“We’re going to find out,” said Spurlock.
The three women came out and got into the buck board.
“You drive, May,” said Sadie King. “Remember ole Mary and Pat ain’t as young as they used to be.”
Jeff, helping her up to the seat, discovered that she was carrying Bud’s double-barreled shotgun. An impulse urged him to take it away from her. Well, why should he? Anything that Sadie King did was going to be all right. She’d have hours to think things over before she got to Pioneer City. If she elected to shoot up the town no one who knew her—no one who had known her and Bud—would lift an eyebrow.
“You boys have been good,” she said. May slapped the reins and said “Git up,” and the buckboard went out of the yard with the horses at a lively trot.
Young Jeff and Ed Spurlock swung up into their saddle; and jogged along together another mile; there their trail: split.
“See you mañana, Jeff,” said Spurlock, and “Sure,” said Jeff and each headed homeward.
Jeff drifted along through the pines, his thoughts clouded. Arriving at his own place he unsaddled at the barn, watered Ranger and put him in his stall, gave him a once over in the way of a rub down, fed him and went on to the ranch house. It was a dark, long, squatty blot among the trees, an old Spanish adobe which had been home to him now for a dozen years, a place which he loved. The old Hernando place, some still called it, close to a hundred years old and as mellow as an old pipe. There was a quaint old-world patio, with the starlight glinting on scraggly shrubbery; a whisper ran through the still night, the faint rustling of a little wind through the pines blending with the sound of dripping water.
He entered immediately the big friendly living room and went unerringly to the silver-plated kerosene lamp on the long Spanish oak table. An amber light pulled the room out of the deeper darkness. He looked about him, at an old familiar scene with new eyes. He was thinking of Bart Warbuck’s taking over the Pioneer City Bank, all mortgages with it. Sentiment in a man, over a place like this, could get downright sentimental. That old carved mantel over the enormous fireplace—that set of tall candlesticks—the worn leather couch, even the grooves and scratches in the scantily rugged floor—There was a crash, a splintering of glass, and Young Jeff Cody leaped nimbly into a shadowy corner, his gun getting into his hand without his knowing it. Then he heard outside the hammering of a horse’s flying hoofs. The hoof-beats fled swiftly away into silence.
Startled, his first thought was that someone had shot at him. But there had been no sound of a shot. Briefly a heavy silence shut down; then there was a light patter of bare feet, and old Ah Wong, slant eyes brilliant, popped in.
“H’lo, Bossee Jeff’son,” he grunted. “What you do? Go clazy, smash window? Gittee dlunk, mebbeso? Oo-na-mah! Wha’ for?”
Jeff saw at last what it was that had broken his window and had rocketed into the room. He picked it up and stood staring at it. Old Ah Wong snatched it out of his hand. The narrow Oriental eyes gleamed.
“Somebody bling you heap nice pleasent, Bossee Jeff’son! Heap plenty gol’!—Wha’ for?”
“It’s a present I gave Bart Warbuck,” said Jeff. “And already he has sent it back. What for, Wong? Me no heap savvy.”
Chapter Six
The morning sunshine, playing Midas, made everything golden and gay at Los Robles Rancho, Young Jeff’s ranch among the oaks. Jeff, half dressed, came lounging like a lazy, half-asleep panther into the big living room. Ah Wong was here ahead of him, puttering stoically and with mild and philosophical profanity over a broken window-pane, having found a sheet of glass that didn’t quite fit in the storeroom.
“By’m by, plitty darn’ qlick, you ketchee squaw, Bossee Jeff’son,” he said.
“Walla malla, Heathen?” demanded Jeff. “Wha’ for?”
“Ketchee wi-hoo,” said Ah Wong.
“Wife?” said Jeff, and rumpled his already wild hair.
“You ketchee, Bossee. Good wi-hoo, she fixee window, she sweepee flo’, she cookee lilly bit. Ah Wong ketchee toe damn much workee al-leady.”
“Scatter some eggs in a pan and see what you can hatch out, Wong,” said Jeff. “Make the coffee as strong as a good mule’s right hindleg. Stack the batter-cakes high, ’cause I’m hungry. Then dodge down to the bunk house and tell Benny and Pete that I want to see them before they start up to the North End.—Where the hell are my boots anyhow?”
“Better so you ketchee two squaw,” grunted Ah Wong and departed.
Jeff looked around; he went to the nearest window and stood there a long while, looking out. He had always known he loved this place, always since the day his dad, good old Still Jeff, had said, “Kid, if you want it, take it,” and had started him out with the finest up-and-down little stock ranch a man ever heard about. Only today he knew how much he loved it. It had wrapped itself all up in his heart strings. And he didn’t know right now whether it was to be his or Bart Warbuck’s. His black eyebrows cocked up like devil’s horns.
“You come ketchee bleakfas’ kitchen,” sang out Ah Wong.
“No, in here, Wong.” Jeff came to, and went on getting dressed.
“Anyhow, come diney loom,” yelled Ah Wong.
“Here, damn you,” said Jeff. “Get a move on, or I’ll rip your belly open with a meat ax. Go tell Benny and Pete what I said.”
Ah Wong swore fluently in Chinese, then burst into his own peculiar rendition of a popular song:
“Two lilly gals in blue, Lad,
Two lilly gals in blue;
One yo’ mudder, I mally the odder,
An’ learn to love ’em due.”
“Better so you go ketchee wi-hoo,” grinned Ah Wong. “She cookee bettah bleakfas’. Plitty damn bad this time; me cookee lotten egg; washee clo’, puttee dirty soap water in coffee; no bacon, cookee lilly piece dead cat. Better so you ketchee nicee squaw.”
“Wong!” called Jeff, as though he had just thought of something. Wong, on his way out, stopped and turned. “There’s a nice river outside,” said Jeff. “Go jump in.”
Ah Wong crushed him with contemptuous silence and went shuffling out. Before he got to the back steps he was singing,
“One lilly gal in blue, Lad,
One lilly gal in blue,
You will look sweet, top-side the seat
On my bicycle built fo’ two.”
Jeff tied into his breakfast, one to hearten a man. A squaw? Heaven forbid. What earthly “squaw” could cook him a breakfast the way Ah Wong did? What earthly squaw could curse at him so steamingly, and leave him chuckling, in a sort of glad glow to be alive, the way Wong did? What earthly squaw, be she white or pink, black or yellow or golden brown, could run his house for him the way Wong did?
“I’ll raise that Chink’s wages,” he thought, expansive over the coffee and the general aroma. Then he made a wry face and said, “Like hell I will. By the time Bart Warbuck gets through with me—and the rest of us poor suckers up here on Wandering River—the best I can do is raise a cloud of dust getting somewhere else.”
But he had to think about that. Warbuck was going to all lengths to get what he wanted, an outright mountain kingdom, himself enthroned. To all lengths? Absolutely. No questioning that any longer. Indisputably, as Young Jeff saw it, he had walked forward on stepping stones that were at last crimson, wet with the blood of Charlie Carter and Bud King, wet with yet other blood. There was Bob Vetch killed six months ago. Who had killed him? Men could only shrug—yet they know that Bob Vetch, alive, had stood in Warbuck’s way, that Bob Vetch, dead, was out of his path.
Stepping stones wet with human blood; yes, that’s right, thought Young Jeff. Stepping stones like that got slippery, too—dangerous, especially when a man strode on as rapidly as Warbuck was striding.
“There are a good many things that want thinking over,” he meditated. “There’s old Charlie Carter
murdered yesterday. Why? Because he found gold at last? Then Warbuck knew; knew where the gold was, too, or he wouldn’t have killed Charlie until he did know. There’s Bud King wiped out. Why? Because he knew that the Long Valley gang had killed Charlie. There’s that infernal old Witch Woman; how did she know so much? Read it in her tea cup? Like thunder, she did! How does she tie in—or does she? There’s Warbuck all of a sudden trying to buy me, right after he has swallowed the Pioneer Bank. Why? Dammit, why? What can I do for him? And there’s that hunk of quartz fired back through my window! Just why? To tip me off that he knows where it came from, to whisper in my ear, ‘Watch your step, Jeff Cody, Junior.’ Then there’s that nifty little blonde Chrystine; looks like a baby but—but looks, too, like a young woman who knows what time of day it is. Slipping off on the q.t. to chin with Warbuck. ‘You damn little fool,’ he says to her. But he drags her in and slams the door. And she stays there quite a while. So where does she tie in? Warbuck just playing? Only Warbuck doesn’t just play. Then there’s—”
Pete and Benny, summoned by Ah Wong’s yeowlings, came in from the corrals. Pete, who had been born among horses, reared among horses and who still could draw breath only among horses, looked like a horse himself with his long face and round, astonished eyes; you’d have said that if a rag fluttered in front of him, he’d have taken the bit between his teeth and run away. Benny, young, half Indian and the other half an indeterminate something else, came slinking in at Pete’s heels like a wild thing.
“House afire, Jeff?” said Pete.
“Not yet,” said Jeff. “Squat, boys.”
They squatted, Pete at his ease, Benny looking like something trapped; Benny was always like that with four walls hemming him in.
“I’ve got some pretty nice ponies running around, think so, boys?” said Jeff.
“I’ve saw better,” grunted Pete. “I kin rec’lec’ when I was a kid, down Laredo way, when—”
“I know,” said Jeff. “Save the telling of it for your grandchildren, Pete. I’m thinking right now of the stock I’m sort of fond of; of Captain Kidd and Claude Duval and Lady Augusta; of Young Pat and Baby Mary and Redskin and Gay Girl and Highboy. I’m thinking—”
“Me, I know, too,” grumbled Pete. “You’re thinkin’ about Satin Slippers an’ Sweetheart an’ Molly-O an’—”
“I don’t want anything to happen to any of those horses, boys,” said Jeff.
Pete’s horse-eyes couldn’t very well grow any rounder; they took on a glassy look.
“Like what, Teff?” he demanded. “What could happen to them?”
“Somebody might run ’em off on a good dark night; somebody, hid up in the brush, might knock over a few of them with a Winchester. Lots of things could happen, Pete. Suppose you make it your business that nothing goes wrong. Day and night, you keep those horses safe.”
Pete and Benny looked at him staringly, swiftly at each other, back at him.
“What’s up, Jeff?” said Pete.
Jeff got up and went to the window, the one Ah Wong had been fixing.
“I don’t know, Pete. Maybe I’m just jumpy this morning. I do know that Bart Warbuck is set on doing him a sort of magnificent clean-up job; he’s making a grand stab to rake in every ranch in Long Valley and in Deer Valley and up here along the high end of Wandering River. Among other ranches he wants my place, and he’s half got it already. The more I lose out, the more Warbuck wins, savvy? And you know as well as I do the way Warbuck plays the game.” He turned stormily and said, “Dammit, I don’t know anything. You boys just do what I say. And get started doing it now!”
Benny was off like a shot; Pete, having pulled at a long lower lip, hunched up his shoulders and made his high-stepping, leisurely exit.
Young Jeff soon followed them out. He kept thinking of what he had told them: “Dammit, I don’t know anything.” Maybe a good solid day in the saddle, going places, would tell him something. Riding a favorite rough-country horse, a sturdy black four-year-old, he headed first for Charlie Carter’s cabin; from there he meant to ride in the general direction of Pioneer City, thinking of the various ranches within striking distance along the way where Bud King might have turned in a moment, where he might have had a word to say about Carter’s slaying.
Early as it was he found someone already before him, Still Jeff in a rattling old spring wagon, who had driven all the way up from dead Halcyon. Well, that was Still Jeff for you. When he had a thing on his mind he got busy about it; also, to him day and night were pretty much the same. If he had any place to go, he was just as likely to set out at midnight or two o’clock in the morning as any other time.
“Hi, Jeff,” he sang out cheerily. “Got to thinking about old Charlie’s dogs. I’m taking ’em home with me.”
The dogs, five of them, unquestionably mongrels yet with a strong dash of Shepherd in each and every one, were already renewing friendship with Still Jeff whom they hadn’t seen in six months, yet whom they remembered. Young Jeff grinned at the picture.
“Halcyon’s due to become populated again,” he said.
“Tell me about things; I ran into one of the Redding boys on the way up,” said Still Jeff.
Young Jeff told him all that he knew; of the happenings in town last night, of his calling with Ed Spurlock on Sadie King, of her departure for Pioneer City. Still Jeff pulled at his mustache and spat a time or two but had nothing to say. So presently Young Jeff helped him get the dogs into the wagon, tied for safety’s sake to the back of the seat, and left him.
As he had planned, he made a day of it. He rode more or less at random, there being no way to tell what trails Bud King might have followed if in truth he had been fleeing ahead of the Warbuck killers. He went that day almost as far as Halcyon, stopping only on the ridge running down from Monument Mountain from which he could see the deserted houses brooding in the still valley. From there he went back another way, and both going and coming he stopped at ranch houses along the way asking about Bud. No one had seen him yesterday.
Days ran by and nothing significant occurred. Men murmured; they got together in fields, at crossroads and in town, and were restless and angry and eager for some sort of an outbreak, but they did nothing. The younger ones and even some of the older hot-heads, were all for getting a crowd together and going out for Jim Ogden and those others who had boasted of having lynched Bud King. But those who saw farther ahead, or saw more clearly, stilled the incipient storm. A thing like that would start a small war that would rage up and down Deer Valley and Long Valley and all the course of Wandering River, and seep on into the mountains and down into the desert lands lying to the south; it would bring about many a man’s death, it would stir up bad blood that a whole generation could never cool—and it would leave Bart Warbuck where he now stood, on top of the heap.
“Keep your shirts on,” said those who in the end suppressed the rebellion. “And keep your eyes peeled. Something will pop one of these days that’ll give a man a chance to get his teeth in something solid.”
So they went about their business as usual and kept their guns loaded and handy, and for a time all was serene. But there were clouds on many faces which had been cheerful enough before. For soon it became widely known that Melvin of the Pioneer City Bank had sold out to Bar Warbuck—that Warbuck, ipso facto, held many and many a mortgage. Hitherto an old timer had but to ramble into town and have a talk with John Melvin. “Hell’s bells, John,” he’d say. “I haven’t got enough money to make a bullet big enough to kill a sick rabbit. So I reckon you got to wait.”
And John Melvin, knowing these men, would say, “Looks that way, don’t it? Well, come back and let’s talk about it in thirty days.” He had never lost a cent on a man of them and never would.
But now there was Warbuck to talk to. And Warbuck wanted the world, at least those several thousand acres of it from east of Deer Valley to west of Long Valley. He was willing eno
ugh to buy—at his own prices. What he liked to do was to get a man in the hole, then force him to sell. Men tried for once to plan definitely ahead, to meet their payments, and grew desperate in the attempt. They weren’t used to bookkeeping of any sort, especially that sort that set an exact sum for an equally exact date. Give ’em time they’d be all right; they always had been, hadn’t they? But—
Young Jeff, among others, tried to figure ways and means. There was no great rush; he ought to handle his trouble He could sell his string of stock, though fully two third of his young horses weren’t ready; he could dig in for the last cent of his reserve funds; he could find someone, somewhere, who would take over the tatters of the mortgage of Los Robles and give him a breathing spell.
There was Still Jeff, for instance. Still Jeff had said laconically, “I got some money, Jeff. Say how much and when.”
And old Red Shirt Bill, too, had known about things. “Come to me, Kid, when you want money.”
Young Jeff had said to himself, not to them, “Dammit, no! If Warbuck can lick me, let him lick me. I’m not going to those two old boys—God bless ’em.”
As time slid by he got to wondering: What about that gold which Charlie Carter had found? Now these foothills of the Tecolotes, though a cattle country of late, though there were signs that the valleys were going to become hay and grain country one of these days, had in the beginnings been a mining district. Witness old Halcyon that had once rollicked and frolicked and made noisily merry on the yellow stuff men had dug up out of the earth. Sure, there was gold in the Tecolotes and had always been and maybe always would be. And, if his chain of supposition was logical, Charlie Carter had found it—and Warbuck or his right hand man had come to know of Carter’s discovery—and so Carter was wiped out before he could either blab or get to work. So Warbuck knew where Charlie Carter got his gold.
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