The slamming echoes of that shot caused him to rein up the horses sharply, pulling around in the direction of the camp. His brows were pulled together with a stunned wonderment as to where and how he could have slipped up in his precautions, knowing as he did the resolve of self-destruction which had ruled Opal Waymire at the moment of their parting.
“Perris’s gold bullet,” he said finally, as understanding came to him. “I overlooked that. Never was sure whether that trinket was a dummy or not.”
He put the dun into a gallop, thrusting Opal Waymire and Duke Perris out of his mind. Rounding the bend in the narrow trail, he saw Alva’s face turned toward him from her position with her back to the lightning-struck spruce, a pencil of golden sunlight slanting off the rim-rock to put blue glints in her raven hair.
He pulled the horses in fast at the base of the snag and dismounted, tarrying only to rummage his saddlebag for the stockman’s knife he kept there. As the lariat parted under the thrusts of that razor-honed blade, Alva Ames fell forward against him.
Logan lifted his manacled wrists over her head and down behind her shoulders, pulling her hard against him. She spoke then, all her heart’s desire in her voice for him to claim.
“I love you dearly, Cleve. As long as I shall live you are mine to cherish and I am yours for whatever lies ahead.”
Their lips melted in the kiss that sealed the common destiny they would share throughout the future. They clung to this moment, savoring it hungrily, knowing that for them life would never hold another moment as magic as this one which found them standing together at the open door of their most secret dreams.
For these two, Logan’s ranch in the Blue Mountains would be the place which the children Alva would bear him would learn to know as the hills of home.
THE RENEGADE HILLS, by Allan K. Echols
Copyright © 1952 by Allan K. Echols.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
Jim Webster
Range detective hired by the local cattlemen to find out who was behind the outlaws that terrorized Northern Texas.
Swanson
Big cattleman. Realized the local authorities were helpless to stop the outlaws. Thought Webster’s guns would be better.
Dick Hammond
Young cowboy who worked for Swanson. His six-guns came in handy when Webster needed help badly.
Faulkner
Ran the local freight line. He worried too much about the lives of his men—and Webster got suspicious.
Austin
Weak-willed schemer who worked for Faulkner. Webster used his greediness as a means of getting information on Faulkner.
Flint
Big, burly wagon driver for Faulkner. A knock-down, drag-out fight with Webster gave him cause to seek revenge.
CHAPTER I
Meeting by Night
The big Concord stage had been jerking on its bullhide thorough braces for four solid hours without rest, the yellow wheels sinking into muddy potholes, bumping over the rocks of the half-graded trail, its floor boards bumping against bolsters, and the passengers bouncing on their horsehair seats like popcorn in a skillet.
Jim Webster had eaten a meal of beans and salt pork during the twenty-minute stop early in the morning, and now as the team pulled into Woodbine his body ached as though he had broken a dozen mustangs to the saddle. Spring showers had come and gone intermittently for the last two days, and now after dark, as the driver pulled the stage up in front of the hotel, it was raining hard.
Webster hauled his slicker on in the cramped confines of the stage while the other half dozen passengers piled out and ducked for the hotel, from whose roofed porch sheets of water poured noisily into the running gutter. The driver was already opening up the boot at the rear, and Webster pulled up the collar of his slicker, sloshed back through the mud and picked out his saddle and war-bag and threw them on the hotel porch. It was good to get his feet on solid ground again.
His high-crowned Stetson gave him the appearance of being even taller than his six-foot-two. Though Webster was just short of thirty, he had a strong mature set to his jaw, and the sun had etched crow’s feet around his serious gray eyes. Altogether, with his long face and square jaw, and his appearance of height, his lean build failed to suggest that he had as much weight as he actually carried in his broad, flat shoulders and long, muscular legs.
Jim picked up his warbag and saddle easily, and started toward the hotel door, when he noticed the man standing beside it, smoking and giving him an appraising glance. Trained in quick observance, Webster noted that he was younger than himself, that despite his windburned complexion, he was fair of skin and had a clear pair of blue eyes that seemed to quickly read all that appearances could tell him about Webster.
The younger man swung the screen door open and gave Webster a brief, impersonal smile as he approached, then drifted into the hotel lobby behind him. Webster signed for his room and started up the pine stairway; then something caused him to glance down at the lobby before passing on to the second floor. The young man was standing at the desk, idly looking at the register.
Webster threw his bag and saddle on the floor of his dingy room, hung his slicker over the back of a hickory chair and shucked out of his jacket and shirt, hanging his gunbelt on the bedpost. He had washed and was shaving when he heard a slight squeak behind him, and saw the handle of the door turning as quietly as its rusty mechanism would permit. He took two steps across the room and retrieved his gun as the door came open and the young man from the lobby stepped inside and closed it behind him.
His nerves on edge from the long, uncomfortable stage ride, Webster asked shortly, “Ever try knocking?”
The fair young man looked smilingly at the muzzle of the gun Webster was pointing at him.
“Generally do,” he grinned. “But I didn’t want to attract any attention this time. Webster, aren’t you?”
“Didn’t the register answer that question for you?”
“Tough, riding the stage line in this kind of weather,” the young man observed philosophically. “Gets on your nerves.”
“Is that what you busted in here to tell me, friend?”
“No. Name’s Hammond. Dick Hammond. Range boss of Swanson’s Double H. Now if you’re not Webster, I’ll trot along—”
“All right,” Webster answered. “I’m Webster and you’re Hammond, and what do you want?”
“Go on with your shaving. Then I’ll take you visiting. Swanson’s waiting for you.”
Webster jammed his gun back into the holster, still hanging from its belt on the bedpost.
“I was thinking of getting caught up with my sleep and hiring a horse and riding out first thing in the morning. Is he in a hurry?”
“Not particularly,” Hammond answered, seating himself on the edge of the bed and fishing for the makings. “It’s just that he wanted me to head you off. He doesn’t want you to show up on the ranch. He’s here in town. I’ll take you to him as soon as you’re ready.”
Webster said, “All right. There’s a bottle in the top of my warbag. Pour us a couple of drinks while I finish shaving.”
He turned back to the dresser and picked up his razor. Hammond poured a couple of drinks into two glasses while the razor made a scratching sound over the wiry stubble on Webster’s lathered face.
Webster studied him through the dresser mirror, and concluded that young Hammond was what he purported to be. The young man’s casual ease seemed to be a part of him, a natural self-confidence and a kind of quiet amusement at things in general. Webster felt a little impatient with himself for having been so suspicious of the man, but reminded himself of his mission here, and that there were those here who would be glad of a chance to kill him even before he saw Swanson.
He finished shaving and put on a clean shirt and jacket, then buckled his gunbelt around his waist and tied the tip of the ho
lster down to his leg with its rawhide pigging string. Then he picked up one of the glasses.
Hammond stood up, raised his glass and said, “Luck!” then when they had tossed off the drinks, added. “And you’ll need it, all right.”
“Very well,” said Webster. “Where do we go from here?”
“You wait until I’ve had time to get downstairs and across the street before you come down. Then you’ll see me pass under the lantern of the livery-stable door. You follow me, but not too closely.”
“That bad?”
“It could be. Swanson doesn’t want you seen with anybody connected with Double H.”
Webster shook the water off his yellow oilskin slicker and put it on. Hammond opened the door, looked up and down the dimly lighted hallway and slid out, closing the door behind him.
Then Webster took a jackknife out of his pocket, and opened it. He opened his slicker and ripped a slash through the oilskin just inside the pocket opening. He lifted the gun out of his holster and stuck it in his belt. Then he closed his slicker, rammed his right hand into the slicker pocket, through the rip, and grasped his gun handle.
It worked satisfactorily. He could walk down the street with his hands in his slicker pockets—and with his right hand on the handle of his gun.
After a few minutes he went downstairs and lingered in the shelter of the roofed hotel porch while he let his eyes sweep the muddy street. The rain had settled down to a steady drizzle, the water running off the porch roof in streams that splashed in the gutter. The road was a quagmire, with ruts filled to overflowing. A few doors away, a covered wagon was bogged down hub deep, and the team had been removed and taken away.
Most of the buildings were dark and almost invisible in the steady rain, but here and there lights shone dismally through windows. In front of two of the lighted buildings kerosene torches flickered over the doors, and farther down the street a lantern cast a yellow glow above the wide, black mouth of a livery-stable entrance. It was this entrance that Webster watched until he saw a man stop under the lantern, light a cigarette, and then move on.
Webster recognized Hammond’s black rubber slicker, and followed on down the plank walk, sometimes under an awning, sometimes exposed to the rain. The only other men he had seen on the street were two cowpunchers ducking out of the swing doors of one of the lighted places, running up a few doors and ducking into another. Saloons, both of them.
There was little chance of his being observed, Webster thought, but the caution he had developed in his business made him careful nonetheless, and he walked down the street without keeping his eyes on the man ahead of him. Passing the doors of the saloons, he noted that for such a night, when most everybody would have preferred to stay at home, the places were unusually crowded. For a town giving so little sign of animation, there were a lot of people awake.
Passing the wagonyard beside the livery stable, he saw that there were a dozen or more covered wagons lined up around its fence, and a good many horses and mules in the lot and under the shed beside it. There were still other camp outfits in the vacant lots alongside the wagonyard, where the wooden walk ended. Small as it was, this town seemed crowded, despite the emptiness of the rainswept street.
Jim stepped off the walk and began picking his way through the mud, having little success in avoiding puddles. And then Hammond came up out of the dark and was beside him.
Hammond’s sudden appearance made him grip his gun handle tighter, revealing to him how tense he had grown during the three-day trip into this northern strip of Texas, a section with which he was unfamiliar.
Hammond’s voice was still pleasant. “Sorry about all this mystery, Webster. It’s Swanson’s idea, but he’s right. This is one hell of a place; you can give a man a wrong look, and end up floating a thousand miles down Red River with a bullet hole in your back. There are men who might have killed you before you saw Swanson if they’d even seen you with me. That’s how touchy this dump is.”
“Must be a nervous town,” Webster growled, bowing his head to the rain. “What’s the trouble?”
“It’s only a short way,” Hammond evaded. “Swanson will tell you.”
They turned a corner and kept on past a row of dark houses, and after a hundred yards or so, Hammond took his arm and stopped him at a fenced yard, where he opened a picket gate and went in with Webster following.
The house was as dark as the rest, but at Hammond’s knock, a door opened, letting a little light seep out into the night, and they went in. The woman who had opened the door greeted them pleasantly, nodding to Webster and saying to Hammond, “Hello, Dick. You boys hang your slickers here in the hall. Eric is waiting for you.”
Then she turned a friendly look of curiosity on Webster and smiled as her glance measured him. She was perhaps in her early forties, but had taken care of herself; she was attractive and radiated a warm friendliness.
“Mrs. Halsell, this is Jim Webster,” Hammond said.
Webster took the hand she offered, and she said, “We were waiting for you. It’s a wonderful night out for ducks, isn’t it?”
More puzzled than ever, Webster acknowledged the introduction and followed the woman and Hammond into a larger, better-lighted room. He had only time to approve of its comfortable appearance, when his eyes settled on a man who had risen from a masculine kind of upholstered chair and was knocking the dottle out of his pipe.
Webster’s quick eye swept over a tall man in his fifties. He had thin sandy hair combed straight back and neatly trimmed; he wore a mustache clipped shorter than was generally worn in Texas, and his face was lean and bony, set with steel-blue eyes under bushy, yellow brows. His jaw was made of flat planes and his mouth was trim without being hard. Webster saw strength and responsibility written all over the man, and perhaps some coldness, as he approached.
Hammond said, “Mr. Swanson, this is Jim Webster.”
As they shook hands, Swanson’s mouth relaxed into a pleasant but reserved smile. “Glad to know you, Webster. We’ve been expecting you. Hope I didn’t inconvenience you, rushing you over here like this. You’ve met Mrs. Halsell?”
“Yes.”
The woman had come over and taken a chair near the man’s easy chair, and Webster studied the two of them together. There was at least a close association here, but he would have to wait to find out what it meant. Meantime, sizing Swanson up, he saw a man he judged fully capable of handling his own affairs, and this in itself gave him cause for a wonderment which he kept to himself while he waited for an explanation.
Swanson pointed to a chair with the stem of his pipe, and sat down and began stuffing it again with tobacco as Webster took his seat, each man still taking the measure of the other. Then Swanson opened a box of cigars, which Webster declined and began rolling a cigarette. Young Hammond, with the freedom of a man accustomed to the place, found a chair across the room and pulled it into the circle.
With an abruptness that surprised Webster, Swanson said, “You look like a man who could handle yourself, all right.”
“I’ve managed to stay alive,” Webster admitted, hiding an impatience which was mounting in him. He was not accustomed to doing business in a femininely branded living room full of people.
“That in itself is something,” Swanson said. “If half the stories I’ve heard about you are true.”
“You’d probably be safe in discounting most of them, I imagine,” said Jim.
Swanson said, “I’ll tell you the reason I had Dick meet you like this, rather than waiting until you came to the ranch. I thought that when you heard how things are, you’d prefer it that way yourself. I understand you’re quite a lone wolf and like to play your cards your own way. That’s all right with us if you decided to handle it that way.
“Now here’s our setup; our ranch, the Double H, is on the river about five miles from town at its nearest side. We’ve got five thousand acres
of fine grass under fence. Down in your part of Texas five thousand acres is not much land, but up here where the grass is thick, and where the land is fenced and cross-fenced for controlled grazing, a place of that size represents considerable investment. We do some breeding, of course, but we do a big turnover buying and selling. Indian Territory lies just across the river over there, and that is just about as lawless a country right now as you can find anywhere in the United States. Trail herds come up this way, headed for Kansas, and the trailers get cold feet. They haven’t got the money to keep going, or haven’t got the nerve to try to push a herd across Indian Territory, and so they sell to us. Some of them try to make it and lose their herds or their lives, or both. A few make it across the Territory, but it takes so many armed men to guard a herd of cattle going through, that not all of them want to take the chance.
“Well, whatever the reason, we buy quite a bit of stock from trailers. We fatten it up under fence, and we move it up into or through the Territory ourselves. We sell some to Indian Agencies, some to the railroads that are beginning to build down through the Territory, and some we push on to the railhead and ship up to Kansas City or Chicago.
“That is, that is what we used to do. But now we’re having about as poor luck as some of the smaller trailers did. We lose one herd after another. We hire more men, and they get killed. We plan our drives in secret, and start them off in the dead of night, and they hardly get across the river and into the mountains on the other side when a gang hits them and we have a few dead men on our hands and we’ve lost our cattle. It’s getting so that we’re afraid to push a cow across the river any more. So there we are; we can’t do business if we can’t drive our stuff to market, and if we do start it to market it doesn’t get there. There’s your problem. It’s just that simple. I sent for you to hire you to stop it.”
Mrs. Halsell and Hammond had to laugh, and even Webster and Swanson smiled. “Simple enough,” Webster said dryly. “Just stop it. Why hasn’t your law stopped it? You’ve got law here, haven’t you?”
The Fifth Western Novel Page 20