Reaching out, he got a foot on it and pushed up; the black horse instantly took up the slack. Fallon swung a hand up and got hold of the edge. Teel’s boots fought for a toehold and dug in, and suddenly they both had arms over the edge and the black took up the slack so suddenly that they found themselves over the edge and sprawled in a muddy tangle.
Teel struggled to his feet and stood swaying. “You surely picked a lousy night for a ride!” he said wryly.
Fallon got up and spoke to the black horse, which walked toward them. “I could do with some coffee,” he said.
“Hell!” Teel said. “I could do with a drink, although I’ve sworn off the stuff.”
Riding double, they rode back into town.
It was breaking day when they came into the street, covered with mud, and exhausted but hilarious. Damon was out, sweeping off his walk, and he looked at them in astonishment.
“What happened to you two?” he asked.
Teel was not a man given to saving face or mincing words. Briefly, he told what had happened. “We could have lost the herd,” he said at the end, “and you’ve eight or nine head there yourself.”
“I can’t understand it,” Damon said. “Al wouldn’t—”
“He was drunk,” Pete Shoyer interrupted. Shoyer was a late-comer and owed no loyalty to Damon. “I got up to close a window and saw him ridin’ up the street. Chances are he’s back there in the stable, sleepin’ it off.”
* * *
AL DAMON AWAKENED slowly. The first thing he smelled was the fresh hay beneath him; and opening his eyes, he found himself staring up at the low rafters in the shed behind the store, which served them as a stable.
He rolled over and pushed himself up, sitting back and looking around. His head throbbed heavily and his mouth tasted awful. His pistol had fallen from its holster, and he picked it up and slipped it back in place.
The sun was high in the sky. The morning noises were around him, but they were late noises. No roosters were crowing, but a hen that had laid an egg was cackling.
He got up, then staggered against a doorpost, holding his head.
His horse was gone…the saddle was gone. He looked outside and cringed as the sunlight struck his eyes. He’d better find that horse and get the stock out on the grass. Pa would—
The horse was nowhere in the stable, nor was it outside, as he half expected it to be. Hitching up his belt, he put on his hat and went striding angrily into the store.
“Where’s my horse?” he demanded. “Somebody rode off on my horse.”
His father looked up. “The horse you call yours,” he said coldly, “belongs to Blane, and Jim Blane is riding it now. He also has your job of riding herd on the stock.”
Al Damon was feeling mad, but his father intervened before his son could give vent to his anger.
“You were drunk,” the older man said bitterly; “filthy, dirty drunk and sprawled in the hay. If it hadn’t been for Teel and Fallon we’d have lost everything last night, and no fault of yours that we didn’t.”
“What happened?”
Joshua Teel had told the story, and he had told it in concise and often profane terms. Joshua Teel was no storyteller, but starkly told, the happenings of the night were clear to everyone.
“What I want to know,” Damon asked, “is where you got the whiskey. Brennan didn’t sell it to you.”
“None o’ your damn business!”
Damon’s face went white. “Don’t you speak to me like that!” He came from behind the counter. “You’ve been behaving like a young tough long enough. You will take that pistol off and you will leave it here in the store. And you will get up in the morning—every morning—and help me here.”
“I ain’t a-gonna do it!” Al shouted. “I ain’t no kid! I’ll do what I damn’ well please!”
He walked out of the store and stopped on the walk. He could hear the ring of Blane’s hammer on the anvil over at the blacksmith shop, and he started in that direction. Then he stopped. Blane was worse than his pa. No use trying to talk to him.
There were still some silver dollars in his pocket, and he started for the saloon. Then he hesitated…Fallon would be there. About this time he usually ate breakfast, and Al did not want to see Fallon. Not this morning.
Fallon was a hero, a big man. He had saved their stock—or made out like he had. What was there to that? Just driving the cattle up out of the wash.
Al Damon stood there on the street, and his head ached. He dreaded seeing his mother, so going to the house was out of the question. And he didn’t even have a horse.
The enormity of that struck him hard. Without a horse, he could not get to see Bellows. Without a horse, he couldn’t go anywhere, do anything! And how could he explain to Bellows that he, who aspired to be a member of an outlaw gang, had his horse taken from him like any brat of a kid?
He walked slowly down the street and, looking toward the flat, he glimpsed a rider moving along the wash. It was Fallon. There was no other horse like that around.
Al Damon turned quickly and went up the street to the Yankee Saloon. Brennan was standing behind the bar smoking his morning cigar.
“How’s for some coffee?” Al Damon said. “And maybe a couple of them eggs?”
Brennan turned, picked up the pot, and filled a cup. “No eggs,” he said, sliding the cup across the bar. “Too hard to come by.”
Al Damon was about to make an angry reply, but he kept his mouth shut. He had a feeling that whatever he might say would be ignored by Brennan.
After a moment he spoke. “They fired me,” he said, “just because I had a couple of drinks. Hell, I didn’t do nothin’.”
Brennan took the cigar from his mouth and looked thoughtfully at the ash. It was building evenly and well. He put the cigar back in his mouth and looked down the street toward the flat.
“All over nothin’,” Al Damon complained. “Those cattle were all right. That ol’ dam won’t hold water, nohow.”
Brennan took his cup and went over to the coffee pot to fill it. Fallon should be back soon, and he was looking forward to it.
Fallon puzzled him. What kind of a man was he? The events of the previous night had told him nothing he had not known. That Fallon had nerve and that he would come through when the going was rough—that he had taken for granted. What interested Brennan was what kind of a man he was otherwise. Macon Fallon was a man who held his own thoughts, expressing them rarely and to few men.
“That Fallon,” Al Damon said, “he makes me tired!”
Brennan took the cigar from his mouth again, this time quickly, angrily. The ash fell off and he swore, staring down at it.
“He wears that gun around,” Al Damon went on, “not even a notch on it. Not one!”
Brennan’s anger stirred him to speak. It irritated him that he did speak, for he did not want to. A saloon wasn’t the same as any place else. In a saloon a man was entitled to speak his mind, as long as it didn’t offend anybody, and if it did, then the speaker was answerable for it. But a saloon was a place for a man to come with his troubles, and a bartender made a habit of listening without really paying much attention, unless the speaker was a friend.
Now Brennan spoke. “Nobody but a tin-horn would file a notch on his gun!” he said. “That’s a kid’s trick!”
“Like hell!” Al said. “Tandy Herren does it! He’s got sixteen notches on his gun!”
Brennan tasted his coffee. It was too weak. He put the cup down and picked up his cigar. Suddenly, he was worried. He glanced quickly at Al, then away. How much of a fool was Al Damon?
“I doubt it,” he said. “Tandy’s a good hand with a gun, all right, but he’d never carve notches on his gun.”
“A lot you know!” Al Damon scoffed. “I seen it!”
Instantly, he knew he had said too much. He hastily gulped
the rest of his coffee. “Got to see Pa!” he said, and went out.
Sunlight was bright in the street, and for a moment he stood still, thinking of what he had said. Brennan would likely think he had seen Tandy Herren coming west. After all, what did Brennan know about where he had been or who he had seen?
He walked down the street, knowing he must make peace with his father, but reluctant to begin it. He would see his mother first. And then he would have to study out a way to get hold of a horse.
Macon Fallon rode slowly along the rim of the wash. He was still tired, but the warm sunlight felt good, and the air was fresh and clean. Moreover, he had water. A lot had gone over the dam, of course, but after the flash flood had ended, he still had a lot of water backed up in the wash.
It lapped within a few inches of the top of the dam and extended back up the wash for several hundred yards. The sun would evaporate a good bit of it, but even so, this water, with what the rain had done, would get their crops started. Several acres of corn had been planted, and a few rows of onions, potatoes, carrots, and such-like.
Turning in the saddle, he looked up toward the town. It was fresh and attractive in the morning sunlight, and certainly the setting was splendid. The mountains towered above and behind the town, giving the place an almost picture-book setting. With some management, it could become a most attractive place.
Not that it mattered in the long run. All he wanted was one good prospect on whom he could unload the claims.
The passing of time, however, worried him, for with each succeeding day the chances of someone showing up who knew the town as Buell’s Bluff became greater. Or the chances of someone coming to town from Seven Pines.
Riding along the bank of the wash had brought him close to the grazing cattle. He turned toward the mountains to avoid coming close to Jim Blane, but the boy swung his horse around and cantered over to him.
“Pa told me what you did last night,” Jim said. “You might have been killed.”
“A man takes his chances.”
“None of that stock was yours,” Jim said. “It was different with Teel. He had a lot to lose.”
“I couldn’t have done anything without him,” Fallon said. “He’s quite a man, Teel is.”
They talked for a few minutes about the stock, the grazing, and the water, and then Fallon rode on into the hills. He went north, and soon found himself picking his way up the slope. It was in his mind that he might find a deer, and he had not ridden this way before. He was looking for sign when he found the remains of the fire.
Night or day, a man might ride very close to that little hollow without seeing it, and any fire would have been invisible. Whatever tracks there might have been had been wiped out by the rain…or had they?
He stepped down from the saddle and stirred the remains of the fire. Rain had pounded the ashes into a mass, but the charred sticks were plain enough. Squatting on his heels, he moved a few of them. There was sand and ash beneath them, and beneath that, more ash and a few sticks that had not burned. Dirt had been kicked over the fire once, and then another fire had been built on top of it.
Somebody had come here, more than once…why? There was no water nearby, no grazing for horses within half a mile, except for the sparse brush. Altogether, it was an unlikely place for a camp, except that it offered concealment.
Mounting the black horse, Fallon found a way out of the hollow, and he had gone only a short distance when he came on the same trail Al Damon had discovered.
Fallon, wiser in these things than Al Damon, recognized it for what it was, an ancient Indian trail. It undoubtedly had also been used by game, but it had been made by Indians.
It was not much over six inches wide, for Indians habitually walk with one foot placed ahead of the other and their trails are narrow. If Indians had made it, it led to something…probably to water or to some source of food.
He lost the trail, found it again, and then as he walked his horse under a great leaning slab of rock he saw the track. A horse had stepped under the shadow of the leaning rock where the earth had been sheltered from rain and wind.
When he had gone a little farther his eye caught something glinting in the sun. When he reached it, he saw that it was a whiskey bottle.
Al Damon had been drunk. And he had not had the whiskey from Brennan, who did not sell by the bottle, anyway.
Had it been Al Damon who met with somebody back there at the hollow? Or had he merely stumbled on the place as Fallon had? Yet what reason could Damon have for being here? His job had been to watch the stock.
Turning his horse back, Fallon sought out the continuation of the trail. He followed it by guess, by hunch, by a sort of instinct for such things, as much as he did by what he saw on the ground. An Indian rarely walked right out on a ridge; he usually followed the contour of a hill, and habitually sought the easiest going.
When Fallon had ridden for half an hour he realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into the mountains.
He had ventured into a gigantic cleft, invisible from the flat below, or even from the hollow where he had discovered the remains of the fire. A shoulder of the mountain presented a false wall and he had ridden behind this. The sides of the cleft sloped back steeply, ragged with projecting crags and spurs.
It was very hot, and the air was still. He was climbing steadily. Twice he drew up, studying the hills around, giving the black horse a breather. As he left one zone behind and entered another the growth was changing. The higher slopes were dotted with piñon pine, and the growth was thicker there.
He knew he should start back, but the lure of the trail led him on. There was always another bend, always another projecting rock around which he wished to see. Suddenly the trail dipped sharply, and went into a narrow cleft where the bottom was in the shadow of the towering cliffs above. The air was amazingly cool, and he smelled water.
When he found it, he saw that the water lay in a tank, a natural stone formation some fifty feet across and deep in the shadow where the sun could never reach it. A trickle of water flowed from the tank and lost itself among some rocks off to one side. There were sheep tracks a-plenty, but no tracks of horse, cow, or man.
Yet on the wall above there was Indian writing. He studied it curiously, wondering what it was meant to say. Perhaps it was an invocation to the gods of the hunt.
He watered the black, then rode on through the cleft until it suddenly dipped around and down into a great open park of grassland. This park was all of two miles wide, and perhaps three miles long. A small stream ran down the center. All around the great bowl, the mountains towered at least fifteen hundred feet, but to the north there seemed to be a gap, and that gap could very well be the canyon that ran past the town of Red Horse.
Suddenly a marmot scrabbled in the gravel on the slope, and Fallon turned his head sharply, his hand going automatically to his gun. He saw the little animal, and saw it vanish among the rocks.
He was about to start on when suddenly he saw that the trail he had been following branched here, and the left-hand branch, which he would not even have noticed had it not been for the marmot, went up, up, up among the great crags that rimmed the valley.
Only a small section of the ancient trail was visible, and it might have seemed a patch that was naturally bare, but his eye followed the hint the marmot had given and he saw there was a break in the rock.
Dismounting, he took his rifle and, scrambling over the rocks, reached the place he sought. There was a trail, and a trail a horse could climb. He looked up, drawn by the lure of the unknown trail, drawn as he had always been. But the hour was late and he was far from town.
Descending into the open space, he started across the grassland and, when he was near the stream, a deer suddenly started from the grass. He lifted his rifle, catching a quick sight of the back of the neck just above the shoulders. He squeezed off his s
hot, and the deer fell.
When he had butchered it, he started for the break in the hills which he was sure was the canyon leading toward home.
Suddenly a rider appeared, riding up from some hollow where he had remained hidden until now. And then another appeared, and another and another. And then another rider appeared, far on his right, and there were five, six riders there.
Utes….
Macon Fallon touched the black horse on the shoulder. “Ready, boy…we may have to run again.”
He held his rifle in his right hand and he rode forward, seeming to look neither to the right nor to the left, head up, the butt of the rifle on his thigh. Wind stirred the grass, and he looked ahead to the opening of the canyon.
How far? Half a mile? A mile? Distance was deceiving on these hot, still afternoons. The wind stirred again, faintly, like a living thing awakening from a long sleep.
The riders were drawing nearer. “All right, boy,” Fallon said quietly, and the black horse began to lope. It was an easy, space-eating lope, and he was riding toward the point of a triangle, of which the lines of Indians made the two sides.
His mouth was dry, and when he touched his tongue to his lips they, too, seemed dry.
They were closer…within rifle-shot soon. The black had come a long way, but the horse was good for the run to the canyon.
How far now? He had gained a few hundred yards, perhaps as much as a quarter of a mile.
“All right, boy…now!”
With a bound the black horse was off, running as if it was shot. Before him the canyon gaped. Suddenly the Indians had begun to whoop, and they were coming on, running hard.
The nearest one was over-anxious…he fired, and the sound of the shot racketed against the cliffs. The black was running fine, and the way was clear. But they were pulling up on him now, cutting across to head him off. He glanced to right and left. The nearest ones were close…too close.
The canyon opened before him, then closed to scarcely twenty yards wide. There were boulders and broken slabs of rock on the left, and Fallon eased the racing horse.
Fallon (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 7