by Peter Dawson
“Tonight’s the night we’ve been waiting for,” he unceremoniously told the three. “We haul that scoop through the fence and up across Anchor to a big cut where the creek splits. You three’re so new here you don’t know the spot, but I can find the way. With this freeze, the creek’ll be low. We’ll have maybe four hours to dig the bed of our branch deeper and get out before it gets light. You’d better wear plenty of clothes.”
Ben Galt was frowning, plainly not liking this but nonetheless hardly disposed to argue it, though he did mutter: “It’s killin’ cold to be workin’ in water.”
“Chances are the creek will only be running a trickle,” Pleasants told him, quickly adding: “Another thing. Tomorrow you’re moving camp across onto Crowe’s place. To put in fence for him.” He was enjoying their startled expressions as he went on: “You’ll be with him for maybe a month, then come back to finish up for me.”
“Crowe’s good for the money?” Galt wanted to know.
“He’d better be. He’s given me his word on it, which is why I’m doing him the favor of loaning you to him.”
Red Majors’s broad face shaped a slow grin. “Sounds good. I can use the extra cash.”
“Then let’s get goin’,” Ben Galt said, turning toward the tent.
Harry, following him, drawled morosely: “Listen to that wind. Better put on every damn’ thing you own. She’s goin’ to be cripplin’ cold before we’re finished.”
Chapter Thirteen
By the second afternoon following the inquest, the holding grounds to the south of Ute Springs was crowded with upward of five hundred head of bawling, hungry cattle. Almost every outfit for thirty miles around, spooked by the storm, was shipping ahead of time. Yet the weather made all this bustle and hurry seem a trifle incongruous, for it was sunny and warm and thawing as it had yesterday. It was a perfect, balmy autumn afternoon.
Jim Echols sat the top rail of a loading pen near a chute where a boxcar was being loaded with prime steers. He hadn’t bothered to wear a coat, and the sun felt good on his back.
The pens were deeply mired with mud. Water lay everywhere. The last of the snow was going fast and Squaw Creek, a hundred yards to the west, roared with the run-off.
The lawman held a tally board across one knee and penciled a mark on a sheet of paper as each animal was urged with prod pole up the slippery cleats to the ramp and into the boxcar. Up ahead the locomotive’s compressor wheezed idly while the engineer leaned out of his cab window awaiting the brakeman’s signal to move the freight ahead along the siding so as to load the next empty boxcar.
Echols idly noticed a team pulling a buckboard through the mud toward him along this near side of the pens, though he didn’t recognize the driver until the rig had pulled to a stop below him and Fred Bond called: “Got a minute, Jim?”
The sheriff glanced down, saying cheerfully: “Look who’s here. Be with you as soon as we finish this car.”
In two more minutes he hung the tally board from a nail on the pen’s corner post and swung down to the next-to-bottom rail, stepping across to the wheel hub, and easing onto the buckboard’s seat. “Thought you’d be too busy to hit town again this soon.”
“Came in after a load of salt,” Fred told him. “On the way back I’m taking the long way around. To see Crowe.”
Echols brows lifted. “Hopin’ for any luck with him?”
Fred Bond smiled crookedly. “Not any. But at least I can try.”
“And if he won’t let you drive across his place?”
“Then we’ll go up and over the mountain. It just might work. The snow’s going off fast even up there.” Over a slight hesitation, Fred added: “But that wasn’t what I came to tell you.”
At the lawman’s questioning look, Fred decided to be blunt about his reason for being here. “Now wait’ll you hear what I have to say before you blow up, Jim. It’s this. Frank Rivers has taken that job I offered him.”
The sheriff’s head came up. His stare took on a stoniness. “I told that joker to clear out and keep goin’.”
“I know, I know. But he saw what a spot we were in and decided we needed help. That isn’t what matters, though. What does is that someone took a shot at him on his way across from Summit night before last.”
Jim Echols’s expression briefly mirrored complete astonishment. “Anyone with him to prove his story?”
“No, but.…”
The lawman’s low, mocking laugh cut Fred short. “Then why swallow it? He’s a one for makin’ up a fancy tale.”
Fred was finding it hard to keep a rein on his patience as he said: “There’s this much proof. Collins and I were out on the meadow forking hay from the stacks. We heard a shot, what we thought was a rifle away off in the distance. Then three or four minutes later there were more, five altogether. As it turned out, it was Rivers. He’d been caught out in the open. So he hit the ground and played ’possum. Tolled this gent almost down to him, then had the bad luck to miss him with his Forty-Four, then with his rifle. Whoever it was hit the brush fast and kept going.” He eyed Echols solemnly, adding: “He’s got a chunk ripped out the back of his arm deep enough to lay your thumb in, Jim. Now I suppose you’ll say he probably shot himself.”
The edge of sarcasm in those words wasn’t lost on the sheriff, who sat a long moment in thought before soberly asking: “Where’d this happen?”
“Off near Sawmill Ridge, as near as we can make out.”
“Does Rivers know who it was?”
“No.”
The blast of the locomotive’s exhaust took the lawman’s attention now. A rattle of couplings sounded over the bawling of the cattle and the freight began crawling ahead, whereupon Echols turned on the seat and called to a rider inside the pen: “Mose, get up here and spell me with the tally on this load, will you?”
The rider nodded and headed for the pen gate, whereupon the sheriff settled back on the seat and glanced at Fred again, his look quite grave. “What’s Rivers’s idea on this?”
Fred Bond shook his head. “He doesn’t have one. But I do. Someone’s out to get him. Half a hand spread to the front and that chunk of lead would have made him a meal for the lobos.”
Echols was completely baffled and showed that now as he gave a long, whistling sigh, drawling dourly: “First Cauble, now Rivers. Can’t make head or tail of it.”
“Look at it this way, Jim. Suppose you’re wrong and Frank is right about his pardon. Suppose the word’s got around that he’s hunting the sidewinders that cut down his father? Suppose they’ve heard of it and are hunting him?”
The lawman lifted a hand in a deprecatory gesture. “That’s askin’ too much of a man to believe.”
Fred shrugged. “Well, you know about Frank now, anyway. And I’d thank you to keep hands off him at least until we’re out of the woods. Yesterday he did as much work as any other two men could’ve, even with the bad arm. He and Collins and I cleaned out those finger draws up to the east of the layout. Today he’s working the north bench with Kate. Give us four or five more good days and we’ll be ready to move our beef down. Or”—he added dryly—“move it up.”
Jim Echols took out tobacco and papers and built a smoke, scowling down at his hands, afterward offering Fred the makings. Fred shook his head, whereupon the sheriff licked his cigarette, shaped it, and only then said: “All right, it’s your look-out who you hire. I’ll keep hands off. But after you’re through with this, I want that man to get the hell clear of here and stay away.” Acid in his tone, he concluded: “If you’d ever known Bill Echols like he once was and could see him now, you’d understand why I don’t want that lanky moose around.”
“Anything you say, Jim.” Fred was mightily relieved.
* * * * *
Frank and Kate had boiled their coffee over a small fire at midday and had eaten a quick, cold meal of bread and jerky, Kate afterward heading back down toward Anchor’s main meadow driving forty-odd head of cattle, their morning’s gather.
No
w, with the sun beginning to dip toward the far horizon, Frank’s three hours of being on his own had netted him only five steers and three heifers as he worked down out of a box cañon, pushing the cattle ahead of him. The buckskin’s hoofs occasionally kicked up a fine spray of muddy water, and the sodden drifts were melting fast, with large patches of steaming bare ground showing here and there. Another day like this would see most of the snow gone except for that along the shadowed northern slopes.
The memory of the rifle shot that had so narrowly missed killing him night before last was still strong in Frank. His arm was stiff and sore, all but useless. Yesterday and today he had ridden warily. Numerous times he had unobstrusively climbed to high ground and spent long minutes scanning the surrounding hills and the open pockets in the timber, looking for some furtive movement of man or animal that might warn him of someone stalking him. So far he had found absolutely nothing to reward his alertness.
Many times he had deliberately tried to think out the answer to the riddle of who might have taken the shot at him. At first it seemed highly probable that someone he had met over the past four months—possibly someone who begrudged him his pardon—had followed him to this out-of-the-way spot. But, with the exception of Jim Echols, he could recall no one who bore him enough real animosity to want to take his life.
He had even soberly considered the possibility of Echols’s having been the man there along the rim two nights ago. But instinct rebelled against this. The sheriff might heartily dislike him, even loathe him for what had happened to Bill Echols. Yet he judged it wasn’t in Echols’s make-up to force himself to the act of committing outright murder.
His reaction to the thought of Lute Pleasants being the guilty party had been much the same. In the beginning, up there at his camp along the trail, he realized that the Beavertail man’s high rage might have driven him to shooting to kill. But afterward, when Pleasants had had the chance to think over the circumstances surrounding Cauble’s death, the man’s common sense had outweighed that original rash impulse. It seemed beyond the realm of reason that Pleasants, after his about-face at the inquest, could have had any interest whatsoever in the luckless stranger who had had the misfortune to be a witness to the killing of his foreman.
Never, not even when he had been arrested for the murder of his father, had Frank Rivers been confronted with an enigma so completely baffling as this. Only one thing had occurred to him that made any sense at all, a possibility he had talked over last night with Kate and Fred. This was the likelihood that somehow the word that he was hunting down the two men who had robbed the Peak City stage had reached those two and that they were in turn hunting him.
If this could be so, if it was one of that pair who had taken the shot at him, then it might mean that his weeks and months of futile searching were nearly at an end. Today he had thought much of this, fervently hoping that it might be so.
Just now, as he rode out of the wide mouth of the cañon, he was startled at finding Kate waiting for him close below alongside a clump of alders flanking the stream that snaked down from his high bench to wind out across Anchor’s big headquarters meadow, four miles distant. He hadn’t expected to see Kate again until suppertime, and now the prospect of being with her filled him with a sense of well-being that at once lightened the somberness of his thoughts.
“Think we ought to send for help to handle these?” he asked as he rode in on her, nodding to the eight animals drifting off along the stream.
Kate laughed. “That’s why I’m here. Collins just told me he and Fred worked that box and everything north of here last week. Thought I’d better go back and tell you.”
Frank folded his arms and leaned on the horn of the saddle. “So where to now?”
“Down to the fence. Collins thinks the storm may have pushed a few of the wild ones in on the wire.”
She turned as she spoke, gathered up her gelding’s reins, and stepped into the saddle, then led the way up along the edge of the thicket and, beyond it, swung in toward the creek.
Frank, following, took in the sureness with which her willowy upper body kept its straight-backed balance when the gelding stumbled once as a small rock turned under hoof. There was a quality of grace, of physical well-being about this girl that oddly went hand in hand with a certain mischievousness and light-heartedness he had discovered in her yesterday in strong contrast to her seriousness the day of the inquest.
It struck him suddenly that he had never before been so intrigued by a woman, nor found one so volatile and at the same time so straightforward and steadfast as Kate Bond. And there was a deep humility in him as he realized how completely she seemed to trust him. So far as he had been able to discover, she believed in him, in the justice of his pardon, and in his reasons for being here.
She turned in the saddle now, looking back and smiling as she asked: “How’s the arm? Stiff?”
“Better,” he told her.
He had answered almost absent-mindedly, for they were coming in on the grassy bank of the stream and a moment ago he had seen something that whetted his curiosity.
Kate noticed his preoccupation and drew rein, waiting for him to come in alongside her. Then, as though she could almost read his thoughts, she asked: “What is it, Frank?”
He nodded on ahead to where the muddy water rippled along the rocky bed of the stream well below the level of the grassy banks. “Doesn’t this run much water except after a storm?”
The question made her stare at him in strong puzzlement. “Of course it does. Why Fred catches trout out of.…” Her words trailed off and her eyes came wider open as she abruptly caught the point of his question. “It should be deeper, shouldn’t it? Because of the run-off. A lot deeper.”
He nodded. “A lot.”
Kate looked upstream toward the higher hills to the north out of which the creek found its way. “Something’s blocked it, Frank.” Her glance betrayed a strong exasperation then. “This would have to happen right now, when we’ve got twice as much as we can do anyway.”
“A slide’s probably changed the channel,” Frank told her. “Want to follow it on up and have a look?”
“We’ll have to. It wouldn’t be so funny if it runs dry next week after all this snow’s gone.”
She impatiently reined the gelding on out and along the line of the stream, Frank putting the buckskin in alongside her. And in another two minutes, when he saw that her worried frown hadn’t thinned, he drawled: “Ten to one some brush or logs have dammed it. Can’t be anything a stick of giant powder couldn’t blow loose.”
“Let’s hope so. Just thinking of losing what water we have makes me turn cold inside.”
“Who said you were losing it?”
“I know we’re not.” Kate forced a smile. “But for a minute there I got to wondering what it would be like if we did. It would … it could be the end of Anchor.”
She spurred the gelding into a quicker jog then and they rode for another mile without speaking, meantime angling up off the bench and riding between a series of rocky, timbered hills. Once, rounding a bend in the stream, they came upon a buck and three doe and watched them bound away into the towering pines. Another time they surprised two bald eagles feeding upon the carcass of a yearling, and, as they climbed higher between the shadowed hills, Frank could feel the heat going out of the day.
The creek, he noticed, had shadowed and was running only a fraction of the volume it had below. Finally they came to the mouth of a cliff-hemmed cut too narrow to let them follow the stream except by wading their animals up along its rocky channel.
Kate drew rein, looking across and up a trail that climbed the rocky slope of the gorge’s west wall. “There’s the only way around this stretch,” she impatiently told Frank. “It’s at least two more miles to the forks.”
“The forks?”
“Yes. Where the Porcupine splits. We call this branch Owl Creek. The Porcupine drops down across Beavertail and empties into the Squaw six or seven miles above t
own.”
“Then let’s get at it.” Frank led the way across the shallowing stream to the twisting trail and started up along it.
They took the better part of a quarter of an hour climbing a series of switchbacks to the rim. And at the head of the trail Frank looked east across the gorge to see a series of snow-splotched and timbered hills climbing all the upward distance to the boulder fields below the lofty, whitened peaks.
Rarely had he gazed upon such lush summer range. And as Kate joined him he breathed in genuine awe: “So this is what Pleasants passed up for his fence.”
“It is.”
She gave him a sidelong, speculative glance, debating something that shortly made her ask: “You’ve been wondering about that, haven’t you?”
He looked around at her. “About what, Kate?”
“Why he hates us so much that he’d put in the fence.”
He halfway grasped that what she was about to say was in dead seriousness. Nodding slowly, he drawled: “Guess I have.”
“It’s because of me, Frank. I … Lute and I saw a lot of each other last summer. He was … he can be very nice when it suits him. He was always that way with me.”
When she hesitated, he looked away, faintly embarrassed at having prompted her to speak of something so personal. Yet as she went on her voice was firmer, her tone edged with real anger. “He was until one particular day. That day I saw him for what he really is. He was riding a half-broken horse, a paint. The horse shied and nearly threw him. He must have forgotten I was there. Because he flew into a rage that … that is still hard to believe. He got down and picked up a stick, a club. He was beating the horse about the head when I stopped him.”
Kate was pale, her voice trembled. “I cut him across the face with the ends of my reins. I called him things … things a man would have called him.” Her head came up and there was a defiant look in her eyes. “I told him he was a coward, that I never wanted to have anything to do with him again, not ever. There was something about him right then that made me as afraid as I’ve ever been.”