“You mean he lets a bookkeeper in on all this business? Bookkeepers have mouths; they can talk. You know?”
“Not this one. See that little gray mouse of a man at Faulkner’s? He’s the bookkeeper. Used to be bookkeeper for Faulkner in a bank or something, and went to prison for letting money stick to his hands. Faulkner has got him over a barrel. His tongue just ain’t, on a deal like this, because he’s in on it.”
They came to the storeroom and dismounted, and Dustin led Webster through the back room, the room from which he had heard the music coming on the night he was there. He saw now what this part of the place was.
It was a kind of social hall and barroom combined. There was a short pine bar at one corner, with a few whiskey bottles sitting on a shelf behind it. There were several tables and chairs, and poker chips and cards, and in one corner he saw a fiddle case and guitar case.
Now there were no more than a half dozen men in it—and three women. They all looked at him with suspicious glances as he followed Dustin through the room, and on through a door to a storeroom.
At the door Dustin turned and spoke to one of the men. “Joe, get all the boys in here, will you? I’ve got something to tell them. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes.”
Then Dustin closed the door behind him, and he and Webster went through the store. It was stuffed with merchandise of every description. Cases of hardware, saddles and leather harness, horse collars, kegs of nails and horseshoes, boxes whose tops had been ripped off to reveal contents of hammers and carpenters’ tools of all kinds. There were bales of bedding, blankets and quilts, mattresses and bedsteads, cookstoves beating stoves, and kitchen utensils.
And a pile of new plow points!
This was the stuff pioneers needed, typical goods that would be pouring up into the Territory in the wagons of traders. Stuff that the thieves could resell anywhere.
“Why have you got so much of this lying around for?” Webster asked.
“Same answer as the question about the cows. You can’t unload too much of it at a time on the stores that buy from us. You’ve got to give them time to sell it before you give them more.”
“Why?”
Dustin looked puzzled. “Well, the stores don’t want to buy too much ahead. So we can’t sell it as fast as we get it. Why did you ask a question like that?”
“I was just wondering.”
“About what?”
“About why you let this stuff lie around when you can be converting it into money.”
“I told you why. You think you could convert it into money any faster than we do?”
“Sure. It’s stuff, isn’t it? Then it could be sold if you know how to do it.”
“Do you?”
“Sure.”
“All right, how about us seeing you do it?”
“That’s just what I’m here for.”
“When?”
“Starting tomorrow. If your boys are here, suppose we go and meet them.”
They went back into the room which seemed to have been provided as a community recreation center. Now the men had gathered from the various cabins, and were sitting around on the benches and hickory chairs. There were three or four frowzy camp girls with them, clinging to their men of the moment, and they all watched Dustin and Webster with frankly curious looks.
Dustin wore his perpetual smile, but Webster sensed that there was a kind of secret and nervous amusement in it now, as though the man were getting ready to play some kind of trick.
“Boys,” Dustin said, “This is your new boss. Have a good look at him, and from now on, do just what he tells you to do. He’s full of cockleburrs and hard to curry, and he don’t like to take no for an answer. He says he’s going to make us all rich. He’s going to show us how you really ought to run a deal like this. So, he’s the big he-wolf from now on. His name is Jim Webster, and it’s now all his show. Take it, Webster.”
It was evident now what Dustin had been thinking; he was throwing Webster to the boys with a bad reputation, making him sound like a boastful windbag, thus putting him at a disadvantage from the beginning.
Webster knew that Dustin’s move would be successful; the men would take an instant dislike to a man who had built himself up as tough and boastful, and this, apparently, was Dustin’s way of fighting for his own leadership—putting Webster in such a light that he could not get the mastery of the gang.
Webster looked the bandits over one by one, giving each a long appraising stare. He saw Ike Flint back in a corner, trying to be inconspicuous. At the near corner he recognized the second guard he had overcome on the night of his explorations; the man still wore the marks of the fight on his face. He stood at the bar toying with a tin cup of whiskey, and avoided Webster’s gaze.
“I’ll tell you about what Dustin was saying,” he said to the whole room. “I’m in on this party to get what I can out of it. I reckon you men are in it for the same reason. I’ve been around a little, and I’ve picked up a couple of bits of information that might possibly have some truth in them. One of them is that money doesn’t grow on trees; the other is that there hardly ever seems to be more than twenty-four and a fraction hours a day here in this country. Since you’ve got to make money instead of picking it off of trees, and since you’ve only got so much time every day to do it in, I’m one of those guys that likes to use that time getting what I want. There’s another thing I heard that might have some truth it in. A fellow told me once that a straight line was the nearest distance between two points. Right or wrong, I kind of liked that idea, so I’ve got in the habit of going after what I want in a straight line. Saves time; know what I mean?
“So there it is; I’m running this shindig from now till I’m not running it any more. And if there’s anybody that don’t want to go along with what I tell him to do, it’s time to make a straight line up to me and speak his piece. Once we get moving, I won’t be having any time for arguments.”
A deep silence fell over the room at Webster’s challenge. And after a moment Jim saw the man at the bar turn his swollen face toward him, set his tin cup down and approach.
“This is the guy they call Snake-eyes,” Dustin said. “He seems to want a word with you.”
Webster knew by the increased silence in the room that the crowd was prepared for something; they knew Snake-eyes, and they must have anticipated that something was coming up. It was this sudden tense expectancy that alerted Webster.
The man stopped six or eight feet from Webster and stood poised with his fists on his hips, a few inches above the pair of guns he was wearing. Snake-eyes was a lean man of average height, with a droopy, stained yellow mustache and slate eyes that seemed filmed over, so that you read only sadness—or maybe it was malevolence in them. One of the eyebrows was so puffed out that the eye was hardly visible.
“What’s on your mind, mister?” Webster asked.
“Ever see me before?”
“Yeah, sure. You were one of the boys who were trying to keep me out of here the other night. You shouldn’t have done it.”
“You didn’t wait to explain yourself. You just jumped me. Fell out of a tree on top of me.”
“Yeah. While you were asleep. You were put out there to see that nobody got through. Do you know what you were doing? You were risking the lives of every man in this room by going to sleep. In the army they shoot men for going to sleep on guard duty. A whole army could have come in here and killed off every man in here—just because you laid down on your job.”
While he talked to the man, he was trying to sense what effect his own speech had on the rest of them. Snake-eyes had stuck his neck out by bringing up the subject, and Webster had instantly seized on it to prove to the rest of them that he knew what he was doing, and could think faster than the rest of them. He was trying also to turn the tide of sympathy from Snake-eyes to himself by showing the rest of them how he had jeopard
ized their own safety.
And still further, he was baiting Snake-eyes, trying to make him lose that stolid, impassive, secretive attitude and reveal what he had in his mind.
Snake-eyes licked his lips and shuffled his feet, and the latter movement was not lost on Webster. He shuffled his own feet slightly.
“I was saying,” Snake-eyes said softly, “that you jumped me from behind.”
“Not from behind; from above.”
“Yeah. What’s the difference? I don’t like men to jump me from behind. See my face?”
“Yeah,” Webster answered shortly. “It ought to teach you never to go to sleep on guard duty. Some of your friends might take a notion to mark up more than your face for flirting with their safety like that.”
Snake-eyes was adamant; he was a man of a single purpose. He was new here, having gained admission to the group by reason of his reputation as a lightning-fast and icicle-cold gunman. He was the executioner, now doing a personal job.
“I don’t like my face marked up like this.”
“Is that a fact?” returned Webster, giving a surprised lift to his eyebrows. “You should have told me.”
“I’m telling you now. We don’t like to get roughed up. Me, nor nobody else. Flint don’t like it, either. Look at Flint’s face. See him?”
Snake-eyes pointed across the room toward where Flint was sitting, behind Webster and to his left. “You see what Flint’s going to do about it, don’t you?”
Webster turned his gaze slowly in Flint’s direction—and jerked it back instantly, his hand whipping out his gun. The weapon exploded before Snake-eyes got his sneak draw half completed.
Snake-eyes bowed his head gently, his arms hung lax at his sides as his weapons dribbled on the floor. Then his knees bent and he dropped into a prayerful position for a moment before he fell over on his side with Webster’s bullet square through his heart.
One of the camp women screamed, gray smoke floated in a thin layer shoulder high in the air, billowing gently like a wispy blanket. A man’s cough sounded explosively in the silence. The sunshine slanting through the window on the form of Snake-eyes sleeping on his side on the dirty floor, and Webster backed up against the wall and met the combined gaze of the stunned men who comprised his outlaw crew.
“Anybody else? You’ll have to come up with a slicker trick than that.”
There was no answer.
Dustin grinned at Webster. “It looks like you’re the top dog, all right. The man shouldn’t have been so touchy about his beauty.”
Webster was wondering; the thought had occurred to him at the beginning of the trouble that Snake-eyes might not have started this business altogether because of the whipping he had taken. There was something fishy about the whole thing, to his way of thinking. Dustin’s secret amusement, Flint sitting back there in the corner like a buzzard waiting for a calf to die, and—the thought struck him with sudden warning—the fact that Dustin did nothing to stop the fight.
Dustin had been warned that if Webster died, the evidence which Jim had gathered against him and Faulkner would be brought out into the open; Webster had even pointed out to Dustin that his own neck would be in jeopardy if he—Webster—died.
Then why had Dustin ignored that warning, and permitted the fight to go on?
Webster filed this in the back of his mind for further thought, and turned his attention back to the group which sat silently in the big pine room, waiting for his next move.
“How many men have you got, altogether?” he asked Dustin.
“About sixteen—that is, fifteen, now that Snake-eyes is no longer of much use to us. And there are six more in the sawmill crew.”
“Are they in on this business?”
“They know about it, and we get a little help from them when we need it. They are there for a blind, but a profitable one. Leave that to Faulkner. Selling ties and bridge timber makes him money legitimately, but the important thing is the contacts we make with contractors through that business.”
“How many wagons and teams can you round up?”
“Maybe six or eight.”
“All right,” Webster said to the whole room. “Let’s get going. Here’s what we’re going to do; I want all wagons pulled up to the warehouse; load up every bit of that merchandise. I want all those cattle rounded up and ready to go. We’re pulling out of here during the night. That won’t give you much time to get ready, but we can make it. I want everything out of here and down on the prairie by daylight.”
That order caused a buzz in the place. Dustin looked at him blankly for a moment, then asked, “What’s the hurry?”
“What did I tell you a while ago?” Webster returned. “That stuff is merchandise and we’re going out and exchange it for spending money. Like I told you, you can’t make money loafing around.”
“But I told you that you can’t sell it any faster than the buyers can use it.”
“That’s what you think,” Webster said. “You and Faulkner wanted to see how I do business, now you’re going to see just that.”
One of the men came up and joined them, and Dustin said, “This is Merle Tate. He’s a kind of strawboss, same as Flint.”
“That reminds me,” Webster said. He called to Flint. “Ike, you and the man sitting next to you come up here and get Snake-eyes and take him out and bury him.”
Flint did not move, but answered across the room. “Let the stinker rot. He’d have got us killed, sleeping on the job. He don’t deserve burying.”
Webster raised his voice for the first time. It had command in it; it was filled with anger and warning. “I said for you and that other man to do this burying job. Snake-eyes might have been a mighty poor man, but he was human, and a human deserves a burial. And if I still haven’t convinced you that I’m running this show, you’ll get a burial yourself. You want to find out?”
There was a long silence while Flint lost his battle with Webster. His face filled with hatred, he got up from his chair and said to the other man, “Come on, Tige.”
Webster turned back to Dustin and the strawboss. “Get all that merchandise loaded into the wagons, and get the cattle ready to go. I want all hands armed, and all of them along. We might need them. Now, Merle, what was on your mind?”
“I’m not refusing to go along with what you say, but here’s what I’m thinking. Six or eight stolen wagons of stolen merchandise, and seven or eight hundred stolen cows makes a mighty big parade. Don’t you think somebody might get wise to us? As a matter of fact, how could they keep from it?”
“He’s got a point there,” Dustin said.
“Yeah,” Webster said. “That’s the kind of thinking that has been going on around here all along. It’s changed now. How’s this for a piece of reasoning; don’t you realize that people have known for a long time that these hills were full of thieves? And don’t you know that they are afraid of the men out of these hills? Of course the people we do business with know we’re thieves. But they’ve known that all along. And who do you think is going to ride up to a troop of sixteen or seventeen armed outlaws and call them thieves? How many stray deputies would tackle us if they wanted to do something about it? And what chance would a posse have against us? Are we as good fighters as a bunch of farmers and ranchers and storekeepers, or are we afraid of them?”
Dustin shook his head in wonderment. “By God, Webster, where does this thing end? Are you going to keep on getting more and more brazen until we all stretch a rope?”
Webster laughed at him. “People like us usually do end up above the crowd, don’t we? Either on a gallows or the limb of a tree. What’s the matter? Did you think thievery didn’t have any element of chance in it when you decided on your career?”
Dustin slapped the wall angrily. “Aw, go to hell. I’ll face as much lead as you do, any time, night or day.”
“Then stop squ
awking, and show me the list of all your regular customers. Merle, get the men moving.”
The men weren’t sure whether they wanted to move or not. Webster watched them argue with Merle Tate as he went among them. Then he slapped the wall loudly, and shouted.
“God damn it, I told you men to get going! Now move, or I’ll move you!”
They moved. Reluctantly. But they moved.
CHAPTER XIV
Forced Sale
It was near midnight, and a new sickle moon hung over the mountains. In and around the grove which concealed the hidden settlement high in the mountains there was a continuous state of confusion. The cattle were being tight-herded near the concealed sawmill entrance. A small group of cursing men were finishing the job of loading the wagons in the light of a few kerosene lanterns, each wagon being run through the lean-to shed and out into the open space around the sawmill, where the drivers sat in their seats and waited nervously for the big parade to get moving.
The bandits were tense under their quiet sullenness, for none of them had ever seen or imagined an enterprise like this before in their long experience in the profession of thievery. Not having been informed of Webster’s plan in detail, they were almost unanimous in considering it both a waste of time and dangerous. Some were even inclined to believe that it was an elaborately staged plan against themselves. But, remembering Snake-eyes, none of them felt inclined to face Webster and voice his objections.
They knew about Flint’s fight with Webster. They had seen the new boss handle Snake-eyes, and they were convinced that they had a leader who knew what he wanted and had the guts to get it. They had worked all the afternoon and half the night under the whiplash of his tongue, and they had seen that he was a man who got things done.
Even the women were grumbling. Girls who had chosen a life of idleness, picking up their living from men who were pleased to feed and clothe them, they had, by virtue of having no competition, reigned practically as queens here in the high valley ranch.
But they had awakened to a new fact in their lives a little before sundown. The four women had been sitting in the recreation room, drinking and talking while the men were working furiously to get the drive started.
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