracks, wiping them out near a shelf of rock so the tracks seemed to vanish on the rock itself.

  Over the way into the aspen he placed a dead tree, still attached to its base by a few shreds of bark. This he could swing back and forth, making the route seem impassable to a buckboard.

  When Morgan Tanner returned to the stone house, he helped Ann from the buckboard. For a moment she stood close to him. “Will they ever leave us alone, Morgan?”

  “I believe they will. There will be trouble first, I think. Ollie Herndon is hunting trouble, with or without orders from Dunn. We’ve got to be careful.”

  During subsequent days he explored the rift in the mesa, finding several ice caves, and in one of them a stone hammer. He prowled the canyon, often alone, but sometimes with either Johnny Ryan or Ann. He did a lot of thinking about what he had discovered. Algosa was no longer just a cowtown Mines were being opened in the back country, although not very rich they had large ore bodies and gave evidence they might last, turning Algosa into a market town.

  Morgan Tanner had come from mountain country where cattle were more valued for milk, butter, and cheese than for beef, but so far as he was aware the only milk cow in Algosa was owned by the postmaster.

  What Dunn might he planning he could not guess, but the raids ceased. Tanner rarely went to town, and the palace was never empty. When he did go into town he met people, and he asked a few questions, listened a lot. Johnny Ryan, his wife’s brother, was a hardworking youngster of thirteen. With Johnny helping, Morgan Tanner handled the cattle and strove to improve the place. When he did go to town he wore a gun, but avoided places where there might be trouble.

  Several people made a point of telling him what Dunn had done to the Powell boys, and he knew they all expected a showdown between Dunn and himself. Yet none of the Dunn riders appeared, and as long as he was left alone, Tanner was satisfied.

  The sun came out hotter each day, and the sky was cloudless. Wiley Dunn rode his sorrel out on the range beside his worried foreman. “What do you think, Ollie? Is the range all as bad as this?”

  “There’s places that are better. Back up in the breaks and in the deepest canyons. The water holes haven’t slacked off too much yet, except that one down to Spur. That’s gone dry.”

  There was silence, and Herndon asked cautiously, “Boss? D’ you reckon we might sell a few head? Ease up on the grass a mite?”

  Wiley Dunn stiffened. “No. Anyway, the price is off. We’d lose money to sell now.”

  Ollie Herndon said nothing. Gunman he might be, but he was also a cattleman. It was hard to sell when prices were down, yet better to sell now while they had beef on their bones than to let them lose weight. But he knew better than to make suggestions. Wiley Dunn had always had a fixation on numbers.

  “If we had that Lonetree place it would help,” he suggested. “You give me the word and I’ll tackle Tanner.”

  Dunn waited while a man might have counted ten, staring out over the long brown miles of his range. He was wishing this affair had never come up. The expression in the eyes of Tanner’s pretty wife had hurt him more than he would have admitted to anyone
. He had grown more sensitive, he reflected, as he grew older. And if he faced Tanner now there would be no telling the outcome. If he died, what good would all these vast acres be? And if Tanner died, what would become of that lovely girl?

  “No,” he said finally, “not yet.”

  He saw nothing of Tanner. Twice he rode up the valley, keeping well out of sight, and another time he rode along a ridge overlooking the place from a distance. Lonetree was more lovely than he remembered it. There had always been water there, but now there were long, perfectly lined rows of planted crops, and over against the far side there was a field of alfalfa, or what seemed to be alfalfa. Tanner was no fool. He had a good thing there. He stared at the hay. Yet that was a lot of feed for the stock he had … suspicion leaped into his mind.

  Had Tanner turned to rustling? Had he, like other nesters in the past, started stealing cattle? Suppose he had a small herd of Hat cattle that he was secretly fattening? With sudden decision, Dunn turned away. This was the explanation. There could be no other.

  In the stone house against the cliff Morgan Tanner looked across the table at his wife. “Honey, I’ve been thinking. If we had us a Jersey bull now, a right Bne Jersey from good milk stock, we might cross-breed those heifers into better milkers in a few seasons.”

  Ann Tanner looked at him thoughtfully. “You want to use that money Uncle Fred left us? Is that it?”

  “It’s your decision. It’s up to you and Johnny. He was your uncle.”

  “But he left it to all of us! What do you think, Johnny?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it, Sis. Morg never spoke of it before, but it’s been in my mind. There’s a market for milk and butter down at Algosa. This country has plenty of beef.”

  “All right,” Ann agreed. “Buy a bull whenever you can find one you want.”

  “I’ll go into town tomorrow,” he said.

  Morgan Tanner reached town at ten the following morning, and a few minutes earlier Wiley Dunn, Ollie Herndon, and twelve Hat hands swept down on the Lonetree ranch. It had been shrewdly planned, for Ollie had been watching the ranch with glasses and had seen the boy ride off on some mission. Instantly he was down off the ridge and they were riding. There was no one about when they rode into the yard.

  Dunn shouted and, whitefaced, Ann Tanner came to the door. “Just what is it you want, Mr. Dunn? Have you taken to fighting women now?”

  His face flushed but his jaw was set. “I’m fighting no one, but we’ve come to search the range! That damn no-good husband of yours has taken to rustling cows. We seen some of them.”

  “We have no cattle but our own! Now I am ordering you to get off this place at once!” She turned quickly to grasp the shotgun, but Herndon leaped from his horse and caught the barrel as she was swinging it up. He wrenched it roughly from her hands.

  “Right purty, ain’t you? Maybe you could do with a good man after we string up that husband of yours!”

  She slapped him across the mouth and Herndon struck her. She had stepped back, but the blow caught her on the forehead and knocked her down.

  “Ollie!” Dunn was whitefaced with anger. “For God’s sake, man! Get into your saddle now, and be damned quick about it. I’ll have no man strike a woman in my presence!” He pointed. “Get into your saddle, do you hear?”

  Turning to Ann he said, “Sorry, ma’am, but you shouldn’t have reached for that gun.”

  “And let you steal our cattle. You’re asking for trouble, Mr. Dunn. You don’t know Morgan as I do. Morgan Turner’s mother was a Lowry, from the Neuces country. You may remember what happened to the Fullers.”

  Wiley Dunn stared at her, shocked. Every detail of the twenty-five year feud was known to everybody in cattle country. The Fullers, or some people who called themselves that, had killed a Lowry boy in an argument over horses, and every Fuller had died.

  Suddenly, with startling clarity, he remembered the scene from years before. He himself had witnessed the final shoot-out. He had been visiting in Texas, planning to buy cattle, and four of the Fuller outfit had cornered two Lowrys, Bill Lowry and some youngster of sixteen or seventeen. They had shot Bill Lowry in the back, and then the kid turned on them. The boy had drawn as he turned, a flashing, beautifully timed draw. Ed Fuller caught the first bullet in his midsection as the boy fired. Thirty seconds later the youngster was in the saddle, riding out of town, leaving three Fullers dead and another dying.

  Now, suddenly, the face of that boy merged with that of Morgan Tanner. Of course! That was why there had always been something disturbingly familiar about the man. There was no turning back now.

  “I’ll stay here, Pete. The rest of you scatter out and find the cattle. When you find them, drive them out here.”

  “Those are not your cattle. We bought and paid for them.”

  Ollie Herndon did not leave. “Boss, let me go get him. I want him.”

  “Don’t be a fool!”

  Dunn was worried and his temper was short. “That’s the sheriff’s job.”

  He paused. “Anyway, you’re not in his class. Morgan Tanner is the one they used to call the Lowry kid.”

  “Aw, I don’t believe it! Why, that — !”

  “Mr. Dunn is right,” Ann Tanner replied, “and when he learns what you have done, he will kill you. I wish you would ride now. I wish you would leave the country before he finds you.”

  Herndon laughed. “Since when have you started carin’ about me?”

  “I don’t care about you. You’re a cheap, loudmouthed braggart, and a coyote at heart. You’ve gotten away with a lot because you ride in Mr. Dunn’s shadow. I just do not want my husband to have to kill another man.”

  As they drove the cattle away, Ann looked after them, heartsick with worry and fear. Johnny appeared from the trees. “I seen ‘em, Sis, but I didn’t know what to do. I figured I’d better ride to town after Morg.”

  “No,” she was suddenly thinking clearly, “you stay here and don’t let them burn us out. I’ll ride into town and see Sheriff Collins.”

  While Johnny was saddling her horse she hastily changed, fixed her hair, and got some papers from the strongbox.

  Collins was shocked. “Ma’am, you can’t do this! You can’t arrest Dunn for stealin’! Why, he’s the higgest cattleman in these parts!”

  “Nevertheless, I have sworn out a warrant for his arrest, and I want you to come with me.” She showed him the bill of sale for the cattle. “He has driven these cattle from my place, taking them by force, and Ollie Herndon struck me.”

  She indicated the bruise on her brow. “Sheriff, my husband is a Lowry. I want Wiley Dunn behind bars before my husband finds him.”

  “Just what happened out there, ma’am’” Reluctantly, he got to his feet. “Is that right? Is Morg the one they called the Lowry kid?”

  At her assent, he started for the door. “You come along, ma’am, if you will. I don’t want any killing here if it can be helped.”

  The Lowry kid was credited with nine men in all, but locally Morgan Tanner had been a quiet, reserved man, well-liked in the area, and always peaceful. Yet Collins knew the type. The West was tull of them. Leave them alone and they were solid, quiet men who worked hard, morning until night; push them the wrong way and all Hell would break loose.

  Suddenly Tanner was in the door. “Ann? What’s wrong? I thought I saw you come in here.” Then, “What’s happened to your head?”

  He listened, his face without expression, but as he turned to the door, Collins said, “Morg? Leave this to the law.”

  “All right. Except for Ollie. I’ll take care of him.”

  “You’re well liked around here, Morg. You want to spoil that by killing a man?”

  “ I won’t kill him unless I have to. I’ll just make him wish he was dead.”

  Wiley Dunn was talking with Ollie Herndon on the porch when Sheriff Collins, Morgan Tanner, and Ann rode into the ranch yard. By then there was a livid bruise where she had been struck.

  “Dunn,�
� Collins spoke apologetically, “I ve got a warrant for your arrest. You and Ollie there. For rustlin’.”

  Ollie was watching Tanner. The expression in his eyes was almost one of hunger. “You huntin’ me?”

  “Pull in your neck,” Tanner said calmly, “you’ll have your turn.”

  Dunn’s face was flushed with anger. “You’d arrest me? For rustling?”

  “That’s right,” Collins said. “Mrs. Tanner has a bill of sale for those cattle you drove off. She bought ‘em from the Bar Seven. Paid cash for ‘em.”

  Dunn was appalled. “Look, this is a mistake. I thought — !”

  “The trouble is that you didn’t think at all,” Tanner cut him off. “You’ve let yourself get so fat-headed and self-centered you didn’t think at all.

  “Dunn, all I’ve ever wanted from you is peace. You’ve no legal right to any of that range you hold. You’ve used it and misused it. Right now you’re destroying the range with five thousand more cattle than the grass will carry.

  “If you want to know the truth, Dunn, I’ve given serious thought to sending word back to Texas for two dozen friends of mine to come in and settle on your range. They’d file on it legally, and they are fighters. You’d be lucky to keep the house you live in.”

  “Tanner, maybe I’ve been some kind of a blind fool, but you wouldn’t want to press those charges, would you? I might be able to beat your case, but I’d look the fool. You name the damages, and I’ll pay. That all right with you, Sheriff?”

  Collins waved a hand. “If Tanner drops his charges I’ll say no more.”

  Morgan Tanner looked at Dunn and could find no malice in his heart. All that had been washed away back on the Neuces. He wanted only peace now, and Ann. “No more trouble about Lonetree?”

  “No more trouble. That’s decent of you, Tanner. You had me over a barrel.”

  Herndon swore. “Boss! What s come over you? Knucklin under to this plow-jockey? I’d see myself in — 1”

  His voice broke off and he started to draw as Tanner turned. Tanner’s draw was smooth and much faster. His first shot broke Ollie’s arm at the elbow, spinning him half around. A second shot notched his ear, and as Ollie’s other hand grabbed at the bloody ear, another bullet cut the lobe on the remaining ear. Herndon turned and began to run clumsily. Tanner walked after him, gun poised.