Gunsmoke Justice

by Louis Trimble

  “Your father’s dead?” Brad asked.

  “Three years,” she said. Her voice quickened. “He helped Ike Quarles get a start. And until Jim Parker came there was no trouble. Quarles seemed content to do as the rest of us — run only as much stock as we could cut native hay for.”

  She stood up abruptly. “But my troubles shouldn’t concern you. I’m sorry.”

  “Unless I work for you,” Brad said quietly.

  “Then you’ll only be asked to do what you were hired for.”

  “If I work for anyone,” he said firmly, “their troubles come first. I told McFee I’d work whole hog or not at all.”

  “I want men to fight Ike Quarles,” she blurted out. “I want men who can match the hardcases he’s brought in here. My men are soft; they aren’t fighters. I can’t ask them to fight.”

  That, Brad thought, was a funny way to look at it. If a man worked for a spread, that spread was his home and he should be willing to fight for it as such.

  “Have you tried?” he asked.

  She gave a light, quick shrug. “My foreman has questioned them. He’s a good boss and he knows men. They’re just punchers and no more.” She paused adding, “No, I want men to fight.”

  “And what does Quarles want that’s worth fighting for?” Brad demanded.

  She led him to the side veranda and pointed to the sweep of fields visible through the hovering poplars. “Jim Parker came in here from the east,” she began, “carrying a satchel full of books. We were running as many head as our winterfeed would carry. He showed us how we could get water to the land and grow alfalfa. That was four years ago, and those of us on the river and the ranches across where the creeks are heavy and run all year followed his example.”

  She pointed to the north. “That first ranch is Biddle’s. He’s Quarles’ bootlicker.” Her voice deepened with scorn. “Quarles is one place beyond him; his homestead runs also to the mountains and he put his cattle in the first canyons, pre-empting the land there. The river comes out of those mountains and reaches Quarles first. It drops from his north boundary to the level you see below.”

  The pattern came back to Brad. The world was no different on this side of the mountains. The grass was the same on one bank of a creek as on another. Men were cut of a stamp and he had found hogs from Texas to Washington.

  “So,” he said, “Quarles cuts off the water before it gets to you. With a dam?”

  “Nothing so obvious,” she explained. “The river is formed by two feeder creeks. This is odd country. The water goes underground and joins and comes out in a big spring to start the Sawhorse. Quarles and Biddle have filed water rights on the feeder creeks. Jim Parker says that we can fight them by proving that the creeks are the source of the river.”

  “I see,” Brad said. “But by the time the Government gets through in the courts, you won’t have hay or stock.”

  “Or land,” she amended. Her face softened as she looked at the fields and at the bunch grass graze visible from where they stood. “I was born on this land. It holds my mother and father. I don’t want Ike Quarles to have it — to dirty it.”

  She shook herself. “But I can’t appeal to you that way. It isn’t fair.”

  “You can tell me some more,” Brad said. “How does filing a water right give Quarles all the water?”

  “He’s diverted the feeder creeks,” she explained. “He had a fortunate shale slide that boxed in a canyon and created him a reservoir. All the water we get is that coming from the creeks like this one by the house. Most of them are summer dry.”

  “There’s enough water for everybody?”

  “More than enough. The north mountains are heavy with snow in the winter, and snow lies all year in some of the canyons.”

  “Water and land for everybody,” Brad mused. He put out a hand as if reaching to feel the dirt. “It’s good country.” He looked down at June Grant, at the mingled despair and hope in her eyes. He made his decision. “It’s worth fighting for.”

  Her smile was like the first sun that was starting to top the eastern mountains. And then it was gone. “If — if we lose, I can’t do more than bury you.”

  He understood her meaning. “We’ll ask no more,” he said.

  She turned away, walking quickly, purposefully now. “I’ll let you meet the men.”

  “This Jim Parker,” Brad said, “is he your partner?”

  She looked back at him unsmilingly. “He’ll be my boss it we get through this. No, Jim owns the upper end of the valley. He has less water than any of us.”

  “But more savvy?” Brad said, remembering what Faith McFee had told him. “So Quarles tried to run him out.”

  “I can’t thank you for what you did yesterday,” she said.

  Her voice told him what she felt toward Jim Parker. He envied the man for having a woman like this. He untied his horse, saw that Olaf was doing well, and followed her toward the rear.

  The men were scattered and out of sight, but she found the one she looked for in the bunkhouse. Studiously observing the rules of a ranch, she stopped, not going in.

  “Dave,” she called. When a man ducked out of the doorway, she motioned to Brad and Olaf. “Here are the new men, Dave. I’ll leave you to finish explaining to them.” Her smile for him was warm, but with no great depth. “The men will be listening for breakfast.”

  She started off, and then turned. “I have a lot of faith in Dave,” she told Brad.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AFTER June Grant had left them, Brad and Olaf followed Arden into the bunkhouse. It was a neat place, but no neater than the average man would want it. There was no sign of a woman’s hand, no frills at the windows, no fancy cloth on the table that sat under the hanging center lamp. Brad had seen that kind of thing on a woman-run ranch; he was glad to find that June Grant had more sense.

  The bunks were near the front with an open space at the rear. Near one side wall was the large heating stove flanked by the big table and a half dozen chairs. Brad walked past Arden and sat down; Olaf followed him.

  Looking at Arden, Brad tried to reserve his judgment. He was a quick man when it came to making decisions, but now he tried to curb himself. Prepared to like Arden, to work with him in this fight, it bothered Brad to find that he could not feel the same trust in the foreman as June Grant evidently did. It was not anything he could put his finger on — Arden was amiable, smiling, a relaxed man who looked sure of himself. But the doubt was there inside Brad, not a positive distrust or dislike, but simply a lack of feeling. He could not feel drawn to Arden as he had expected.

  Now he said probingly, “How strong are we here?”

  Arden was standing relaxed with one hip against the edge of a bunk. He made and lighted a cigarette and then snapped the burned match between his fingers. He was no longer smiling.

  “As strong as that,” he said, and tossed the match out the open doorway.

  Brad waited, letting Arden carry the talk, only speaking to ask a question. The men, Arden said, were of little use. There were Andy Toll and Jake Bannon and Nate Krouse. They were punchers and good enough at their jobs, but good only for those jobs. He had the same opinion of Jim Parker. A man who read too much and was no fighter for this kind of war.

  Privately, Brad didn’t agree with that. What he remembered of Parker had given him a different opinion. But it was only opinion, so he didn’t push the matter.

  When Arden turned to talking of Quarles, his voice flattened out with hopelessness. As though, Brad thought, he had about decided to give up but wouldn’t say so in words. Quarles was planning to make this his big year, according to Arden, and ruin both the Split S and Parker before an injunction could force him to give up the water. Arden admitted that the Split S would have nowhere near enough hay to feed the stock through the winter. For June Grant that would mean selling all but a handful of beef at a loss. It would mean, too, that she could not meet in full her notes due at the Spokane Falls bank.

  Brad shaped up a ciga
rette and struck a match. Blowing out the flame with a puff of smoke, he said, “What’s Quarles showing in the open?”

  “He’s got the water tied up,” Arden said.

  Brad brushed the statement aside. “Until you get an injunction, that’s legal,” he said. “You say he’s pushing the Split S. I’ve seen him rough Parker, but that’s a different thing.”

  Arden moved reluctantly away from the bunk. “It’s a hard thing to pin down, Jordan.” He shook his head. “Quarles doesn’t push June much in the open.” He took a moment to flip his cigarette onto the packed, bare ground in front of the bunkhouse door, and then turned toward Brad again. “Just one thing,” he added.

  “Tell it,” Brad said. He spoke more harshly than he intended. But if a man had something to say, he liked him to say it.

  Arden shrugged. “It might not be much.”

  And it might be a lot, Brad thought as he listened. Arden explained that at the edge of the timber where it folded into the sage hills June Grant’s father had located a fine-grassed canyon where he fattened his best stock. It was open range and belonged to him only by right of long usage. This spring Biddle and Quarles had moved in seventy or eighty head of their own prime stuff into Pine Canyon, putting the Split S back on the scantier range in the open. June had gone to Quarles with a complaint.

  “He told her it was open range,” Arden went on, “and said we were welcome to run his beef out if we could.”

  Brad nodded his understanding. It was a challenge June Grant was too weak to accept. In a way Arden was right — it wasn’t too much to argue about. Open range was open range, and in a country as raw as this, the right of usage wouldn’t have too much meaning.

  “Even so,” he said aloud, “why hasn’t McFee helped?”

  Arden’s laugh was almost ugly. “McFee’s town marshal. There’s no law in the valley outside his town. No law but this.” He slapped his gun.

  “If that’s the law,” Brad said, “then we can use it as well as Quarles.”

  “We haven’t the strength,” Arden objected. “What are we against Quarles and Biddle?”

  “We’re no more than we want to be,” Brad said. This man bothered him even more than he had at first. Signaling to Olaf, he started for the door.

  “When you’re ready to do something, let us know,” he told Arden.

  Leaving the foreman, Brad and Olaf went up to the house and entered. “Olaf and me will be at his homestead,” Brad told June Grant. “There’s work for us there and, until we can do something here, there’s no call for all the extra feeding we’d mean to you.”

  June Grant looked thoughtfully in the direction of her hayfields. “It will have to be soon,” she said slowly. “I can’t hold out much longer.” She paused and added, “I’ll have a man come for you when Dave is ready.”

  It was on Brad’s lips to ask why Arden had to wait any longer. But he stopped himself. He knew little of these people. It was not his place to work on June Grant’s faith in her foreman.

  He said, instead, “We’ll take a boundary sashay on the way home, then,” and left.

  As they rode, he tried to piece together what he had learned so that it would make a coherent pattern. But there was too little to work with as yet. He had seen Quarles’ kind many times. Some were slick men, and some depended on force to get what they wanted. But in every case Brad had never found a solution except to meet force with force. This was the only law certain types of men recognized.

  He drew rein now on a high knoll that gave him a sweeping view of the valley. In the distance he could see Sawhorse Falls as a faint cluster of ugliness on the brown face of the flats. He remembered again McFee’s position in all of this, and he wondered at a man who could draw himself into his own tight little world and let that around him shatter into pieces.

  Olaf was looking, too. He caught Brad’s eye and nodded understandingly. “It’s a good land,” he said.

  “Good land,” Brad agreed. “It could be a good place to live.”

  “Yah,” Olaf said. And Brad knew that he would stick, no matter how tough the fighting got.

  They reined around and rode on into the hills.

  • • •

  Arden watched Brad and Olaf ride off and when the first rise to the west had blotted them from sight, then he walked purposefully to the house.

  June Grant was in her kitchen, getting ready for the noon meal. Arden beckoned to her, and she stepped to the comparative coolness of the side veranda.

  “What made you hire a man like that?” he demanded.

  Her eyes widened and a faint flush tinged her cheeks. “I hope to save my hay,” she said briefly, “and my stock.”

  “Fight fire with fire,” he murmured. His smile for her was warming, asking for inclusion in her troubles. “You’ve made the decision, then.”

  Sometimes Dave took too much for granted, June thought, but she could not help being drawn by him. With her love for Jim Parker, she saw Arden only as a trusted friend. There was always a faint sense of warning when she felt his smile, but she put it down to a natural suspicion of anyone born with such easy charm.

  “The decision was to be yours, Dave,” she said. “But if you’d rather not — ”

  She left it there, and he looked down at her, smiling crookedly. “Hinting I might be afraid, June?”

  “Or not think it wise.”

  “I don’t,” he admitted. “Quarles is too strong.”

  “He’s not getting any weaker,” she pointed out. “Is there any other way?”

  Arden considered this while he took the time to roll a cigarette. He lifted it to his mouth and licked the paper. His eyes met hers. “No,” he said, with complete honesty, “there’s no other way.”

  “Then,” she said with quick logic, “I couldn’t do better than to hire a man like Jordan.”

  He laughed at her triumphant expression. “Putting it that way, you win.” He touched a match to his cigarette. “Right now I’d better get to town and see to the supplies we ordered.”

  “That’s right,” she agreed. He was nearly down the steps when she called to him. “Act quickly, Dave. I think Jordan is a restless kind of man.”

  “Quickly, quickly,” he muttered as he went to the corral for his horse. Give him two months and an army of Jordans could not do anything.

  Going to the hayfields, he stopped and looked carefully at the plants. Not even two months. Unless there came a rare summer rain heavy enough to soak into the ground, six weeks would see the end of this crop. The sand here was deep and dry. Hay took a lot of moisture to stay alive through a desert summer; it needed even more to grow strong. The first cutting should be nearly ready now, he realized. Last year they had cut hay just at this time. But it had been put off this year, hoping for more growth. Well, they would have to cut, but there would be little more than stubble. There wasn’t hay enough to feed more than a handful of the stock June needed to get through the winter.

  He started on again, the hoofs of his horse thudding sullenly across the bridge. Arden looked down at the riverbed and frowned a little. The trickle of water in it wasn’t enough to hold a small fish. And though he realized the necessity of this for his own plans, he had enough love of the soil in his nature to regret it for the moment.

  At the turn he looked back, and he could see faintly two dots on the farthest bare bench. Jordan and Hegstrom, he thought, and his frown turned from regret to anger.

  In Jordan he saw clearly a potential threat. Until now there had been no man in the valley with the driving strength necessary even to challenge Quarles’ self-assumed leadership. One man might not seem like much, Arden thought, but it was in that very fact that the danger lay. If Quarles were fool enough to push aside the threat of a man like Jordan, Arden knew that Quarles might find himself against a wall before he realized it.

  But it wasn’t Quarles Arden worried about too much. Quarles had the power and the strength to handle Jordan if he awoke to his danger soon enough. It was for h
imself that Arden’s anger turned on Jordan. He sensed in the other man a shrewdness that would force him to move more carefully. Until now, he had had it easy at the Split S; he warned himself to go more carefully.

  As he rode along his anger turned to worry, and from it came a plan that took form and shape and strength. It was beautiful in its simplicity. He was Jordan’s boss, wasn’t he? What could be simpler than to give Jordan an order no man could live through? After all, wasn’t Jordan’s purpose to fight openly against Quarles?

  Smiling suddenly, Arden hurried his horse. Nothing could be simpler. Nothing could be safer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I LIKE TO GET the feel of the country,” Brad said to Olaf.

  They mounted the last bare bench, following a northwest trail, and the edge of the timber was just beyond them. Nearby, in a meadow, a few head of cattle grazed. They had the Split S brand on them, so he knew he was still on home range. Farther along and below them there was a thin razorback hill with a crest of scrub timber. It looked like a natural dividing line, and when Brad could see beyond it, the idea was confirmed. Cattle now carried Nick Biddle’s odd-looking Sawhorse brand. Along with them were a few head of the Double Q.

  Brad pointed out the brands to Olaf, making sure he understood their meaning. He cut due west into the timber and then along a trail that ran slightly south in its general direction. “This is all open range,” he explained, “and if Grant was on it first, he’s got more rights than Biddle.”

  He was hunting for Pine Canyon and when he found it, marked as it was by two tall ponderosas standing like sentinels at the narrow mouth, he looked back and judged he was well south of the razorback that separated Biddle from June Grant.

  “But rights don’t count,” he told Olaf, and pointed to the Sawhorse beef grazing on the belly-deep grass.

  He looked admiringly at the canyon. This was a place to put a man’s best cattle, right enough. There was water from a creek that roiled along one canyon wall, and grass deep and rich enough to keep any cow happy. It was cool in here with the high, partly timbered sides shutting out the sunlight at this hour of the day, but a notch near the end showed him where it would come in warmly in the afternoons.