by Peter Dawson
As she stopped speaking, Frank whistled softly. “Let him have his fence. You and Fred are going to lick this thing.”
“I wonder. Night before last, the night you came, I suppose I was desperate. Sam Cauble’s dying had made me realize what a serious thing this is. I offered to go down to Lute and beg him to let us take our cattle out across Beavertail. Fred wouldn’t listen.”
“I don’t blame him.”
She gave him a look of gratitude. “So that’s the story, Frank. We’re going to do the best we can. And we’re doing it without Lute’s help.”
She abruptly spurred ahead of him and led the way on along the rim, Frank soberly thinking back over what she had said with a degree of awe at realizing how willingly she had taken him into her confidence.
As they went on, they now and then rode the chill, silent corridor of a stand of spruce or golden aspen, at other times threaded their way through mazes of rotten outcroppings. Occasionally they swung over to the rim’s edge and looked down across the two-hundred foot drop to the stream foaming whitely along its rocky bed far below.
Frank noticed that the stream had diminished even more in its flow, though he made no mention of that as they went steadily on. And shortly Kate told him: “We’ll have to give this up in another half mile or so when we come to the forks.”
They covered that distance in ten more minutes, abruptly riding out onto a promontory that jutted like the prow of a ship and sloped steeply down to mark the dividing point where the upper stream separated into its two channels. To the right was the twisting line of the Owl Creek gorge they had been following, to the left lay a shorter slot soaking through the lower hills to mark the falling course of the Porcupine.
Kate was in the lead as they came to the rim’s edge. She peered downward and Frank saw her stiffen, then turn quickly and motion him to join her, giving him a wide-eyed and incredulous stare.
He rode in alongside her and looked down into the gorge that lay in deep shadow. For a moment he failed to see what had so startled her. But then all at once he made out several long, straight criss-crossed furrows of bare earth down there patterned blackly against the whiteness of the unmelted snow blanketing the banks of both branches of the stream.
The Porcupine was full to overflowing. Its booming roar sounded up plainly to them as it raced along its channel. On the near side of that channel ran a straight, high mound of freshly turned gravel, blocking all but a trickle of water from the branching that led into the Owl Creek gorge.
“It’s a dam,” Kate breathed. “Who would …?” Her face had gone pale. Now suddenly her eyes brightened in fury. “Lute!” she cried softly. “It couldn’t be anyone else!”
A core of anger was hardening in Frank. He said nothing, though he was already halfway grasping the cunning that lay behind the work that had been done down there. What struck him hardest of all was that, except for this unforeseen thaw, the blocking of Owl Creek channel might never have been discovered.
“What do we do, Frank?” Kate’s voice was unsteady, the look she gave him an awed, furious one. “Bring Jim Echols up here and show it to him?”
“Let’s have a look.” Frank reined the buckskin over to a point on the rim fifty yards away that let him look down on the upper reach of the Porcupine, stepped out of the saddle. By the time Kate stood beside him he had seen enough down there to let him tell her: “There’s the way they came. Looks like the tracks of a sled. They did the work with a scoop and a team.”
“Jim is going to see this. And I’m going to have it out with Lute. We can haul him into court for this.”
Frank gave her a glance that was faintly amused. “Suppose our friend says he doesn’t know anything about this? Suppose he …?”
“But who else could have done it?”
Frank nodded. “It probably was Pleasants. But where’s your proof? He can say it was someone else that wanted to make trouble between your two outfits. Then there’s this. Down below, where the sun has had a chance at the snow, you’re not going to find any sled tracks. He’s in the clear, Kate.”
“But Jim Echols can see it with his own eyes. He’ll know.”
“Sure. But even that’s not proof enough to bring before a court.”
His words heightened her look of helplessness and bafflement, and in another moment she was asking in a small voice: “Then what can we do?”
He hesitated in his answer, peering below once more. This rim on which they stood sloped steeply downward in a series of rotten sandstone ledges and talus slopes all the way to the narrow banks along the channel of the Porcupine. Fifty yards farther along the rim rose a thirty-foot-high formation of shelf rock that was badly weathered, its inner edge crumbling away.
Slabs of sandstone had fallen from the table rock’s side and lay close to the edge of the rim, some upended and lying against others. And directly beyond a thin stand of aspen grew along the line of the drop-off, a few of the trees leaning precariously outward and hanging by their roots where portions of the rim had fallen away.
Sight of those exposed tree roots all at once roused a thought in Frank that was like suddenly being able to see clearly in total darkness. He looked around at Kate with a glance that mirrored a genuine awe, drawling: “What can you do?” He nodded toward the slabs of rock lying so close to the edge of the drop-off. “There’s your way of making friend Pleasants wish he’d never come up here.”
For a long moment Kate’s expression was one of complete mystification. Then abruptly a look of dawning comprehension brought her eyes wider open. She quickly moved a step closer to the rim and peered downward. When her glance finally came around to Frank again, her green eyes were bright with a blend of excitement and alarm.
“You’re trying to tell me we could block off the Porcupine?”
“Yes. So tight nothing could ever blow it loose. But,” he added gravely, “you’ve got to think what it would mean to Anchor, all that water pouring out across your range.”
“What does it mean to Beavertail?” Kate countered. “It means grass, a world of it.”
“Another thing,” he said still speaking very seriously. “Suppose Pleasants comes up here and finds our tracks? He can.…”
“Suppose he does?” she cut in, fire in her eyes now. “Would he dare tell Echols? Or anyone else? You and I have seen what he’s done down there.”
She turned quickly away then, hurrying across to the base of the towering formation of sandstone, looking around once and calling impatiently: “Come on, Frank!”
He smiled as he followed her, some of the same excitement that was gripping her beginning to have its way with him now. And as he joined her, he said: “Woman, I’d hate ever to be on the outs with you.”
“You’re not Lute Pleasants, so you probably never will be.” She walked across to a tilted-up slab of sandstone close to the edge of the rim, telling him—“This one will do for a start.”—bending down to get a grip on its lower edge.
He joined her, leaned over, and took a handhold close beside her, breathing—“Now.”—and putting all his strength into the lift. A stab of pain ran up along his bad arm, yet he ignored it, feeling the touch of Kate’s shoulder against his as the muscles of her slender body tensed.
The rock was very heavy, four feet long and a foot in thickness, though narrow. He felt it inch upward and threw more of his weight behind it. And as it tilted farther, he rasped out: “Back, Kate.”
She didn’t move, didn’t say anything. And as he felt the rock all at once tilt beyond the vertical and begin its outward fall, he threw an arm about her waist, wheeled, and ran back from the edge of the rim.
Ten strides took them back past the base of the table rock, Kate meantime gripping Frank’s hand and holding it tighter about her waist in sudden fright at a rumbling sound rising out of the gorge behind them. They stopped and turned then, facing the rim as the rumble mounted to a low roar.
They could feel the earth trembling under them, and off to their right the b
uckskin whickered in sudden panic. The roar gathered volume until it drowned out the sound of the stream far below. Dust began rising lazily out of the depths.
Where they had been standing only seconds ago, a twenty-foot stretch of the rim all at once tilted outward and vanished from sight, taking four aspen trees with it. They heard that heavy mass of rimrock strike a shelf below with a prolonged, hollow booming that echoed back from the far wall of the gorge. And across there Frank was amazed to see a wedge of talus all at once move slowly downward and settle out of sight in a smother of dust.
He called above the roar—“Let’s get out of here!”—and pushed Kate on ahead of him and farther back from the rim.
They ran across to the buckskin and gelding, quieting the animals as the last low rumble of falling rock echoed up out of the depths.
Kate looked at Frank, her face pale, her expression aghast. “Can we … can we look now?”
He nodded, and she came quickly across to him, reaching out and taking his hand, needing the assurance of his physical presence to steady her as they walked slowly out to the rim’s edge.
As she peered downward, she clenched his hand so tightly that her nails bit into his palm. Yet he didn’t feel that in his awe at what he was seeing through the settling pall of dust down there.
The gorge of the Porcupine was choked to a height of a third of its depth by a peaked dam of rock and rubble. The stream was already backing up behind it, forming a small lake.
In another quarter hour, Frank supposed, Lute Pleasants’s dam across the mouth of the Owl would be washed away and the gorge below it roaring with the full force of the run-off.
Chapter Fourteen
They had little to say on the long ride back from the rim, both of them awed to silence by what they had witnessed up there.
For they had waited to see the roiled waters of the Porcupine slowly fill in behind the awesome mound of the slide to form a small lake littered with debris—branches, a few logs, and floating yellow islands of aspen and willow leaves. Then, as though it had been built as a plaything for the amusement of a child, the seething waters had burst over Lute Pleasants’s carefully built gravel dam and washed it away.
The near end of the dam still remained. “Something you can show Echols,” Frank had said. And as they rode on down along the line of the gorge, the booming roar of the stream coursing down the bed of the Owl had been a muted thunder following them.
Twilight lay across the mile-long meadow and its fenced stacks of wild timothy as they rode down on Anchor. No light showed in either the bunkhouse windows or those of the sprawling house of square-cut logs, and Kate had finally ended a long interval of silence by saying: “Wade always works till it’s too dark to see. And we needn’t count on Fred being here for supper. He may be spending more time with Crowe than he’d planned on.”
They had rounded the far end of the barn and were riding in on the corral at the near end of the pasture when Frank abruptly noticed the buckboard blocking the corral gate alongside the watering trough, the team standing, heads down, patiently waiting.
It was the rig Fred had driven to town this morning. Something about the look of it—perhaps the fact of the reins being wound about the brake arm—sent its sharp warning to him. Something was wrong here, very wrong.
The light was so poor that he hoped Kate hadn’t noticed the buckboard yet. As casually as he could, he told her: “Some coffee would go down good right now. Go on up to the house.…”
“Fred’s back,” she cut in, not giving him the chance to finish what he had been about to say. “But why would he leave the team that way?”
He left her side then, putting the buckskin over there at a lope. He came in alongside the buckboard and looked down into it, caught his breath.
Fred Bond lay sprawled on his back between several disarranged blocks of salt. His face was puffed, swollen. His eyes were closed, his head rolled around to the side. Blood stained his mouth and the boards below his head.
Frank wheeled on away and back out to meet Kate. He caught her gelding’s reins, pulled the animal to a halt, saying tonelessly: “Get on up to the house, Kate.”
Chapter Fifteen
Forty minutes after he had carried Fred Bond to his bedroom at Anchor, helped Kate undress him, and listened to his sometimes incoherent story, Frank Rivers rode his badly blown buckskin up Ute Springs’ main street to Doc Lightfoot’s house.
Within three minutes of knocking on the medico’s door, he was helping Lightfoot hitch a mare to a buggy they had pushed out of a shed to the rear of the house.
“Tell me about that arm again,” the doctor said as he climbed into the buggy and unwound the reins from the whip socket. “Could he move it? Was there a break?”
“No break we could find. We had to straighten it. Then’s when he yelled and went under.”
“Dislocation then. Hurts to beat hell.”
“Doc”—Frank waited until the medico, turning the buggy, reined in and looked down at him once more—“it may be Fred’s hurt bad. So get up there fast as this mare’ll take you. If you kill her getting you there, I’ll see you get another.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make tracks.” Lightfoot’s voice was low-pitched in anger over what he had heard these past two minutes. “And just remember, Fred’s tough.”
He drove out the yard gate then and turned down the street, the mare at a fast trot. Frank trudged on out past the house and to the buckskin tied at a rail beyond the walk, beginning to feel his tiredness now. He stood there until the buggy’s lamps had faded from sight around a bend far below, the quiet rage still seething in him as he thought back on those ten minutes he had spent with Fred before leaving Anchor.
Kate’s brother, he supposed, would never be quite the same again. The arm might heal and be all right, and many a man had got along without three of his teeth. But no man, regardless of his disposition, could keep from becoming in some degree bitter after being beaten about the head with a gun, after being booted in chest and stomach and groin until sheer agony dragged him into unconsciousness.
He thought—Now Echols.—with an added measure of resentment. About to climb to the saddle again, he decided against it and, grateful for the way the buckskin had carried him down here, reached over to slap the animal gently on the neck, afterward taking a hold on the reins and leading him on up the street.
Not a window in the courthouse showed a light, so he walked on as far as the livery, let the buckskin drink briefly from the street trough, then led him into the barn and put him in a stall. He took off the saddle, paid the hostler for two measures of oats and one of corn, and only then asked: “Where would a man find Echols this time of night?”
“Jim? No tellin’. Try at the hotel.”
Frank went on up the street and shortly cut across it toward the lights of the hotel, wondering about the reception the sheriff would give him if he could find him. As he climbed the verandah steps leading to the Hill House’s entrance, the tantalizing odor of cooking meat from a restaurant two doors below made him suddenly realize he was ravenous. But that didn’t matter just yet.
Inside, he crossed the lamplit lobby to a counter at the foot of the stairway, asking the old man behind it: “Jim Echols been around tonight?”
The other nodded to a broad doorway on the far side of the room. “He ought to be right in there, eating his supper.”
Frank saw Echols the moment he stepped to the entrance of the nearly empty dining room. The lawman was eating at a table in the far corner in company with a young woman with a freckled, plain-looking face and straw-colored hair.
Uneasy over having to intrude upon this somehow intimate scene and interrupt the sheriff’s meal, Frank nevertheless took off his hat and walked across there. Jim Echols happened to look up and see him coming, and a scowl settled over his thin face.
“If you’re here to see me, I’m busy,” he brusquely remarked as Frank reached the table.
His tone ruffled Frank’s unstea
dy temper. Yet Frank managed to say quietly: “Fred Bond’s taken a bad beating. Doc Lightfoot’s on his way out to see him. Thought you ought to know about it.”
The lawman’s look of truculence vanished before one of undisguised apprehension. “Fred hurt? Who did it?”
Frank glanced pointedly down at the girl. “Hadn’t we better step outside?”
Echols misread his meaning and snapped: “Lola’s to be trusted. Come on, man, out with it.”
Deciding to match the other’s bluntness, Frank shrugged meagerly, saying: “They knocked out three of his teeth, cut up his face and head. They may’ve kicked in a couple ribs. Something’s wrong with his left arm and.…”
“Who the hell was it?” the sheriff burst out, his thin face pale now, his voice grating in bridled anger that wasn’t directed at Frank.
“Three Beavertail men, Harry and Ben and one other. Only now they claim they’re working for a man named Crowe.”
“For Phil Crowe?” The lawman’s look mirrored outright incredulity. “Doing what?”
“Putting in more fence.” Frank waited a moment for Echols to take this in, then went on: “Fred had been across to see Crowe in Summit when.…”
“I know all that. He told me today he was goin’ to see Crowe. Where’d this happen, in Summit?”
“No. Right at the line between Crowe’s land and Anchor. They’ve set up a camp down below and started digging post holes. They spotted Fred on his way home, stopped him, said they’d hired on with Crowe, and that he was to keep to his side of the line from here out. He lost his head and admits he started the argument.”
“Which means my hands are tied.” The lawman sighed in disgust and glanced at Lola Ames to say wearily: “What was I tellin’ you about bein’ over a barrel? First the fence, then that Cauble mess. Now this. What’s a man to do? Where do I start from to set things right?”