by Max Brand
“Well?” said Ranger, pretending indifference, although the lowered voice of Sol Murphy made the beat of his heart quicken.
“Fact is,” said Sol Murphy, “there ain’t a gun on the Crosson Ranch.” He stared as he named the hidden mystery, and, keeping his face a blank and his eyes wide, he waited for similar astonishment to possess the listener.
Ranger did not need to pretend or to act a part. He gaped in turn. The two men presented perfect pictures of the same emotion.
“Yeah,” said the storekeeper, “it’s a funny thing.”
“Funny?” said Ranger. “I dunno that I see much that’s funny about it. Those hills back there look pretty wild to me. Looks to me like a real wilderness where a man could find some pelts. That’s why I want to trap it.”
“Of course they’re wild, those hills. And got some wild men in ’em, too.”
“What do the gents up that way say about Peter Crosson?”
“They don’t like him,” said Sol Murphy with decision.
“Don’t they? And why not?”
“Well, he ain’t neighborly,” said Sol.
“Ain’t a friendly kind of a gent, eh?”
“No, he ain’t,” said Murphy with quick decision. “There ain’t no friendliness in him. Not that he’s a mean man, though,” he added hastily, as one who does not wish to be guilty of an injustice.
“What does he do to them?” asked Ranger.
“Well,” said Sol Murphy, “that’s what I never could find out, but I know that none of the thugs ever bothers him.”
“They got a lot of thugs up there, have they?”
“Sure they have. They got a lot of thugs. Why, it’s a regular hole-in-the-wall country, what with the cañons and the brush and the woods. You could hide ten thousand men in almost any square mile of that country. If a posse chases a man that far, he stops right there. It ain’t anything but a clean waste of time to try to chase into the Tucker Hills. Everybody knows that that knows anything.”
The mere thought definitely irritated Sol. He swore once or twice under his breath and glared at Ranger as though he resented the presence of the stranger.
“Why,” said Ranger, “I wouldn’t think that anybody would wanna take up a holding right up there among them thieves.”
“Would you? No, you wouldn’t,” said the storekeeper. “You wouldn’t think so at all, and neither would I. But there they be. Right up there.”
“Maybe the Crossons are thugs themselves?” suggested Ranger.
So Murphy shrugged his shoulders. “How do I know?” he asked with the petty anger of a man who dislikes a question that he already had often asked of himself. “Nobody knows nothin’ about the Crossons. All I know is that nobody visits the Crossons twice.”
This information jarred suddenly home in the mind of Ranger. “Why, that’s kind of interesting,” he said.
“I think that it is,” agreed the storekeeper.
“Nobody ever gets to see ’em up there on the ranch?”
“No.”
“How do they drive strangers away . . . them not having any guns?”
“Dog-gone it!” exclaimed the irritated Sol Murphy. “How do I know? Wouldn’t I give my front teeth, and my grinders, too, if I could find out what they do to strangers? All I know is that when Charley Moore come back from a hunting trip up that way he had a scared look that didn’t wear off for mostly six months, and every time anybody mentioned the Tucker Hills he lost most of his summer’s tan and got up and left the room. Nobody knew what to make of it. But I reckon that he run into the Crossons.”
The hair began to prickle along the scalp of Bill Ranger. “It sounds sort of ghostly,” he declared.
“Yeah, don’t it?” said Sol Murphy. He went on slowly: “There was Jerry Hanson, too. He heard something about the Crossons, and he said that he didn’t believe that there was any such kind of people around there in the hills. He said that he was gonna ride right up there and have a look at things. And Jerry Hanson, mind you, is a fightin’ man.”
“Real one, eh?”
“Well, they say that he’s killed three. I dunno nothin’ about it, but that’s what I’ve heard. I know that I don’t want no trouble with Jerry Hanson. Anyway, I seen Jerry start. He had a horse and a pack mule. He had a good Winchester, and a pair of .45s that the triggers and the sights was filed off, that bein’ the kind of an hombre that Jerry Hanson is. He don’t trifle none at all. Well, he started off like that, not sayin’ nothin’ to anybody but me, because Jerry ain’t a talkin’ man. But he went up there to find the Crossons, because he told me so. And Jerry was the kind that would either do or die, I’ll have you know.” Sol Murphy paused.
“And what happened with him?” asked Ranger, itching with uneasy curiosity.
“Well,” said Murphy softly, “I didn’t see nothing of Jerry Hanson till about six months later when I was down at Hampton Crossing, and there I seen a freight train go by, and one of the doors of the boxcars was open, and settin’ inside was a man, cross-legged on the floor, his head in his hands, his face lookin’ sort of cadaverous and sick. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I would’ve said that that poor, starved-lookin’ gent, that a Chinaman would’ve had the nerve to go up and punch the nose of, I would’ve said that that was Jerry Hanson.”
“You don’t say,” breathed Lefty Ranger. Then he added with a rickety laugh: “I reckon that I’d better keep away from them hills.”
“Oh,” said Sol Murphy, “outside of a coupla dozen thugs and yeggs, them hills are safe as can be. You can trap all the mountain lions that you want, and get a good bounty for ’em right down here in Tuckerville. But don’t get no foolish ideas. Don’t start to trap no Crossons.”
“Tell me one thing,” said Ranger. “Why don’t people talk about ’em more around Tuckerville?”
The storekeeper frowned heavily upon him. “Stranger,” he said, “does folks likely talk a good deal about yaller fever and the smallpox?”
Chapter Five
When Lefty Bill Ranger packed his roll and left Alaska, he had felt that Menneval’s offer was the very height of romantic generosity—a thousand dollars a month for nothing more than travel, together with a little information to be picked up at the end of the trail.
But when he drove his loaded burro out of Tuckerville and steered his course for the ragged Tucker Hills, he felt that Menneval probably had driven a shrewd bargain with him. He was more excited than ever he had been in Alaska, whether fighting a storm or striking gold. There was danger ahead, and there was mystery ahead. And although he carried with him a good Winchester and an excellent Colt revolver as well, and although he was a master of both weapons, yet mere powder and lead seemed a very small comfort to Ranger.
Other men had come up here into the hills. They had possessed arms equal to his; they had possessed skill greater than his, no doubt, and yet none of them had seen the Crossons without becoming changed men. A mark had been put upon them—a mark about which they would not talk. A horror so great that it was beyond speech had closed over them, and now he was to put his foot upon the threshold of the same mystery, and the very thought of it sent cold prickles up his spine.
The Crossons might be madmen, able to overwhelm the minds of others by the insanity of their fury, their strength, their animal cunning.
The Crossons might be clever, hard-headed exploiters of something that the rest of the countryside knew nothing about. They might, for instance, be working quietly at some rich digging, piling up gold month by month, extracting a fortune that they guarded as dragons guarded hoards of old.
The Crossons, on the other hand—and this seemed the most likely case of all—might really be the capable chiefs who controlled a number of the outlawed men who took refuge in those hills. In that case, it meant that they controlled the exploits of various robbers who issued from the fastness of the hole-in-the-wall country and went down into the rich lowlands for pillage, returning to the safety of the district where the Crossons lived. If
this were true, no wonder that men found it dangerous business to approach the Crosson homestead, for twenty armed hands might be raised against any intruder.
Lefty Ranger swallowed hard, but could not get rid of the lump that had formed in his throat. But he plugged away. The honesty for which he was famed in the white North drove him forward. He had undertaken a task. No matter how frightened he might be, he could not withdraw until the thing had been accomplished, or disaster had overtaken him. No doubt that was the very reason why Menneval had selected him, instead of choosing far more cunning and sharp-edged wits for the work that lay ahead.
He rose out of Tucker Flat and its orchards. He pushed back through rolling country where cattle grazed here and there on the good grass. He passed through a borderland of rocks that glistened and blazed in the sun and sweated with cold in the nights.
And so he came into the hole-in-the-wall district.
It was well worthy of that name. Dry draws, only running with water in the height of the rainy season, and cañons, in the palm of which at least a trickle ran all the year long, cut up the face of the country. Around them rose hills as irregular in shape and abrupt in slope as waves in a choppy sea. Rocks grew more than grass on the sides of those hills. There was better pasturage for goats than for cattle. If, here and there, a meadow appeared and a bit of almost level grazing land, it was sure to be fenced away by almost impenetrable rubble of rocks where no road could be made.
It was a country where the pack horse alone could make headway, and even a sure-footed burro could not steer a straight course. Ranger had to climb heights repeatedly and take his bearings, and pick out a way across the wilderness ahead of him, a winding way, sticking to watersheds and small divides.
All grew wilder as he penetrated into the district. He found trees—forests of mighty spruce and pine untouched by the lumberman for the good reason that there was no way of hauling the treasure out to town or city. There were brakes and dense growths where fire had cleaned out the old giants and allowed a crowding second growth to spring up about the scarred and blackened knees of the old forest monarchs.
There were extents of hardy brush, tall enough to cover man and horse, and frightfully difficult to force a way through. Here the cattle, in places, had broken meager trails through growths so dense that there was no turning from the path on either hand. Once committed to one of these green tunnels, a man was as securely hemmed in as though walled in by rock, and Lefty Ranger never entered upon one of them without misgivings.
It was a vast checkerboard of difficulties.
No sooner was a spacious forest left—a forest in which directions were lost with a dizzy speed—than he came into a frightful brake of brush, and when this was passed he would find himself in a tangle of intercrossing cañons and ravines with precipitous sides. Many of these were box cañons. He never knew, when he entered the mouth of one of them, when it would end up in a sheer cliff, with fine spray over the brim of the wall.
He worked farther into the region. Above him rose the loftier heads of the upper mountains, and upon their sides white streaks appeared, like veins of marble, through the cuts of the ravines. White cloaks and caps were on their shoulders and their heads. The dark veil of the forest marched up them to a point where all trees ceased. And he could see timberline marked along the sides at a regular height. Sometimes he felt as though this dark veil of the forest was a symbol of the mystery that he pursued, towering above him unknown, yet leading him on.
He was not a lonely man. He had been too many years in the Far North, and there he had learned to be his own company, not allowing his brain to become too active, and not asking too many questions of the landscape around him. But he fought against a dreaded sense of helplessness in these hills. It was different from the white North. The warmth of the sun, the song of the many birds, and the pleasant sound of the streams should have made this a terrestrial paradise to one so long among the snows. But instead they made it seem like a dream to Ranger. And the dream was all of fear.
He had not really been homesick since he was a child. He could hardly remember the home for which he had been ill at heart then. But he was homesick now.
He told himself that he would walk ten miles and swim a river for the pleasure of talking to an Indian in a tongue that the Indian could not understand. He used to listen to the chattering of the squirrels with a peculiar envy, and the bright flash of a blue jay overhead made him follow the beautiful and evil little creature with longing as it skimmed across the treetops, bent on mischief.
As he worked his way slowly into the country, his eyes were more often upon the ground than upon the natural features around him. It is said by seamen that Satan himself would make a sailor if he would keep his eye aloft. But a wanderer by land can never be at home in any country unless he learns to keep his glance upon the ground.
On the great page of that book he reads most interesting signs. The second day out, for instance, he found the trail of a timber wolf with a spread to the forefoot as great as the broad palm of his own hand. A hundred pounder, that one, if it weighed an ounce.
After that the trails of the wolves grew thicker and more frequent. And most of them were big—astonishingly big. Along with them went the more dapper marks of coyotes, the cunning scavengers and thieves of the wilderness. And even these footprints were greater in size than most that he had seen in his other wanderings. Sometimes he could hardly tell whether the signs were that of a big coyote or a small female timber wolf. But everything was big.
Just as the spruce and the pines overtopped almost anything that he ever had seen, so all the animal life seemed large. The squirrels that scampered on the branches were unusual in size and looked in their fluffing fur as big as Persian cats. The wildcats had nearly the foot-spread of a lynx. And when he found the trail of a mountain lion, he gazed at it in amazement, for it was as the trail of a lion indeed. The sign of the deer were as those of oxen. And the cattle that he came across here and there—long-legged, gaunt-bodied creatures—seemed to have grown beyond their ordinary proportions.
An elk came out of the woods, and, seeing him in the trail not fifty yards away, it stamped its forehoof and shook its head, less frightened than annoyed by his presence. When he reached for his rifle, it turned a little, but paused to look back at him over its shoulder. He could have shot it ten times over, but a certain awe restrained him. What made the wild creatures so fearless?
When he started from his camp on the third morning, he found the sign of half a dozen timber wolves about the place. Some of the tracks came up within three feet of the place where he had slept—and he shuddered at the thought of the great white fangs that could have slit his throat at a single slash.
On the evening of that very day, as he came through the dusk up a small draw, he saw through the blue of the evening a huge gray outline standing on a boulder with the cliff behind. It was a lobo, a king of its kind, and, when Ranger came close to it, instead of bounding away from the rifleman, the big beast merely snarled—a hideous apparition, lighted by the flash of its own long white teeth and the glistening red of its gums.
Ranger gasped. He had been over much of the western world. He never had seen animals react like this in the presence of armed men. If there were thugs, yeggs, bad men among these hills, what kept them from teaching the creatures of the wild better manners?
For his own part, he did not fire a shot at the grinning monster. He had found, in fact, that from the time when he entered the wilderness, he was loath to use a gun. He killed one young fawn that supplied him with plenty of meat. But after that the memory of the echoes that the report roused and brought heavily booming back on his ears depressed him and sent a chill through his nerves.
Instead of firing at this timber wolf that so impertinently challenged him, he went slinking by, and then for quite a time kept throwing frightened glances over his shoulder to see if the beast were following him.
Chapter Six
In the early morni
ng, Ranger came into view of the Crosson Ranch. He came over the crest of a high hill, and the place was below him, spread out like a map. To understand the panorama, in fact, a map was needed as soon as one removed one’s eyes from it. For the Crosson place was simply an elevated and fairly level plateau that had been slashed to ribbons by many creekbeds and the basins of draws. One might have called it a little kingdom of one elevation. It spread out from a central and fairly large acreage that was cut by the channels that water had worn into many crooked fingers that wandered here and there toward the sides of the higher hills. The ravines were dark with trees and shrubbery, or else the naked rocks in them blazed in the morning sunshine.
The level upper land was a solid sheet of green, pleasant to the eye as cool lake water to the thirsty traveler. And in the center of the main body of the green lake there was a shrouding of lofty trees, true monsters from the primeval forest; inside of that harborage rose a plume of smoke, and although the habitation was entirely sheltered from the eye of the most curious, Ranger guessed that this must be the place where the Crossons lived.
Only men who loved solitude could have selected such a site. Within ten miles on all sides of them there was hardly a cultivable or grazing patch of land that amounted to five acres in a solid piece. Here they had some hundred acres of good ground, and the reds and golden browns and whites of the feeding cattle made pleasant resting places for the eyes of Lefty Ranger.
If one loved solitude, one could hardly pick out a better place. No rustler would ever undertake the terrible drive through the badlands that surrounded this island of prosperity for the sake of the few cattle that he could herd before him in the drive down the narrow, dangerous cañons. The ranch itself was very largely a maze. The surrounding entanglement of ravines made a true labyrinth. And the greatest wit would be helpless in such a place, unless he understood perfectly the lay of the land. That was the kind of knowledge that one could pick up by growing into the ranch and growing up with it. It was not something to be studied out of a book. The peculiarities of the formation of that ranch were as singular as the varying characteristics that will show dimly in the face of a man.