The Vengeance Seeker 4
Page 11
“You should have, Pete.”
Wolf picked up his rifle, slammed his hat back on his head, lowered his shoulder and bulled his way through the waist-high window into the back alley that ran behind the jail. He rolled when he landed and came up with his Winchester ready. By this time there was a great deal of commotion from the street, though no one seemed aware yet of his escape. Wolf started to trot along the alley and soon reached the rear of the hotel. He darted across a side street and through the rear door of the livery, coming in behind the hostler who was peering out the front door at the commotion in front of the jail.
“Saddle up my horse and tie my gear on board,” Wolf told him sharply.
The hostler spun around. When he saw the Winchester in Wolf’s hands, he raised both hands.
“Never mind that,” snapped Wolf. “Saddle my horse and hop to it!”
As the fellow rushed into the black’s stall, Wolf moved to the stable’s entrance and peered out. There was now a large crowd milling about across the street from the jail, with a smaller one forming in front of the jail itself. As Wolf watched, someone rushed out of the jail, yelling excitedly to the crowd.
Wolf moved back into the livery and checked the rear. Peering back down the alley, he saw four or five men racing toward the livery, guns drawn. Wolf ducked back into the barn, dug into his back pocket and flipped four bits at the hostler.
“I know that ain’t enough,” Wolf said, leading the black out of his stall. “Next time I come through here I’ll settle up with you.”
The man backed up hastily and nodded, only too willing to accept the arrangement.
Satisfied the man had tied his gear on securely, Wolf swung into the saddle, ducked his head low and spurred the horse out into the street. He turned the horse sharply and galloped directly for the crowd in front of the sheriff’s office. Halfway there, he heard someone raise a cry. Men began breaking back toward the sidewalks, grabbing for their six-guns as they went.
Wrapping the reins around his pommel, Wolf guided his horse with knee pressure and pulled the Winchester out of its scabbard. As he rode into the crowd’s midst, he fired rapidly just over the townsmen’s heads—levering and firing with machinelike rapidity. He was beyond them before they could regroup. A few moments later he was galloping out of town.
He dropped the Winchester into its scabbard, snatched up his reins and looked back. He saw no one on a horse taking after him and struck north into high country. This was not the first time he had left a town in this fashion, he reflected ironically. And he doubted it would be the last.
Then he thought of Barnum and wondered what would become of Lawson. Barnum was the only man he knew who could put a lid on a town like that. With him gone the place would most likely blow itself apart.
And it couldn’t happen to a nicer town.
Eleven
John Harrington looked up from the bleating shorthorn. He had just refereed at a brand dispute, ruling in favor of a rival spread. The rep from that spread was the one who called his attention to the approaching rider. Harrington swung around to look.
He did not recognize the rider at once. But as soon as he did, Harrington reached for the reins to his dun and swung his still tough body into the saddle. The owner of the Bar X had been waiting for this moment for a long time. Now that it had come, he hoped he would be able to handle himself as well as he had planned.
Harrington rode toward the rider, skirting the branding fire and ignoring the stench of singed hair and sizzling hides. He was watching the rider intently.
Yes, it was the same one, all right—the same rider who had struck the bargain with him a year ago. His face was dark and lean, with high cheekbones and long but neatly combed black hair. He was coming from the direction of Cut Bank and despite the long ride, he looked cool and prosperous enough in a white silk shirt, new boots and pants, a dark, flat-crowned hat and a black silk bandanna knotted about his throat.
Harrington pulled up. The rider pulled up alongside him and touched the brim of his hat in greeting. His thin, cruel line of a mouth twisted into a smile that sent an uneasy shiver down Harrington’s back.
Nevertheless, he returned the smile as easily as he could. “Mr. Conway, is it?” he asked.
The rider nodded. “That’s right, Mr. Harrington. I guess you remember me, all right.”
“Never forget a face,” Harrington said.
“A year ago we talked about me buying some beef cattle off you. About a thousand head.”
“I remember.”
“I raised the money, Mr. Harrington. I’d like for you to deliver them beeves next spring to my place in Canada.”
“The Tolliver spread, you said.”
“That’s right, Mr. Harrington. And you remember I told you where. Red Deer.”
Harrington nodded. “You settled on a brand yet?”
The man’s dark face creased into a sardonic grin. “The Double Cross,” he said. “Easy to remember.”
“There’s just one problem, Mr. Conway.”
The rider shifted in his saddle, causing the leather to creak sharply. Fixing his cold eyes on the owner, he said, “What’s that, Mr. Harrington?”
“The price we settled on. Twenty dollars a head it was, I believe.”
The man nodded briskly. “That was the price all right.”
“Well, I don’t see how I can meet that price now,” Harrington said. “They don’t seem to be much shorthorn stock left in either Washington or Oregon, and I guess you must have heard what a winter that last one was.”
“How much you want, Mr. Harrington?” Harrington moved uncomfortably in his saddle. “I think fifty a head is more reasonable—considering conditions, Mr. Conway.”
The rider shook his head. “We settled on twenty.”
“I know that. I’m sorry, Mr. Conway. But that price would just about wipe me out now.”
“I wouldn’t want the stock until next spring.”
“I still couldn’t do it. Not at twenty dollars a head.”
The rider’s eyes went suddenly cold and his right hand dropped to the butt of his Colt. He wore it, Harrington had noted, in a holster secured to his thigh with a rawhide thong. Out of the corner of his eyes, Harrington saw his cowhands watching and at the rider’s motion to his gun several dropped what they were doing and stood up. Harrington saw one cow, released suddenly, get up rump first, bleating loudly.
The raucous animal seemed to cut the tension. The rider who called himself Conway smiled. The chill in that smile sent a shiver down Harrington’s back again, but he knew the man was now ready to deal.
“I’ll give you twenty-five a head,” the man said.
“Forty.”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Done.”
Harrington reached out with his right hand. The rider leaned over his pommel and shook Harrington’s hand.
Then, leaning back in his saddle, he said, “That includes your boys driving them north to my spread in the spring.”
“That’s a long haul, Mr. Conway.”
“Thirty-five a head is ten more than we shook on, Mr. Harrington.”
The owner of the Bar X nodded. Yes, he guessed it was. “Then we’ll settle the deal with a drink. Will you be in Cut Bank long?”
“Just got in last night. Got some buying to do. I’ll be there a day or so longer, I reckon.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Ames Hotel. On Main Street.”
Harrington nodded. “I know the place. Would tomorrow afternoon be agreeable to you?”
“Agreeable. I’ll likely be in the saloon next door.” He smiled thinly. “If I can pry a better brand of whiskey from the barkeep, that is.”
“Ask for Mr. Harrington’s special blend,” the owner told him. “And tell Sam to put it on my bill.”
The rider touched his hat brim to Harrington and tugged his horse around. “That’s real generous, Mr. Harrington. I’ll do just that.”
“You saw him, Slim,” the owner said, as the young puncher hurried up. “That’s the same fellow rode in here a year ago wanting to buy beef from me. You said then it was Johnny Reno. You still hold to that?”
The puncher looked nervously about him, obviously not too willing to admit that he would know Johnny Reno on sight. But he squared his shoulders and said, without further hesitation, “That was Johnny Reno, all right, Mr. Harrington. I’d recognize him anywhere.”
Harrington nodded briskly and dismounted. Calling his foreman over, he asked for his pencil and a sheet of paper from his tally pad. The foreman handed both over.
Using the rump of his horse, Harrington wrote on the piece of paper:
Mr. Martin Tolliver:
The man calling himself Tom Conway is Johnny Reno, like I was told by one of my hands. He’s back and he still wants the cattle he mentioned before. I raised the price to discourage him, but he bargained like a killer, and I didn’t want no bloodshed. I guess you will just have to deal with him yourself when he gets to your ranch.
I am sending this letter to give you fair warning. He said he will be leaving Cut Bank in a few days. My hand should reach you before that with this note.
Good luck.
John J. Harrington
Harrington read the note through carefully, then folded it over and beckoned to Slim.
“You remember that spread in Red Deer country where we delivered the five hundred head?”
“The place in Canada?”
“That’s the one.”
“Sure, Mr. Harrington.”
“Ride up there. Leave as soon as you can. Tell Cookie to give you anything you need. Take two horses—the black and Blaze—switch them and ride your ass to the bone, mister, just so’s you deliver this here letter personal to Martin Tolliver, the same fellow we delivered them beeves to this spring. You got all that, Slim?”
“Sure, Mr. Harrington.”
“Then git!”
Slim tucked the letter into his back pocket, turned and hurried off toward the remuda, pulling his white, high-crowned Stetson down securely as he went.
Watching him go, Harrington shook his head. This was a nasty business, and he didn’t much like the part he was being forced to play in it.
With the price of beef skyrocketing after last winter’s big kill and with the completion of a spur from the Canadian Pacific to Red Deer, Martin Tolliver no longer wished to sell his ranch—and especially not to this fellow, once he learned from Harrington he was really Johnny Reno. But Tolliver had already accepted a partial payment of four thousand dollars from Reno for his spread, and it was not going to be an easy matter to talk a man like that out of his purchase.
Well, he was giving Tolliver all the warning he could. It was going to be his grizzly to wrestle with now.
The rancher saw his cowhands still standing around, watching him. “What the hell’re you men standing around for?” he demanded, reaching for the reins of his horse. “I want to hear those brandin’ irons sizzling on fresh hide!”
The punchers moved off hastily and with a sigh John Harrington pulled into his saddle, clapped spurs to his mount and loped over to help a couple of men separate a calf from its mother. Hellfire! At least a third of these unbranded cattle should have been caught in the spring roundup. But nowadays cowpokes weren’t worth a fart in a windstorm.
Three days north of Fort McLeod, Reno found Red Deer River and knew he was almost there. The nights had been getting cold. It would be nice to spend the next one under his own roof—the one belonging to his ranch. The excitement within him was building, and he kept remembering Caulder’s remark: Too bad we couldn’t have thought of that ranch a long time ago.
Well, better late than never.
As he rode beside the river, he noted how clear the water was—like a sheet of glass fitted over the rocks and gravel. Occasionally he caught glimpses of enormous trout darting upstream at quick angles, then holding steady, their fins wavering. It was good country, rich country. He’d have to keep an eye out for grizzlies he was sure, and that thought excited him—almost as much as him having his own ranch, his own private empire.
It was too bad Wolf couldn’t be with him. After all, if it hadn’t been for Wolf coming along when he did...
Reno found himself remembering the night he returned after a trail drive to find his father beating his mother, a bearded, drunken companion standing by his side, urging him on. For the first time Reno could recall, his mother was fighting back, kicking, scratching. But Reno had returned too late to really help, for even as he stepped into the adobe hut, his father—in a mad fury at his wife’s resistance—took out his six-gun and clubbed her repeatedly about the head and face.
By the time Reno had been able to pull his father off, his mother lay still on the bed, her bruised and battered naked body assuming a pitifully awkward position—and Reno knew his mother was dead.
That was when he drew his own six-gun and killed his father. He planted three slugs in the man’s chest and would have sent more into the crumbling body if that friend of his father’s had not shot him.
Somehow, he had been able to stagger out of the hut, get back onto his horse and ride off. A posse had been formed and he had been driven onto the desert and his horse shot out from under him. He was close to death when Wolf found him, too weak even to crawl the few remaining feet to a water hole just ahead of him.
And Wolf had dug the slug out of his chest that night in the light of a campfire...
Sometime later, as they rode together through the southwest, Reno realized from what Wolf told him that his father’s drinking buddy of many years—the same man who had shot him—knew about the murders and robbery at the Caulder ranch.
As soon as Wolf learned that, he had insisted on going it alone. And later, the way he took the first two of that gang became a legend in the southwest. After that, Wolf, still tracking, still searching, had disappeared north...
Too bad, Reno thought again. Too bad the two of them couldn’t take over this ranch together. It would be like old times.
Or would it? Could it ever be? So damn many dead men now stood between them. It was as if he had been trapped into becoming his father and himself at the same time: beating on women and still sending bullets into men he loathed...
The chill wind coming off the white peaks to his left caused Reno to pull back out of his thoughts and take stock of where he was. By the position of the sun he knew it was close to four. By the look of the country, he knew he was already within the Broken Bow, Tolliver’s spread, the land that would soon be his.
As the river swept northwest, he followed it, then left its banks to top a familiar rise. And there it was, spread before him. Shading his eyes from the low, slanting rays of the sun, he pulled up and peered into the distance. Tolliver’s ranch buildings were nestling just beyond the distant stand of pine: a collection of four one-story log buildings, a fine network of pole corrals behind them opening into the horse pasture. And just beyond the buildings, shouldering massively into the sky, the pine-studded flanks of the Mackenzie Range.
Lifting his horse to a lope, he rode toward the buildings, amazed that even before he reached the valley floor, the tall grasses were brushing his stirrups. Halfway across the valley floor, however, he was surprised to find fresh shorthorn stock clustered around a water hole. He had not expected this. Tolliver had told him he was selling out this spring. The presence of the fat yearling shorthorns did not jibe with this.
Tolliver might not have waited for his return, Reno realized suddenly. At that thought, a wild, murderous fury built swiftly within him. Though he tried, he could not dismiss the idea. It was indeed possible that Tolliver had simply taken Reno’s money and then sold out to s
omeone else! It better not be, he told himself. It sure as hell better not be!
He roweled his horse furiously and swept on across the valley toward the low cluster of buildings until, lifting out of a long draw, Reno gained his first unobstructed view of the ranch yard and saw Tolliver and his wife, three ranch hands beside them, standing in front of the stable. They were shading their eyes to get a better look at Reno. Reno felt immense relief as he pulled his horse to a less frantic gallop. They had not sold out to someone else.
He was almost smiling when he rode into the yard. He was willing to pay extra for the stock Tolliver was still running on the land. He had more than enough in his saddlebags for that. More than enough.
As Reno pulled to a halt in front of the five people, he was smiling. “Howdy, Mrs. Tolliver ... Mr. Tolliver.” He touched his hat brim to the woman.
“Howdy, Conway,” Tolliver said curtly.
At once Reno sensed trouble. The foreman—his name was Hudson and Reno knew him from his last visit—was carrying a rifle as were the two hands standing beside him. And what looked like a brand new gunbelt was strapped about Tolliver’s midsection. A look at the woman told Reno everything: her eyes showed fear, something he now read in the faces of the others as well.
“We know who you are, Reno,” said Tolliver.
So that was it. Well, he wasn’t going to let it make any difference. A deal was a deal. Reno might be the devil himself, but Tolliver was going to have to honor the agreement he had made. And he wasn’t going to deal with him as he had with Harrington. Reno folded his hands over the pommel and leaned forward in his saddle.
“So you know who I am. What difference does that make?”
“I guess,” said Tolliver, his voice growing an edge to it, “that it don’t really matter much at that. But the thing is, we’ve decided not to sell.”
“The hell you have.”
Tolliver nodded unhappily. “It ain’t just because you’re Johnny Reno. We just decided we’d be fools to sell out now—what with the Canadian Pacific just finishing a spur to Red Deer. And since last winter, the price of beef has almost doubled. So now we got good access to markets and a decent price for our beef.”