He never remembered when the wind fell. He had been struggling on, breaking trail for his horse for what seemed an interminable period, and suddenly he realized the snow was no longer blowing so much, the wind was dying down. Before him lay miles of white, unbroken snow. The trail of the stolen cattle lay under it.
He plodded on, holding a hand over his nose, trying to keep his scarf across his face. Once again the horse fell, slipping on an icy rock beneath the snow, and again Conagher got it up. Now he could see the low black line of the hills, with a star hanging low in the sky.
A star? No, it was a light. It had to be a light, as low as that. He closed his eyes, took two steps forward and opened them. The light was still there. He was not dreaming.
Evie was serving hot soup to the children when something fell against the door. Putting the soup down hastily, she went to the door, hesitated a moment, then opened it.
A snow-blurred, half-frozen man toppled into the room, fell to his knees, then struggled up.
“My horse,” he mumbled, “my horse is out there.”
“I’ll get him,” Laban said, and went for his coat and mittens. “I’ll put him up.”
“You’d better have some soup,” Evie said practically, and guided him to a place on a bench, not bothering to remove his outer clothing. Let him get warm first. Her floor had been wet from melting snow before this, and on a dirt floor it would be a trouble only briefly.
She put soup into a bowl and spooned some of it into his mouth. After about the third spoonful, he stopped her and struggled to get off his gloves and his fur cap.
“Why, you’re Mr. Conagher!” she exclaimed.
“I reckon so, ma’am.…That soup surely tastes good.” He started to rise. “Got to take care of my horse.”
“Let Laban do it. He’s very good with animals, and he’ll like doing it.”
After a while Conagher stood up and removed his sheepskin coat, and then sat down again to finish the soup.
“Two days,” he said. “It’s the first I’ve eaten in two days. My grub played out, but I had coffee until this morning. Tried to make some, but the wind blew out my fire, blew my coffee into the snow.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Ranch south of here. Away down yonder.”
Laban came in while Conagher was on his second bowl of soup. “I rubbed your horse down, sir. I am sorry we have no grain.”
Conagher looked up and grinned. “You feed that mustang grain and he’d reckon you was tryin’ to poison him. Thank you, son. That horse has come a far piece.”
“It is bad weather to ride in.”
“I was followin’ some rustled cattle. Lost the trail in the snow.”
Evie looked at Laban, and Conagher caught her glance. “You seen any cows?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I saw some. I think they’re being held in a corral over back of us, back in the mountains a few miles.”
“How many men?”
“I don’t know, sir. Maybe only a couple, but there might have been more.”
“We could send word by the next stage,” Evie suggested, “and the sheriff could ride over from the Plaza.”
“Ma’am, those cattle would be clean gone out of the country by that time. No, ma’am, I figure the sheriff has a-plenty to do without me causing him trouble. I’ll just mosey up there and start those cattle back home.”
She was silent for a few minutes and then she said, “If you could wait we might get some help for you. It would only—”
“Mrs. Teale, a man who has to ask for help better not start out in the first place.”
The heat was beginning to drive the cold from his flesh, slowly sinking deeper into his body, and as it did so he felt a vast comfort and a sense of ease and well-being come over him.
Even as he began to grow sleepy he became aware of the neatness of the cabin, the good manners of the children, and the quiet sense of security.
Evie Teale brought him a plate of beef and beans, and some baking-powder biscuits, and he ate, almost falling asleep in the process. When he had finished eating, Evie suggested that he unroll his blankets on the floor and sleep.
She stepped around him as she worked. He was a lean, powerful man, taller but not much heavier than Jacob. How black his stubble of beard showed against his face!
This was the man who had given Kiowa Staples that awful beating, but he did not look like a brutal man.
In the last hours of the night, she awoke suddenly and for an instant she lay quiet, wondering what had wakened her. She thought she had felt a cold draft…she sat up and looked toward where Conagher’s bed had been.
It was gone, and Conagher was gone.
She lay down again, feeling a strange sense of loss, of loneliness…but that was foolish. He was nothing to her—just a strange, lonely, violent man, and she would not be likely to see him again.
Chapter 12
*
CONN CONAGHER RODE out in the morning, still tired though he had slept the night through on the dirt floor in the pleasantly warm cabin. But it had been almost too comfortable for him. When a man gets used to sleeping wherever he can spread himself, he soon gets to like it. When he left in the early hours before daylight he rode out because he simply felt more comfortable in a saddle than in a house.
It was cold. The gelding had humped its back against the saddle, liking the shelter of the shed, flimsy as it was, but Conagher knew what he had to do. Before he got up into the saddle he took out his pistol and gave the cylinder a spin or two and tried the action. Sometimes the oil will stiffen up when a gun has been out in the cold.
He tied his scarf around his face, tucked his ears under the earlaps, and rode into the trees. There was deep snow except where the wind had swept the hillside clear, and he was not expecting an easy time of it. But nobody likes to roll out at daybreak on a cold morning, and outlaws were even less likely to do it than working cowhands.
It took him two hours to struggle through the heavy snow to where he could look into the basin. He saw a hollow where the widespreading branches of a couple of big twin pines had kept the snow away and formed a sort of shelter. He swung down and left the horse there while he went out on a point and bellied down among the rocks.
With his field glass he studied the cabin below.
The cattle were there. At that distance he couldn’t make out the brands, but a cowman soon learns to recognize individual cattle, just as a politician will recognize certain people in a crowd. These were Seaborn Tay’s cattle.
Conagher studied the ground. As near as he could make out, there had been little movement around the dugout. A thin column of smoke came from the stovepipe that did for a chimney.
It seemed to be growing colder. Then Conagher realized that the wind was rising, coming right out of the north again. Well, that was good. This outfit wasn’t likely to go anywhere with those cattle in this snow with a north wind rising.
He looked at the cabin again. He had no sympathy for those men down there. They were men not very unlike himself, but they had chosen to steal rather than to work, and Conagher was a worker who believed in an honest day for an honest dollar. He was going to take those cattle back to the ranch, and that was all there was to it.
He got up and went back to his horse. He considered a minute and then said aloud, “The hell with it,” and swung into the leather.
He turned the gelding on an angle down the slope, keeping on the blind side of the dugout. He hoped there were no cracks in the walls, but it was likely that they had all been stopped up to keep out the cold.
He was feeling tough and mean with the cold weather and the hard travel. He wasn’t hunting trouble, but he just didn’t give a damn. Bringing a few branches from a cedar, he rode up to the cabin close to the chimney, which stuck out the side. When he came alongside the dugout he spoke softly to his horse and stood up on the saddle.
The gelding was well trained, and could be climbed on or over. Standing on the saddle, Conagher stu
ffed greenery into the stovepipe, then filled any spaces with some extra tufts of the cedar.
He dropped down to the saddle, moved to the corner of the dugout, and waited.
Suddenly there was an explosion of swearing and the door burst open, letting out a man in undershirt and pants with one boot on, the other in his hand. The other men piled out after him, coughing and swearing, driven from their warm beds by the smoke, all of them angry, none of them armed. Only one man had boots on.
“All right!” Conagher called. He put a bullet into the ground at their feet and charged his horse between them and the door of the cabin. One man, struck by the shoulder of the horse, went sprawling into the snow.
“Back up!” Conagher ordered. He held the rifle in one hand and with the gelding herded them back. One man made a dart to get around him, and Conn struck him a back-hand blow with the rifle barrel that stretched him out in the snow. “Get out there and take down the bars!” he said.
“I’ll be damned if I will!” one man answered.
“You’ll be damned if you don’t!” Conagher cocked the Winchester. “You call it. I’ve had a damn long, cold ride, and I’d just as soon leave the three of you here for the wolves. Get on with it!”
One of the men started to move slowly, after a quick glance at the others, and the rest spread back, away from him.
Conagher turned his horse and rode at the gate, just in time to see a man throw up a Winchester to take aim. He had been sleeping in the lean-to.
Conagher, holding low, let go with his rifle. His first shot burned the man and turned him, and Conagher fired again. He saw the rifle drop and, wheeling, he shot again, this time using both hands, and the man went plunging into the cabin door. He fell across the threshold, slowly drawing up one leg, and then he lay still.
Quietly Conagher said, “You boys better take down the bars.”
And they did.
With his rifle he indicated one of the men. “You haze them out, then stand back.”
When the cattle were outside, he told the men to line up, facing the pole corral, and had them put their hands against the top rail. He swung down then and went up to the wounded man in the corral and collected his guns.
A bullet had glanced off the lean-to doorpost and gone through the man’s forearm, going in above the wrist and emerging near the elbow. His right hand was out of action, and was bleeding badly.
“Get out!” Conagher booted him in the rear and sent him out with the others. He thrust the man’s six-shooter into his own waistband and put his Winchester into his saddle scabbard.
“You goin’ to let me bleed to death?” the man pleaded. “For God’s sake, man!”
“You fool around with the bandwagon, son,” Conagher told him, “and you’re liable to get hit with the horn. You get up against the fence and be glad I don’t gut-shoot you.”
He backed off, and with a side swing knocked in the glass in the window of the shack. Most of the smoke from the fire was out by now, but he looked around, saw there was nobody inside, and collected the guns.
He threw their boots out into the snow. “Get ’em on,” he said. To one of the men he said, “You help the man with the bloody arm. Better fix that arm up for him, too. A man bleeding like that’s liable to freeze to death.”
“What you doing to us?”
“Don’t hurry me. I might decide just to shoot you instead of hangin’ you, and I might turn you loose. I ain’t made up my mind.”
He glanced at the man who lay sprawled in the doorway. He had never seen him before. He had never seen any of these men, but three of them rode Ladder Five horses.
After making sure there were no more weapons, he threw their coats to them. Then he gave a look around the cabin, keeping the men in his line of fire.
There was a sack of canned goods, several slabs of bacon, and a sack of flour. He gathered them up and carried them outside away from the door; then he went inside and kicked the coals from the fire out into the room, and quickly stepped out. In a moment the cabin had caught fire.
“What in hell you tryin’ to do?” The one who yelled at Conagher was a black-jawed man with a deep scar over one eye.
“This here place has been a hideout for thieves long enough. I’m burnin’ it out.”
“What about our outfits?”
“The hell with you! You were free enough to steal ST cows. Get your outfits where you got your orders.”
“Smoke will kill you for this,” the black-jawed man said, “if I don’t do it first.”
“You open your mouth again until I tell you to,” Conagher said mildly, “and you’ll have a scar over the other eye.”
He pointed to another of the men. “You saddle up for all of you, and be fast about it.”
When the horses were saddled he told them to get on their horses and ride out. “The sheriff in the Plaza is just a-waitin’ for you,” he lied, “so your best bet is east.”
“East? There ain’t a town or place for fifty miles!”
“Tough, ain’t it? Well, that’s the life of an outlaw. You never know what’s goin’ to happen next. As a matter of fact, there’s a couple of stage stations, but I’d fight shy of them, if I were you. All of them know that brand you ride for.”
He gathered up their guns as they rode out and put them in a sack, then he put the supplies into another sack and loaded them on the dead man’s horse.
Then he rode out, starting south, driving the cattle.
When the small herd came down the slope back of the Teale cabin, Evie, followed by Ruthie and Laban, came out to watch. The cattle gathered at the water hole and at the trough, and he rode up to the cabin. He swung down and took the bag of supplies from the back of the horse.
“Here’s a couple of slabs of bacon, Mrs. Teale, and you can split the canned goods with me, and the coffee. You divide it up. I’ll take one third to get me into the Plaza.”
“This is very nice of you, Mr. Conagher, but I am afraid we can’t pay—”
“Didn’t ask you to. These here supplies were the wages of sin, ma’am, an’ the woebegone sinners who pursued the path of Satan have seen the error of their ways. You take that grub and be glad.”
He drew a six-shooter from the sack. “You keep this, too, you might have use for it.”
“What happened, Mr. Conagher?”
“Nothing to speak of. Those sinners came upon evil times, but if they’re wise they are headed east now, and makin’ good time.”
He looked at her. “You got any of that soup left, Mrs. Teale? I’m a right hungry man.”
After he had eaten, watching the road through the windows, just in case, he looked at Laban. “Boy, how’d you like to make a couple of dollars and a free ride on the stage?”
Laban glanced at Evie. “Well, sir, I’d like it. But what would I have to do?”
“Help me drive this herd to the Plaza. I’ll pay you two or three dollars and your fare back on the stage.”
“Is it all right, ma? Can I go?”
“Yes. Yes, you can. You’ll take good care of him, Mr. Conagher?”
“Likely he’ll take care of me. That’s a fine, strong boy, Mrs. Teale, and he’ll make a good hand.”
*
WHEN THEY REACHED the Plaza they bunched the cattle at the stockyards and put them in a pen.
At the livery stable the hostler looked sharply at the Ladder Five brand on the horse that Laban rode. “Now, see here—” he began.
“You see here,” Conagher said. “I’m leavin’ that horse for any Ladder Five rustler to pick up. And you can tell them that was the way I put it. The rider ain’t likely to show up to claim it, and if he does you can go down to the saloon and tell those loafers you’ve seen a real honest-to-Abe-Lincoln ghost.”
“You penned some cattle.”
“Those are ST cows and I’m an ST rider, and in a few minutes I’m going to sell those cattle, give the buyer a bill of sale, and take a receipt. I’ll be damned if I’ll drive them all the way back
to the ranch in this weather. Money is a whole lot easier to carry.”
Conagher and Laban went across to the saloon, which like all such saloons was a club house, an exchange for trail information, an auction or sales room, or whatever. At the door Conagher paused, glanced around, and saw Mahler sitting across the room. He walked in, and said to Laban, “You keep shy of me until we leave. A saloon is no place for a boy, but we’ve got business to do.”
At the bar a squarely built man in a leather coat was watching them. Mahler looked up, his face stiffening into hard lines as he recognized Conagher.
Conagher approached the man at the bar. “Are you Tom Webb?”
“I am.”
“I ride for the ST. I’ve got twenty-seven head of good stock down at the pens I’d like to sell. I’ll give you a bill of sale and I’ll want a receipt.”
Webb hesitated. “I can use the cattle. But isn’t this an odd time to sell?”
“This here,” Conagher spoke roughly, and not quietly, “is recovered stolen stock. It’s too far a piece to drive it back to the outfit.”
Kris Mahler sat very still, staring into his beer glass. His face was drawn and cold. Conagher pointedly ignored him.
“What happened?” somebody asked.
Conagher shrugged. His sheepskin coat was unbuttoned and his gun hand was warm enough, warm as it would ever be. He did not want a shooting, but he just didn’t care. He had ridden too far in the cold, he had been caused some rough work, and weariness had eaten into every bone and sinew.
“Trailed the cattle to a shack north of Mrs. Teale’s place. I recovered the cattle, burned the shack, and drove the stock here.”
“You trailed them? In this snow?”
Conagher looked at the speaker and said quietly, “I trailed ’em. Happens I knew about that shack, so when I lost the trail I knew they’d probably have to hole up there.”
Nobody spoke for a few minutes, and then Webb said, “I’ll walk over and look at the cattle.”
Novel 1969 - Conagher (v5.0) Page 10