by Peter Dawson
The saloon owner reached up dazedly to run a palm across his damp forehead. “I heard you was a rough one to tangle with,” he muttered in real bitterness. “I wish to God I’d been fifty mile from here when you showed up.”
“We’ll get along just fine, Crowe.”
Sighing resignedly, Crowe asked: “What do I answer to folks when they want to know where I got the money to put in this damned fence? When they ask how come your crew’s stringin’ it for me?”
“You had an aunt die back East. She left you a stake,” Pleasants answered without hesitation. “As for Ben and Harry and Red, you can say I was through with them once they finished my fence. Since they were in practice, you hired ’em.”
“A hell of a likely story.”
“You can improve on it maybe.”
Pleasants crossed to the door now, turning up the collar of his coat as he heard the icy wind whistling along the street. About to open the door, he had a thought that made him face about and say: “Tell you what, friend. I’ll even throw in the grub for your new crew. Just to show you my heart’s in the right place.”
“Get the hell gone,” Crowe breathed explosively. “And leave the door open. The place needs airin’ out.”
Pleasants’s booming laugh was drowned in a rush of wind as he turned out onto the snow-covered walk. His merriment lasted only briefly however, a feeling of urgency at once taking him out to his horse and making him jerk loose the knot in the reins with a vicious tug. He used the spur on the animal and was riding at a lope before he had passed the adjoining building.
Once beyond the shut-in black cañon of the street’s lower end, he could begin to distinguish nearby objects with some clarity. So it was that, coming to a rutted track half a mile beyond that cut north through a timbered notch toward Crowe’s line camp and Anchor, he made out along it a line of deep hoof marks trodden in the snow.
These were recent tracks, very recent, for the wind was blowing a constant whirling spume of snow that would fill in the slightest indentation within a matter of minutes.
So judging, Lute Pleasants swung into the side road. He had gone less than a hundred yards when some cautious impulse prompted him to draw the heavy .45-75 Winchester—the rifle he had used last night on Sam Cauble—from its sheath and work its lever, thus making certain that a shell was in the chamber.
* * * * *
Frank Rivers was almost enjoying this bitter, wild night. The moonlight made the beauty of timber and jagged ridge and snowy swale almost as dazzling as by day. He was fairly comfortable, having reversed his neckpiece and pulled it up over his nose to shield his face against the wind, and he rode most of the time with mittened hands stuffed up the sleeves of his cowhide coat. Best of all he felt warm inside.
There were times when a man had to put aside his private wants and selfishness and remember that other people’s affairs counted almost as much as his own. Such was what he had felt compelled to do tonight while eating supper with the Bannisters. He wasn’t in the least begrudging anyone this loss of time that interrupted his everlasting search for the lame carpenter. Anchor, or rather Kate and Fred Bond, had become important to him, oddly so, and he simply wasn’t trying to analyze why he felt as he did about them.
Looking back and realizing it had been only a little more than twelve hours since he had first set eyes on Kate Bond, or even heard of Anchor, was something hard to believe. His thoughts even now were restlessly probing at possible ways the outfit could fight the awesome combination of Pleasants’s new fence and this unseasonal storm. The four-month-long urgency that had kept him so constantly on the move had been replaced by another, one that strangely seemed somehow almost equally as personal.
Yesterday he had been footloose, answerable to no one but himself, calling his time his own. Now, because he wanted it this way, he was thinking of someone else for a change.
He had spent many a winter in the high country. Thinking of Anchor and what this storm might mean, he tried to look back and judge what the chances were of the weather moderating. He could remember just such a bitter spell that had prematurely struck his home range something like six years ago, when he was twenty.
It wasn’t much fun. Not any, he mused.
That storm had lasted the better part of a week, as best he could recall. Then there had been a warm day or two, the snow had turned to slush, and the run-off had filled the creeks to overflowing. The range had dried out in something like another week and he could remember that there had been almost another month of balmy autumn weather before the first real winter blizzard snowed in the range and kept it closed.
The pack mare’s lagging abruptly intruded upon his thoughts and he turned in the saddle and glanced back at the animal: “Couple miles more and you can shed that load, old girl.”
Hardly had his words struck against the moaning of the wind before he was seeing something moving along the white face of a low rim a little over two hundred yards obliquely behind him. At first he thought it was an elk or a deer. But then suddenly he knew that it was a man on horseback.
In another instant the rider had ghosted from sight into a heavy growth of pine capping the end of the rim. And all at once a hard alertness gripped Rivers.
“Whoever he is, he doesn’t like the road.”
His voice struck an alien note across a momentary stillness as the wind died away. He touched the buckskin with spur, sending the animal on at a brisker jog, his glance clinging to the ridge crest behind him. And in several more moments he imagined he saw a shadow slide quickly across an open bay of the timber close above and to his left, though afterward he couldn’t be at all positive he had seen it.
Reaching down now, he drew his rifle from scabbard, levering a shell into the chamber, and then laying the weapon across the swell of the saddle, again nudging the buckskin with spur. In that brief interval he became certain that whoever it was up yonder was either anxious not to be seen or was stalking him.
The pale rosy wink of a rifle’s burst all at once licked out at him from the margin of the trees barely seventy yards upward.
He felt the sharp tug of the bullet along the back of his left upper arm the instant before the explosion of a heavy rifle slapped down at him. A fierce, numbing awareness of his danger turned him rigid. He was trapped, defenseless out here in the open.
Instinctively he let his high frame go loose and off balance. Falling sideways, he cried out softly as he lost his grip on the rifle and saw it spin end over end into the snow. Then the buckskin was shying in fright, dislodging his boot from stirrup.
He went down, headfirst, very awkwardly, his face smothered in snow, his right shoulder taking his body’s slamming weight. The momentum of his fall rolled him, spread-eagled, onto his back. He lay motionlessly, every nerve in him drawn wire-tight.
Chapter Eleven
Lying half buried in the snow after his ungainly fall from the buckskin, Frank Rivers held his long frame rigid against the threat of the rifle on the rim slope close above, expecting each instant to feel the slam of a second bullet into him.
Sprawled on his back at an awkward angle, his head almost covered with the powdery snow, he didn’t dare move. He felt no pain whatsoever in his left arm, though he knew it had at least been grazed by the ambusher’s bullet.
He had unconsciously been holding his breath, and he let it go now in a long, slow exhalation, breathing barely audibly: “Come down out of there, man. Have a look at the meat you knocked over.”
There was a moment then in which a near panic ran through him at the thought of what a fool he was to be lying here, pretending to be either badly wounded or dead. Instead of gambling that the rider would come down off the ridge to make sure of his work, would come within handgun range, he was certain now that he should have cast loose the pack mare’s rope and tried to make a run for it on the buckskin.
But as no sound rose over the restless whine of the bitterly cold wind, hope gradually came alive in him. It was just possible that the m
an up there in the timber might be convinced his bullet had squarely found its mark.
Rivers’s head was tilted toward the rim, yet not far enough to let him see anything but its crest and the inky, star-studded void of the cold heavens above. Slowly, almost imperceptibly he rolled his head around until first the timber came into view, then the broken open ground sloping up to the margin of the pines. Finally he could see the buckskin and mare standing some twenty yards away, heads down and rumps turned to the icy wind.
He could feel a chill moistness and a smarting along the back of his upper left arm and knew he must be bleeding. The snow against the right side of his face, and more that had sifted down inside the collar of his coat, was gradually numbing his cheek and neck. And as his glance clung to the timber’s edge, a fierce gust whipped swirling aspen leaves and a cloud of stinging snow particles into his face, chilling it to the bone.
His right leg was bent under him so that his holster painfully gouged his hips. And as the seconds slowly passed, his eyes began aching with the cold until he finally had to close them and wait until the pain eased away. When he opened his eyes to stare in the direction of the ridge again, what he saw tightened every muscle in him.
A rider was drifting slowly down out of the blackness of the trees and toward him across the snowy open ground below.
“Keep coming,” he breathed softly, prayerfully. “Move on in.”
The distance between him and the ambusher was, he judged, something upward of sixty yards, too far to let him recognize who this might be, much too far for him to be certain of getting in a telling shot with the Colt.
His Winchester lay buried in the snow somewhere behind him. He briefly debated rolling over and taking his chance on finding the weapon before the rider off there could either shoot a second time or wheel back into the shelter of the timber. But then he knew he would be risking too much. He would have to lie here and play out the chance of the man coming within range of the .44.
He could plainly make out the rifle the rider held in his down-hanging right hand, and shortly he sensed the wariness of the other’s approach in the way the horse angled out from a direct line and began walking a slow circle.
When the rider was passing beyond the limit of his vision, Rivers moved his head slightly. Still the man rode, coming on nearer, continuing his circle. And suddenly Rivers was faced with the threat of shortly having the man at his back, of being at the complete mercy of this killer.
That instant the tension within him built to the breaking point. He all at once threw his high frame into a convulsive roll, right hand stabbing in under coat to his holster. He plainly saw the rider stiffen, saw him begin to lift the rifle, and then jerk the reins to put his animal into a quick turn. Rivers lifted out the Colt, lined it, and squeezed off a shot. The pounding explosion of the weapon lifted a geyser of snow three feet behind the hind hoofs of the horse.
Crying out hoarsely in frustration, Rivers came to his knees as the rider bent low in the saddle and raced for the timber. He lined the Colt a second time, knew his bullet was wide of the mark as the rider swung suddenly to the right. Then a moment later the ambusher’s shape was swallowed by the blackness of the timber.
Rivers stumbled across to an elongated indentation in the snow, reached down, and found the Winchester. He knocked it against the sole of his boot to clear its barrel of snow, shouldered it, and levered off three quick-timed shots aimed at the spot where the rider had disappeared. Then he snatched up his hat and ran for the buckskin.
Rage hit him then as he swung into the saddle, cast loose the pack mare’s rope, and rowelled the buckskin with spur, running toward the trees at the foot of the rim. He came to the line of the ambusher’s tracks and followed them into the trees at a hard run. But then he was riding in a gray twilight, the snowy ground ahead a shadowless blanket that showed not a mark, not a track.
He put the buckskin between the pines and through the thickets of buckbrush and scrub oak with a savage and reckless abandon, trusting the animal’s sure-footedness. Then suddenly he rode out into bright moonlight once more, cresting the rim.
Swinging quickly to his left, he rode for two hundred yards, studying the drifted expanse of ground ahead of him, using his free hand to shield his face from the wind-whipped snow. He found no tracks and finally, impatiently turned about and ran back the way he had come. A like distance from the point where he had gained the ridge crest he came across a line of tracks that topped the broken ground and angled down its far side into another growth of pine.
He had followed the tracks almost down to the trees when he finally began listening to a voice of caution that somehow made itself heard over the cold rage seething in him: “Easy now. Let’s think this over.”
The sound of his voice served to steady him, to make him see that he was being foolhardy and acting without any judgment whatsoever. When he came to the margin of the pines, he reined in, hearing nothing but the whine of the wind through the tops of the trees and, in the distance, the eerie howl of a night-hunting wolf.
Over the next several seconds he understood that he couldn’t go on. The ambusher would either keep on going or would choose his spot for making a second try at him. If the man chose to run, it was a hopeless chore tracking him. If he chose to make another try at bringing down the quarry he had missed, then there was no possible way of Rivers guessing when he might be riding into a trap.
“But who was he?” His voice was rough-edged with anger and bafflement. “Who’d be after me?”
As he sat there, scanning the deep shadows of the timber below, he felt a chill moistness along the back of his left hand. Looking at the hand, he saw a streak of blood lined down from wrist to the tip of his index finger. Only then was he aware of a painful smarting along the back of his upper arm, and of his sleeve being wet.
He came down out of the saddle, took off his coat, and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt to see plainly that the bullet had channeled a trough a half inch deep at the back of the ropey muscle of his upper arm. It was bleeding, and he unknotted his neckpiece and bound it about the arm, feeling the knifing chill of the night now and all at once impatient to be on his way to Anchor.
Once he had pulled on his coat, he rode back over the ridge and down through the trees to the road. The mare was standing where he had left her.
He wasted no time in gathering up her rope and heading on along the road, his glance ceaselessly roving his back trail as he angrily tried to puzzle out the enigma of this past quarter hour.
Chapter Twelve
Lute Pleasants had been as certain of his .45-75 having found its mark as he had been last night when using the weapon on Sam Cauble. He had therefore been panicked when Frank Rivers rolled over in the snow to throw that first shot at him.
The hollow explosions of Rivers’s .44 had made him punish his horse in climbing the ridge, and afterward the slapping thunder of the rifle searching for him made him frantically swing to one side as he cut up through the pines. He had paused briefly below the crest of the rim to glance back down through the trees and could see Rivers running for the buckskin. And afterward he had topped the rim and ridden down its far side, wanting nothing so much as to put distance between him and the man he had tried to kill.
The high alarm that gripped Pleasants made him think of but one thing, getting out of there. He rode on as fast as the horse would carry him, making brief changes in direction, working his way west and lower across the hills. Once, after covering perhaps a mile, he stopped beyond the crest of a rise and delayed half a minute, scanning his back trail. He saw nothing moving across the upward distance, and, when he went on, enough of the gnawing fear had left him to allow him to think back upon the quirk of circumstance that had so suddenly changed his luck from good to bad.
When the full realization came of what a fool he had been in not simply putting another bullet into Rivers, he relieved his feelings in much the same way he had yesterday after his run-in with Sam Cauble. His raging out
burst of obscene oaths startled his horse, made the animal shy and toss its head.
That, more than any inward prompting, stifled Pleasants’s rage and made him begin to consider what he was to do next. First of all, he must hide his sign so thoroughly that no one tonight or tomorrow could possibly track him. The wind would help, and with that knowledge he set about the task methodically and thoroughly.
Yet, as he put the miles behind him, the rancor in him didn’t die away. It was plain to him that Frank Rivers must have reconsidered Fred Bond’s offer of a job with Anchor, that the man was probably already at the ranch by now. So it was that his thoughts began coupling Anchor with Rivers.
It was perhaps half an hour later that he was suddenly struck by an idea that immediately made him change his direction and swing into the north. And in forty more minutes he was climbing into the higher hills once more in the direction of his new fence.
By the time he sighted the dying fire at the fence camp, he was tired and chilled to the bone. He rode in past the half dozen animals in the rope corral below the big tent and gave a shout as he came in on the burned-down blaze.
Ben Galt was the first man to make an appearance. By that time Pleasants was at the fire, throwing on wood to build up the blaze. Galt had pulled his pants on over heavy underwear and stood, peering sleepily from the tent flap as he stepped into his boots.
“Rout out Harry and Red,” Pleasants told him. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight. Now. Hurry it up.”
Galt grunted in disgust and disappeared inside the tent. Shortly he came out, pulling on his shirt, holding hat and coat as he strode across to the fire. “Where to, boss?”
“Wait’ll the others get here,” was Pleasants’s gruff answer.
He emptied the coffee grounds from a tin cup he saw lying alongside the fire and filled the cup from a blackened pot sitting at the edge of the coals. He was downing the lukewarm liquid when first Harry Blake, then Red Majors, came out of the tent.