“You think it’s a sure thing, then?” Logan asked, incredulously.
“Yes,” Dowd replied.
“Well, I think you’re wrong for a hundred dollars,” Logan said.
“All right.” Dowd looked at Remy. “I’ll be inside, buying what we need, Miss Remy.”
“Aren’t you even going to watch it?” Logan demanded.
“No,” Dowd said. “I’ve seen it before.” He turned and walked into the store.
“Well!” Logan looked at Remy, astonished. “That foreman of yours is a peculiar man.”
“Yes.” She looked after Dowd, disturbed. “He sounded like he had known something of Mahone before. Now let’s go!”
“You aren’t going to watch it?” Pierce Logan was shocked in spite of himself.
“Of course! I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”
* * *
FINN MAHONE KNEW fighters of Leibman’s type. The man had won many fights. He had expected Mahone to avoid the issue, but Mahone’s calm acceptance and his complete lack of excitement were disturbing the bigger man. Mahone pulled off his shirt.
Leibman’s face hardened suddenly. If ever he had looked at a trained athlete’s body, he was looking at it now. With a faint stir of doubt he realized he was facing no common puncher, no backwoods brawler. Then his confidence came back. He had never been whipped, never…
He went in with a rush, half expecting Mahone to be the boxer type who might try to evade him. Finn Mahone had no intention of evading anything. As Leibman rushed, he took one step in and smashed Leibman’s lips into pulp with a straight left. Then he ducked and threw a right to the body.
Stopped in his tracks, Leibman’s eyes narrowed. He feinted and clubbed Mahone with a ponderous right. Mahone took it and never even wavered, then he leaped in, punching with both hands!
Slugging madly, neither man giving ground, they stood spraddle-legged in the dust punching with all their power. Leibman gave ground first, but it was to draw Finn on, and when Mahone rushed, Leibman caught him with a flying mare and threw him over his back!
Finn hit the ground in a cloud of dust, and as a roar went up from the crowd, he leaped to his feet and smashed Leibman back on his heels with a wicked right to the jaw. Leibman ducked under another punch and tried to throw Mahone with a rolling hiplock. It failed when Mahone grabbed him and they both tumbled into the dust. Finn was up first, and stepped back, wiping the dust from his lips. Leibman charged, and Finn side-stepped, hooking a left to the bigger man’s ear.
Leibman pulled his head down behind his shoulder. Then he rushed, feinted, and hit Mahone with a wicked left that knocked him into the dust. He went in, trying to kick, but Finn caught his foot and twisted, throwing Leibman off balance.
Finn was on his feet then, and the two men came together and began to slug. The big German was tough; he had served his apprenticeship in a hard school. He took a punch to the gut, gasped a long breath, and lunged. Then Finn stepped back and brought up a right uppercut that broke Leibman’s nose.
Finn walked in, his left a flashing streak now. It stabbed and cut, ripping Leibman’s face to ribbons. Suddenly, Judge Collins realized something that few in the crowd understood. Until now, Mahone had been playing with the big man. What happened after that moment was sheer murder.
The left was a lancet in the shape of a fist. The wicked right smashed again and again into Leibman’s body, or clubbed his head. Once Finn caught Leibman by the arm and twisted him sharply, at the same time bringing up a smashing right uppercut. Punch-drunk and swaying, Leibman was a gory, beaten mass of flesh and blood.
Finn looked at him coolly, then measured him with a left and drove a right to the chin that sounded when it hit like an ax hitting a log. Leibman fell, all in one piece.
Without a word or a glance around, Finn walked to his saddle and picked up his shirt. Then he dug into his saddlebags and took out a worn towel. Judge Collins came over to him. “Better put these on first,” he said.
Finn glanced at him sharply, then smiled. “I reckon I had,” he said. He mopped himself with the towel, then slid into his shirt. With the guns strapped on his lean hips, he felt better.
His knuckles were skinned despite the hardness of his hands. He looked up at Collins. “Looks like they were figurin’ on trouble.”
“That’s right. There’s rumors around, son. You better watch yourself.”
“Thanks.” Mahone swung into the saddle. As he turned the horse he glanced to the boardwalk and saw the girl watching him. Beside her was a tall, handsome man with powerful shoulders. He smiled grimly, and turned the horse away down the street, walking him slowly.
Texas Dowd appeared at Logan’s elbow. Pierce turned and handed him a hundred dollars. “You’d seen him fight before?” he asked.
Dowd shrugged. “Could be. He’s fought before.”
“Yes,” Logan said thoughtfully, “he has.” He glanced at Dowd again. “What do you know about him?”
Texas Dowd’s face was inscrutable. “That he’s a good man to leave alone,” he said flatly.
Dowd turned stiffly and strode away. Nettled, Logan stared after him. “Where did you find him?” he asked.
Remy smiled faintly. “He came up over the border when I was away at school. Dad liked the way he played poker. He started working for us, and Dad made him foreman. There was a gunman around who was making trouble. I never really got it straight, but the gunman died. I heard Dad telling one of the hands about it.”
Behind them Texas Dowd headed down the street. He made one brief stop at Lettie Mason’s gambling hall and emerged tucking a single playing card into his breast pocket. Then he mounted his horse and rode hard down the trail toward the Highbinders.…
* * *
FINN MAHONE WALKED the black only to the edge of town, then broke the stallion into a canter and rapidly put some miles behind him. Yet no matter how far or fast he rode, he could not leave the girl behind him. He had seen Remy Kastelle, and something about her gave him a lift, sent fire into his veins. Several times he was on the verge of wheeling the horse and heading back.
She was his nearest neighbor, her range running right up to the Rimrock. But beyond the Rimrock nobody ever tried to come. Finn slowed the black to a walk again, scowling as he rode. His holdings were eighty miles from Rawhide where Alcorn and Leibman lived. There was no reason for them jumping him, unless they needed a scapegoat. The talk about rustling was building up, and if they could pin it on him, there were plenty of people who would accept it as gospel.
People were always suspicious of anyone who kept to himself. Nobody knew the Highbinder country like he did. If they had guessed he had nearly five thousand acres of top grassland, there might have been others trying to horn in.
Crystal Valley, watered by Crystal Creek, which flowed into the Laird, was not just one valley, it was three. In the first, where his home was, there were scarcely three hundred acres. In the second there were more than a thousand acres, and in the third, over three thousand. There was always water here, even in the driest weather, and the grass always grew tall. Three times the number of cattle he now had could never have kept it down.
High, rocky walls with very few passes made it impossible for cattle to stray. The passes were okay for a man on foot, or in one or two cases, a man on a mountain horse, but nothing more.
After a while he reined in and looked off across the rolling country toward the Kastelle spread. It was a good ranch, and Remy was making it a better one. She knew cattle, or she had someone with her who did. He smiled bitterly because he knew just who that someone was.
Finn Mahone got down from his horse and rolled and lighted a cigarette. As he faced north, he looked toward the Kastelle ranch with its Lazy K brand. Southwest of him was McInnis and his Spur outfit. The McInnis ranch was small, but well handled, and until lately, prosperous.
East of him was the town of Laird, and south and just a short distance west of Laird, the P Slash L ranch of Pierce Logan.
&n
bsp; Northeast of town was Van Brewster’s Lazy S, and north of that, the hamlet of Rawhide. Rawhide was a settlement of ranchers, small ranchers such as Banty Hull, Alcorn, Leibman, Ringer Cobb, Ike Hibby, Frank Salter, and Montana Kerr. It was also the hangout of Byrn Sonntag.
He had not been joking when he suggested the best way to look for rustlers was with a pen and ink. There are few brands that cannot be altered, and it was a curious thing that the brands of the small group of cattlemen who centered in Rawhide could be changed very easily into Brewster’s Lazy S or McInnis’s Spur.
Finn Mahone was a restless man. There was little to do on his range much of the time, so when not reading or working around the place, he rode. And his riding had taken him far eastward along the ridge of the Highbinders, eastward almost as far as Rawhide.
Mounting, Finn turned the stallion toward the dim trail that led toward the Notch. It was a trail not traveled but by himself. A trail no one showed any desire to follow.
Ahead of him a Joshua tree thrust itself up from the plain. It was a lone sentinel, the only one of its kind in many miles. He glanced at it and was about to ride by when something caught his eye. He reined the horse around and rode closer. Thrust into the fiber of the tree was a playing card. A hole had been shot through each corner.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he said. “Texas Dowd. He finally figured out I was here—” His comment to the stallion stopped abruptly, and he replaced the card, looking at it thoughtfully. Then, on a sudden inspiration, he wheeled the stallion and rode off fifty feet or so, then turned the horse again. His hand flashed and a gun was in it. He fired four times as rapidly as he could trigger the gun. Then he turned the horse and rode away.
There were four more holes in the card, just inside the others. A message had been sent, and now the reply given.
* * *
THE GREAT WALL of the Rimrock loomed up on his left. It was a sheer, impossible precipice from two to six hundred feet high and running for all of twelve miles. For twenty miles further there was no way over except on foot. It was wild country across the Rim, and not even Finn Mahone had ever explored it thoroughly.
Straight ahead was the great rift in the wall. Sheer rock on one side, a steep slope on the other. Down the bottom ran the roaring, brawling Laird River, a tumbling rapids with many falls. The trail to Crystal Valley skirted the stream and the sheer cliff. Eight feet wide, it narrowed to four, and ran on for three miles, never wider than that.
After that it crossed the Laird three times, then disappeared at a long shale bank that offered no sign of a trail. The shale had a tendency to shift and slide at the slightest wrong move. It was that shale bank that defeated ingress to the valley. There was a way across. An outlaw had shown it to Finn, and he’d heard it from an Indian.
By sighting on the white blaze of a tree, and a certain thumblike projection of rock, one could make it across. Beneath the shale at this point there was a shelf of solid rock. A misstep and one was off into loose shale that would start to slide. It slid, steeper and steeper, for three hundred yards, then plunged off, a hundred feet below, into a snarl of lava pits.
Once across the slides, the trail was good for several miles, then wound through a confusion of canyons and washes. At the end one rode through a narrow stone bottleneck into the paradise that was Crystal Valley.
Finn Mahone dismounted at the Rimrock, and led his horse to the edge of the river. While the black was drinking, he let his eyes roam through the trees toward the Notch, then back over the broad miles of the Lazy K.
Remy Kastelle. The name made music in his mind. He remembered the flash of her eyes, her quick, capable walk.
The sun was warm, and he sat down on the bank of the stream and watched the water. Until now he had known peace, and peace was the one thing most to be desired. His cattle grew fat on the grassy valley lands, there were beaver and mink to be trapped, deer to be hunted. Occasionally, a little gold to be panned from corners and bends of the old creek bank. It had been an easy, happy, but lonely life.
It would be that no longer. For months now he had seen the trouble building in Laird Valley. He had listened to the gossip of ranch hands in Rico, the cattle buyers and the bartenders. He had heard stories of Byrn Sonntag, of Montana Kerr, of Ringer Cobb.
Simple ranchers? He had smiled at the idea. No man who knew the Big Bend country would ever suggest that, nor any man who had gone up the trail to Dodge and Hays. They were men whose names had legends built around them, men known for ruthless killing.
Frank Salter was just as bad. Lean and embittered, Salter had ridden with Quantrill’s guerrillas, then he had trailed west and south. He had killed a man in Dimmit, another in Eagle Pass. He was nearly fifty now, but a sour, unhappy man with a rankling hatred for everything successful, everything peaceful.
Of them all, Sonntag was the worst. He was smooth, cold-blooded, with nerves like chilled steel. He had, the legends said, killed twenty-seven men.
Looking on from a distance Mahone had the perspective to see the truth. Until lately, there had been no suspicion of rustling. No tracks had been found; there had reportedly been no mysterious disappearances of cattle. The herds had been weeded patiently and with intelligence.
Abraham McInnis suddenly awakened to the realization that the thousand or more cattle he had believed to be in the brakes were not there. The rustlers had carefully worked cattle down on the range so there would always be cattle in sight. They had taken only a few at a time, and they had never taken a cow without its calf, and vice versa.
McInnis had gone to town and met with Brewster, and Van had returned to his own ranch. For three days he covered it as he had not covered it since the last roundup. At the very least, he was missing several hundred head of cattle. The same was true of Collins, the Kastelles, and Pierce Logan.
All of this was known to Finn Mahone. Stories got around in cattle country, and he was a man who listened much and remembered what he heard. Moreover, he could read trail sign like most men could read a newspaper.
He mounted the stallion and started over the trail for Crystal Valley.
* * *
PIERCE LOGAN WAS disturbed. He was a cool, careful man who rarely made mistakes. He had moved the outlaws into Rawhide, had made sure they all had small holdings, had given them their brands. Then he had engineered, from his office in town and his ranch headquarters, the careful job of cattle theft that had been done. Byrn Sonntag was a man who would listen, and Byrn was a man who could give orders. The stealing had been so carefully done that it had been going on for a year before the first rumbles of suspicion were heard.
Even then, none of that suspicion was directed toward Rawhide. When Rawhide ranchers came to Laird they were quiet and well behaved. In Rawhide they had their own town, their own saloon, and when they felt like a bust, they went, under orders, to Rico.
Logan had understood that sooner or later there would be trouble. He had carefully planned what to do beforehand. He had dropped hints here and there about Finn Mahone, choosing him simply because he lived alone and consequently was a figure of mystery and some suspicion. He had never mentioned Finn’s name in connection with rustling. Only a couple of times he had wondered aloud what he found to do all the time, and elsewhere he had commented that whatever he did, it seemed to pay well.
Pierce Logan had seen Mahone but once before, and that time from a distance. He had no animosity toward him, choosing the man cold-bloodedly because he was the best possible suspect.
His plan was simple. When Mahone was either shot, hung for rustling, or run out of the country, the pressure would be off, the ranchers would relax, and his plans could continue for some time before suspicion built up again. If in the process of placing the blame on Mahone he could remove some of the competition from the picture, so much the better. He had a few plans along those lines.
His was not a new idea. It was one he had pondered upon a good deal before he came west to Laird. He had scouted the country with care, and then
had trusted the gathering of the men to Sonntag.
Everything had gone exactly as planned. His seeds of suspicion had fallen on fertile soil, and his rustlers had milked the range of over five thousand head of cattle before questions began to be asked. No big bunches had been taken, and he had been careful to leave no bawling cows or calves on the range. The cattle had been shoved down on the open country on the theory that as long as plenty of cattle were in sight, few questions would be asked.
Two things disturbed him now. One of them was the fact that Finn Mahone had proved to be a different type of man than he had believed. He had defeated Leibman easily and thoroughly, and in so doing had become something of a local hero. Moreover, the way he had done it had proved to Logan that he was not any ordinary small-time rancher, to be tricked and deluded. Also, despite himself, he was worried by what Dowd had said.
The unknown is always disturbing. Although he and Dowd had little to do with one another, Texas Dowd had the reputation of being a tough and capable man. The fact that he knew Mahone and had referred to him as dangerous worried Logan. In his foolproof scheme, he might have bagged some game he didn’t want.
The second disturbing factor was Texas Dowd himself. Pierce Logan’s easy affability, his personality, his money, and his carefully planned influence made no impression on Dowd. Logan knew this, and also knew that Dowd was suspicious of him. He doubted that Dowd had any reason for his suspicion. Yet, any suspicion was a dangerous thing.
Pierce Logan had been careful to see that some of his own cattle were rustled. He had deliberately planned that. It made no difference to him how they were sold; he got a big share of the money in any event, and it paid to avoid suspicion. Also, he had gone easy on the Lazy K, because Texas Dowd was a restless rider, a man forever watching his grazing land, forever noticing cattle. Also, Pierce Logan was pretty sure he would someday own the Lazy K.
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