Rider on the Buckskin

by Peter Dawson

  With unruly impatience Pleasants climbed into the saddle once more and headed the roan obliquely across the slope through the trees, abruptly swinging higher as it suddenly occurred to him what Sam was doing.

  Sam had seen the fire up ahead. He must now be thinking that the man who had cut the fence was responsible for the fire. He would be riding straight for it, no longer interested in the tracks he had followed to this point.

  The fire, Pleasants was thinking, would make it easier to be certain of where he placed his bullet.

  Chapter Three

  Frank Rivers could scarcely believe what he was hearing, or what he was seeing. He had been up out of his blankets arranging the three keeper logs of the fire to last out the remaining hours of the night when this mustached, furious stranger rode in unannounced out of the snow blackness, sitting the saddle crookedly, and a rifle leveled across saddle.

  Now, trying to make sense of the tongue-lashing the man had just given him, Rivers protested: “All I did to your fence was ride around the end of it. If you.…”

  “Hogwash!” the other cut in venomously. “You’re an Anchor hand and you damn’ well did cut our wire! Now you’ll throw your hull onto one of those nags and come along with.…”

  The thunderclap explosion of a heavy rifle burst across the night from behind Rivers. He saw the stranger’s slight frame pounded back and off balance. For one split second he stood rooted in a paralysis of surprise, watching the man’s thin face tighten in agony, seeing him sway loosely in the saddle as the gray nervously side-stepped. Then, suddenly aware of his own danger, he wheeled and lunged into the shadows beyond reach of the fire’s light.

  He threw himself into the snow and rolled beneath the low branches of a spruce, wriggled in close to the tree’s broad base. A brief glance toward the fire showed him the gray standing with trailing reins, the stranger lying, sprawled and motionless, in the snow.

  The night’s absolute hush possessed an explosive quality that made him shallow his breathing, straining to catch the slightest stray sound that would bring warning of the killer stalking him. He had waited out a long quarter minute when suddenly the stillness was broken by the muffled hoof pound of a hard-ridden horse sounding from up the trail.

  His long frame stiffened, and in that instant he felt even more trapped and helpless than he had while staring into the bore of the stranger’s rifle, for his holstered .44 and rifle lay beneath the saddle at the head of his blankets beyond the fire.

  But in three more seconds he abruptly realized that the sound was fading instead of gathering strength, and he breathed a long whistling sigh of relief. Yet he didn’t move until the night had swallowed the last remote echo of that horse running into the upcountry distance. And even after he had crawled out and was on his feet again, his nerves stayed taut and every sense in him was keened to a hard alertness.

  He warily made a circle of the fire, keeping well back in the shadows, then knelt by his blankets to pull the .44 from beneath his saddle and buckled it about his waist. Afterward he strode quickly in on the fire, his brief glance down at the stranger met by the glazed stare of wide-open eyes. He wheeled away at once and hurried to drag the carefully arranged logs from the blaze, knowing without any doubt that the man was dead.

  He strode on out to the gray as the glowing log ends hissed against the snow. Leading the animal well out of the light, he tied the reins to an aspen, then loosened the cinch. It was then that the sudden letdown made him start trembling, every nerve in him raw from the punishment of these past five minutes.

  “Now what?”

  His voice laid an alien, startling sound across the night’s absolute hush. He could supply no answer to the question beyond knowing that these past minutes had made a marked man of him. Thinking this, wondering what he should do next, he walked on across to the fire and by its feeble glow looked at his watch and saw that it lacked twenty minutes of being four o’clock in the morning.

  He had a choice to make here and now. He could throw saddles on the buckskin and mare and head up the trail, counting on the feeble moonlight to let him find his way over the pass. By first light he would be long gone, his tracks snowed over, leaving behind him the mystery of a killing that might not even be discovered for a day or two.

  Yet a subtle resentment over the way the stranger had died presently began to undermine this too easy line of reasoning. He went across to light his pipe and hunker down beside his blankets in the shelter of a pine, remembering that his father had died in much the same way this stranger had. And, though he and his parent had disagreed violently on many things, he could still feel a trace of the fury that had held him on learning that a charge of buckshot in the back had snuffed out George Rivers’s life.

  Finally he knew that he had no choice but that of packing the body back down to Ute Springs once it got light. His instinct was to trust Jim Echols’s sense of fairness even though the man obviously loathed him and believed him to be guilty of having killed his father, of having nearly beat Bill Echols to death, and finally of having bought his way out of prison.

  But, Rivers reasoned, so had other good men been blind to his claim of innocence over the past five years. Thinking back on his meeting with the sheriff he could recall nothing to indicate that Echols wouldn’t be fair and honest in dealing with this situation, especially if he voluntarily gave himself up and offered what evidence he had.

  It mattered a great deal to Rivers just now that nothing should stop him in his hunt for the two men who had held up the stage that night almost five years ago. If he should risk turning his back on this murder, there was a strong likelihood that he might eventually be blamed for it.

  When at last the new day dawned, it came weakly, with snow still settling steadily over the gold and emerald sweep of aspen and spruce forest shrouding the high shoulders below the peaks of the Bear Claws. An hour later a thin twilight still lay along this stretch of trail as Rivers finished saddling the mare and buckskin, picketed them once more on the slope close below, and came back to his fire.

  In spite of the thickly falling snow and the poor light he heated some water, got out his razor and a shard of mirror, and spent ten minutes over a careful shave, having instinctively sensed that his looking like a saddle tramp might count against him today whereas his appearance didn’t ordinarily matter one way or the other.

  Afterward he led the gray over to the canvas-shrouded shape near the fire and managed awkwardly to heave the dead man across the saddle. He roped the gelding’s awkward burden securely, and was tying the last knots when he happened to glance around to find both the buckskin and the mare standing alert, ears forward, looking up the draw.

  He wheeled. A rider was watching him from a point where the pines heavily shadowed the upper trail some fifty yards distant.

  Rivers dropped the rope end, letting hand settle against the cold bone handle of the .44. And for the space of several seconds he could feel the other’s glance warily studying him across the snow-hazed interval separating them.

  All at once his visitor called: “Who’ve you got there … Sam Cauble?”

  The voice jolted him with a hard surprise, for it was a woman’s. It took him a deliberate interval to put down his astonishment and answer: “You’ll have to tell me who he is.”

  Seconds passed, both of them remaining motionless. Rivers had almost decided that the woman was about to turn and ride away. Then, again surprising him, she brought her sorrel straight down toward the fire.

  She drew rein a scant twenty feet short of him, and he saw that she was young. She wore a heavy maroon wool coat and a pair of man’s waist overalls. Her face, fair and reddened by the cold, held an odd quality of both delicacy and strength. Her hair was a deep mahogany chestnut and she wore it knotted at the nape of her neck, its folds held by a big silver clasp. Striking she was, yet the most striking thing about her was her eyes, a greenish hazel.

  They were very bright and alive now in the faintly nervous way they regarde
d him. She glanced briefly at the dead man, saying: “You’d be twenty miles from here if you’d done this. We heard the shot across at the house, which is why I’m here.” Hesitating momentarily, she asked: “Who did kill Cauble?”

  Frank Rivers was taken aback by the quickness with which this girl had evidently made up her mind to trust him. There was a quality of high-spiritedness and directness about her that demanded the same in return, so that he told her: “If you heard the shot, you can understand why I didn’t get a look at whoever it was.” He lifted an arm, pointing up the trail. “He cut this man down from off there, the way you rode in.”

  “How does it happen Cauble was up here?”

  “He drifted in while I was stirring around, building up the fire, made some wild talk about how I’d cut that fence down below. About me working for some outfit that’d like to see the wire down.”

  The girl’s expression turned instantly grave. “Then he thought you were working for me. This is our range … Anchor’s.”

  “That’s the brand he named.”

  “You were just traveling the trail, on your way through?”

  “I was.” Rivers’s eyes took on a wry glint. “Now I’m headed back down to take the poor devil to town. No use skipping out on.…”

  His words broke off as a sharp ringing sound shuttled up from below, a sound he recognized as the striking of a shod hoof against rock. Half turning, he looked below along the trail and made out the indistinct shapes of three riders trotting their horses in this direction through the light fog of settling snow.

  “You may be wishing you hadn’t waited around.”

  The girl had followed his glance, and, as she made this pronouncement, there was no warmth whatsoever in her tone. “These are Cauble’s friends,” she added.

  “Not yours, I take it.”

  “No.” Over a brief pause, she told him: “Lute Pleasants is the one in the lead. He’ll do the talking. Sometimes he doesn’t think before he lets his tongue go. So don’t let him crowd you into doing anything foolish.”

  Rivers sighed resignedly, finding nothing in her words to give him comfort. The riders had slowed their pace now and were peering in this direction, and he knew that they had seen his fire. Then in a few more seconds one man cut away and angled up the brushy slope toward a margin of pines at a higher elevation than this stretch of trail. And Rivers, watching the other two come on again, saw something ominous in this dividing of their forces.

  “Maybe you’d better move along, miss,” he said.

  The girl gave him a brief, wondering glance that held a quality of undisguised respect. “Certainly not. You’ll need me.”

  By now the two riders were close enough below for Rivers to catch the creak of saddle leather and the jingle of their spurs and bridle chains. From above, the third man’s horse abruptly set up a racket, pushing through a patch of scrub oak, the sound telling Rivers that they had nicely contrived to put him and the girl between them.

  It was the man who had been pointed out to him as Lute Pleasants who led his companion up the last gentle climb and reined in directly beyond the fire some twenty yards away. Pleasants’s square, ruddy face set belligerently as his quick glance went to the gray, shifted briefly to Rivers, and finally settled on the girl.

  “Didn’t know you’d hired a killer, Kate,” he said tonelessly.

  “I’d never seen this man until five minutes.…”

  An angry, slashing gesture of Pleasants’s free hand cut the girl’s words short. “Let’s have no guff about this. The boys heard the shot, got spooky, and started looking for Sam. Found your cuts in the fence and Sam gone. So they sent a man across to rout me out. Now this!”

  Pleasants tilted his head toward the gray, and his glance swung hard on Rivers. “Didn’t give you time to pull out, did we? What were you aimin’ to do, pack him up onto the pass and cave in a cutbank on him?”

  “No. I was taking him down to the sheriff.”

  Rivers’s quiet tone seemed to rouse Pleasants to a higher pitch of fury. For all at once he looked beyond Rivers and said in a clipped, brittle voice: “Draw a bead on the middle of his back, Harry!”

  “Lute, stop this!” the girl cried in a hushed, frightened way. “Let him explain!”

  As she spoke, Rivers made an abrupt half turn to find the man behind him sitting his horse at about the same distance from him as Pleasants. This one had already reached down to his rifle and half drawn it from its sheath. But now he suddenly froze, motionless.

  He had been watching Rivers closely. This instant he had seen Rivers’s high frame bend slightly and go rigid, with right hand lifting sparely to within finger spread of his holster. There was a smoky, challenging light in Rivers’s blue eyes, and the man was shocked and warned by it.

  Lute Pleasants also caught that startling change in Rivers, as did his crewman alongside him. Pleasants’s outraged expression thinned now before one of slow-breaking wonderment. It was as though some unforeseen element had all at once thrust itself into this situation, an element Pleasants didn’t quite know how to deal with.

  Frank Rivers noticed this indecision in the man and let the seconds run on and the tension build against these three, warily waiting for one of them to make the slightest move. He had all three barely within the limits of his vision, the single man hard to his left, the other two obliquely to his right.

  And with the certainty that they hadn’t quite managed to box him in between them, that they were momentarily unsure of themselves, a feeling of wild recklessness ran through him, making him softly say: “Let’s get on with it.”

  Chapter Four

  Frank Rivers’s flat challenge, thrown so unexpectedly at Pleasants and his two crewmen, faded across the snowy stillness. And for a long moment not one of these four men so much as let an eyelid fall in the face of this threat of exploding violence.

  It was Rivers who finally moved, taking four deliberate backward steps that heightened the odds in his favor. For, as he halted, he was no longer positioned between them, and could nicely see all three men at the same time. And, much to his relief, his move had put more distance between him and the girl.

  He could still feel the pressure they were putting on him, and he knew with a grim finality that they were waiting for only the slightest break in his sureness to use as an excuse for shooting him down. At the moment they were wary, uncertain of him. But this would last only as long as he made it last.

  So now he drawled—“Who wants to give it a try?”—and stood as he had been, wide shoulders hunched slightly forward, right hand hanging close to the .44 Colt.

  It was Harry, the man Lute Peasants had some moments ago invited to draw a bead on Rivers’s back with his rifle, whose nerve was the first to give way.

  “Not me, stranger.” He made an expansive gesture of letting go his grip on the rifle and folding hands across the horn of his saddle.

  Rivers’s glance shuttled squarely on Pleasants now, his eyes flinty, faintly contemptuous in the regard they put on the man. “You do a lot of talking, neighbor. Got anything to back it up?”

  Pleasants was jarred by a harder surprise, and over the next brief interval he evidently weighed his chances and saw them as less than even. For without preliminary he all at once said: “Ben, go get Sam and we’ll be on our way.”

  The man alongside him turned his horse across to the gray and leaned down to gather up the reins, and in that moment Frank Rivers knew that the worst of this was over for him. Harry now came down and joined Pleasants, circling Rivers at a respectful distance, and finally they were all three together as Ben led the gray across.

  It was typical of Lute Pleasants that he should try and have the last word in this affair. He had been humbled, out-guessed, and now he showed how all this rankled as he pointedly ignored Rivers and eyed the girl. “Two hours from now there’ll be a warrant out for this man, Kate. Maybe one out for you, too. I’ll see.…”

  “More talk,” Rivers’s deceptively soft drawl
cut him short. “Man, if you’ve got any horse sense at all, you’ll move along.”

  For an instant Rivers thought he had crowded Pleasants too far, for the man’s dark eyes smoldered with a furious, killing light and it appeared that he was letting anger override his sense of caution. But even then it seemed he was taking into account what the last half minute had shown him of this tall stranger.

  Abruptly hauling his horse around, Pleasants led his men away without a further word. And the girl, hearing Rivers breathe a soft, whistling sigh of relief, looked around at him and was startled to see him slowly shake his head, and then reach up to push his hat back and run a hand across his damp forehead.

  He intercepted her puzzled look. “Lucky, eh?”

  Her puzzlement became stronger. “You … you were …?”

  “Scared? Sure, weren’t you?”

  “But I was sure.… The way you stood up to them and.…”

  Whatever her thought had been she didn’t complete it. And Rivers, half understanding, told her: “When you’re down to only a few chips, you bet like you had a pocketful.”

  The utter lack of pretense in this man confounded Kate Bond. He was a different person now from the one he had been a minute ago. His manner was gentle, his words soft-spoken once more. And suddenly, unaccountably, a feeling of warmth and friendliness toward him made her smile down at him and say: “Lute Pleasants will never know that, will he? He’ll turn it over in that sharp mind of his. He’ll wonder what would have happened if he’d made his try at you. He’ll never forgive himself for not knowing the answer.”

  She had never before been a witness to such a tense, ominous situation, and now its aftereffects made her momentarily lose grip on her emotions. She began laughing uncontrollably. But then the startled, worried look that came to Rivers’s eyes sobered and embarrassed her.

  “Forgive me for acting like a twelve-year-old. But if anything had happened to you, it would have been because of me, because of Anchor.”

  “Well, it didn’t happen, which is all that matters.”