Travis

by T. T. Flynn

  Another wind-muted shout drifted off the ridge slope. “Leave be, you! No raafle ain’t needed t’fill canteens!”

  Clay’s tight smile came as he shoved the carbine back into the boot. “I thought so. Howie, you and Bell move our saddle and packhorses against the edge of the herd.”

  “I ain’t draggin’ back while you go up alone.”

  “One man might make it. Two’ll be a crowd.”

  “Lemme go then.”

  Clay looked up at the opaque clouds of the sandstorm driving overhead. “Be dark before long.” His half smile went to Howie. “First trouble, I’ll come rolling and bouncing down.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Howie stubbornly.

  “Who said I liked it? Get your canteen.”

  Clay unbuttoned his coat, clearing the holstered gun. Alone, carrying the three empty canteens by their straps, he skirted the slowly milling horse herd and started up the steep slope of the ridge. Great swirls of dust and sand scoured across the higher rocks. Fierce gusts whipped the red kerchief folds under his chin. The violence of the storm was in him again, sweeping gritty electricity over his skin nerves. For a moment Clay wondered if the fellow who was calling himself Roger Travis could be back of this. There had been stories in the San Francisco papers about the abduction of William Campbell from the South Bay Bank by a stranger who had tried to cash a draft against an account in the name of Travis. If the man had read them or had heard of the incident from the bank, he would guess that the real Roger Travis was alive. He would be waiting, watching. This was the only logical trail into Soledad.

  A visible way had been worn up the rocks to the tanks that caught the infrequent desert rains. Clay reached the first large, shallow basin that held only sandy muck on the bottom. He climbed on, squinting into the sand and dust blowing across the face of the ridge.

  The next tank, not as large, was partially sheltered by an overhang of rock. Yellow dust covered the water. When Clay dropped a canteen in by its strap, the canteen went completely under. Without expression, Clay watched silvery bubbles burst to the surface. He hauled the canteen out and drank deliberately. And when he lowered the canteen, he sighted the first stranger standing on a ledge some thirty feet higher and twice that far off to the right. Blocky, muscular-looking, hat yanked low, bandanna masking the face against the storm, rifle held ready, the watching figure was a silent threat.

  Then on the same ledge, hunkered down, Clay saw the head, shoulders, and rifle of another man watching him. And several more of them must be around in the rocks.

  Clay shouted at the silent figure: “Our saddle horses won’t make it without water!”

  “Fill them canteens an’ move out!”

  In simmering anger, Clay eyed the man. He remembered how the fellow had said “raafle.” Somewhere he would hear that flat, nasal word again and would know this man.

  Down below, Howie and Ira Bell had brought the saddle horses to the edge of the half-frantic, thirsty herd. A pinto horse broke out of the herd toward the water he could smell. In awkward lunges, hoofs slipping on the smooth rocks, the pinto started to climb. Clay ducked as a rifle report slapped through the shrilling wind.

  When he looked down again, the pinto’s brown and white splotches were dropping on the rocks. The blocky stranger on a higher ledge was unconcernedly jacking in another shell.

  Ira Bell’s shrill anger drifted up: “That hoss belonged to Gid Markham!”

  The stranger in the rocks above Clay shouted down at Ira Bell in a startled tone: “What’s a Markham horse doin’ in your bunch?”

  “I been buyin’ hosses fer Gid Markham,” Ira Bell said. “He’ll hunt you down! He won’t never stop!”

  Clay could have groaned as he heard the exchange and jerked the filled canteens out of the water. Old Ira Bell’s rage had done it now. They’d not get to this Gid Markham—whoever he was—if they could be stopped.

  Clay was swiftly stoppering the dripping canteens when the shot he expected breached through the storm. The sound had its mockery for his own plans. If this were the end, the man named Roger Travis had his freedom to enjoy the identity, the money he had stolen. The heavy canteens banged against Clay’s legs as he lunged up. Howie and Ira Bell were dodging behind the saddle horses, and beyond Bell one of the herd horses was dropping.

  V

  That first bullet, Clay saw, had been meant for Ira Bell. Clay jumped recklessly down the steep slope, guessing that he was the next target. The heavy canteens, two in one hand, the tilted ledges and smooth rock falling away through swirling dust, made it an awesome, dangerous descent for a running man. In the first plunging steps, gravity and the treacherous footing took over. Every jarring stride risked disaster. Other guns on the upper ledges were firing now. A bullet missed Clay’s shoulder. He heard the thin lash of its passing.

  Below, in blurred glimpses, he saw Howie Quist and old man Bell driving shots from their saddle guns at the ledges. His right foot skidded on smooth rock. A desperate lunge and twist staved off the fall and threw him down the steep slope faster, faster. A blow on the canteens vibrated up through the straps. A foot skidded. Clay reeled over a narrow ledge and leaped at the next drop. Arms frantically windmilling with the canteens, he raced down the last steep slope and hurtled on into the milling horse herd.

  He struck the side of a stocky roan, driving the horse staggering, and careened off against another horse that whinnied and reared. Bouncing off the twisting animal, Clay skidded along the flank of another and came to a gasping, sliding halt in the midst of the alarmed herd. He was gripping the canteen straps so tightly his fists ached. Water was spurting against his right leg. The two canteens in that hand had been drilled by a bullet and were emptying fast. Clay bolted on, shouting a way through the herd.

  Ira Bell and Howie were firing across their saddles when Clay tossed canteen loops over his own saddle horn and gasped: “Lead your horses out until the dust gives cover!”

  As they ran, crouching, leading the saddle horses through the alarmed scattering of the herd, what Clay feared might happen, did happen. Howie Quist’s horse was driven to its knees by a bullet. Howie swung around, studied the ridges, and fired.

  Dust thickened behind them as they ran on. Ira Bell was stumbling and gasping for breath when Clay swerved to him and called: “Get in the saddle!”

  Bell reached to the saddle horn and sagged there against the horse. Clay’s rough boost shoved the small, shuddering figure up. A yell and a blow of his fist started the horse sluggishly out toward the full, fierce sweep of the sandstorm.

  A screen of scattering herd horses followed as Howie ran with Clay another hundred yards. Howie had no horse now. Clay finally ordered: “Climb on my horse! I’ll straddle behind you!”

  Riding that way, they passed out of the trapping amphitheater. Ira Bell had pulled his horse up and sat in an exhausted slump, hat askew, eyes dull in the dusty sockets of his leathery face.

  The old man, Clay saw, would be useless in any more fighting. He might collapse suddenly, and they would have him on their hands. Clay slid off, caught the one full canteen from the saddle horn, and gave it to the old man. To Howie, Clay called: “Ought to be some water in those two holed canteens! Get it in you!” He wheeled back, watching for pursuit while the two men drank greedily.

  Bell’s gnarled hands were shaking when he lowered the canteen strap to the saddle horn. Clay shouldered through the blowing sand to the bowed, gnome-like figure and asked: “Can you make the hills on that one canteen?”

  Bell’s voice had a drained thinness. “Might. This hoss can’t.”

  “After your talk of Gid Markham, they’ll be after us,” Clay guessed with harsh conviction. “Howie and I have got to find their horses and more water. If you give out, you’ll burden us too much. Ride for Soledad now, old man. With luck, you might make it.”

  “I won’t burden you,” Ira Bell said. His shaking hand pulled the black kerchief up over his bristle of gray face stubble. Slowly he lifted the rei
ns and urged the horse into a tired walk. Shoulders bowed, the old man rode from sight into the driving sheets of sand.

  Howie Quist gazed after him and shook his head. “The old fellow might make it,” he said. He turned a canteen upside down and watched the last drops whirled away by the wind. “’Most a pint was left . . . pure honey.” He held out the second canteen.

  “I got mine up at the tank,” Clay said. He straddled behind Howie again, holding his carbine. “South along the ridge,” he ordered. “They’ll be running to their camp for horses.”

  Over a shoulder, Howie said: “Suppose there ain’t a camp?”

  “They didn’t walk here. Has to be a camp.”

  Howie changed the subject. “Thought the old fellow was tradin’ with the Navajos on his own hook. Who’s this Markham?”

  “Never heard of him,” Clay said. He was bracing with a palm against Howie’s side, and was conscious, suddenly, of a damp splotch on Howie’s coat. “What’s wrong, Howie?” Clay asked evenly.

  “Cracked rib maybe,” said Howie carelessly.

  Clay’s exploring fingers found the little ragged bullet hole in the coat cloth. Quietly he asked: “How bad, Howie?”

  “It didn’t come near the lung, I reckon,” Howie said casually. “Nothin’ risin’ in my throat. I’m good for all night.”

  Howie was wrong. They both knew it. Howie was losing blood, losing strength in a hot gale relentlessly drying him out. Howie would fade fast now unless he had water and a tight bandage over the wound. Ruthlessly Clay spurred the horse that already had done too much today.

  Tumbleweeds whisked past like erratic, bouncing ghosts lost in the storm. The spurred, straining horse skirted long wind-wrenched stalks of ocotillo cactus, called Mexican Wife-Beaters. The sand-drifted talus at the foot of the almost vertical ridge they were following gave way to dust-filled space.

  “Got to be it,” Clay decided. “Take guard here. I’ll handle what’s inside.”

  He slid off, shoved the carbine into Howie’s hand, and ran forward, not looking back. And once more the high, bald ridges blotted the full drive of the wind. Clay ran through swirling, finer dust, his boots grinding on sand laid down by other storms.

  The camp, suddenly, was there in front of him, to the right where the ridge bent back. He saw picketed horses first. Nine horses looming in the veiling dust on ropes and pins. On the ground beyond was a litter of saddles, bridles, blanket rolls, and the black, drifted circle of a small cook fire.

  It was the meager, hasty camp of men who had come riding light and meant to leave that way. Clay counted the saddles as he neared them. Seven saddles. He began to believe as he came in at a slogging run that no guard had been left. It was almost his undoing.

  Hunkered motionlessly in a cleft of the ridge rock, the guard had pulled a blanket over his head. The crouched figure resembled a hummock of blown sand. From the corner of an eye, Clay barely caught the slight motion of the blanket being lifted. A bandanna, red like the cloth over Clay’s face, masked the guard’s face against the wind. His call, sharply inquiring but not fully alarmed, cut through the boisterous turbulence of the gust.

  “That you, Slim?”

  “Yes!” Clay answered, and swerved toward the rock.

  The hunkered figure was struggling up, wiry and lean, canvas jacket buttoned over shell belt and holster.

  Clay was strides away, still picking up momentum, when he saw the stiffening instant of doubt as the guard peered hard at him. A hand caught for a carbine leaning against the rock, and Clay reached under his coat.

  The guard was hemmed against the rock, frantically jacking in a shell as Clay reached him and slapped the carbine muzzle aside. The guard ducked. Clay slammed his handgun across the black hat brim and his full running weight smashed into the man.

  They hurtled together against the rock. They fell together, Clay on top. The guard struggled desperately. Clay thought of the thirsty paint horse callously shot. He struck again with the heavy gun barrel. The struggling figure went loose and quiet, and Clay shoved upright.

  Gasping, he tore the red bandanna off the guard’s face and printed the pinched, slack features in memory. He yanked a cedar-handled revolver from the holster under the man’s canvas jacket and ran to the sand-drifted saddles and caught up a gaudy saddle blanket of Navajo weave, a bridle, and a saddle.

  The powerful blood bay he selected took the bit, blanket, and saddle without protest. Clay reached back for his knife in its leather hip sheath. Deliberately he went among the saddles, ruthlessly slashing stirrup and cinch straps. He jerked a blanket roll open and piled a tangle of bridles and reins on the blanket and knotted them in.

  Canteens lay among the saddles. Clay hung them in a heavy clutter on his saddle horn. Explosive breaths were pushing out the red cloth over his face as he caught up the guard’s carbine and smashed the stock against the earth. The guard was huddled motionlessly in the rock cleft when Clay gave him a last look and began to cut the picket ropes.

  It took moments of dragging and hauling to get the horses lined around and all lead ropes in one hand. Clay heard the wind-muted punch of gunfire as he heaved the blanket bundle to the bay’s neck. He topped the saddle with an upward lunge, balanced the bundle in his lap, and slowly reined the blood bay away. The lead horses came around and moved with him. Slowly Clay stepped up the pace, riding faster, faster through the swirling veils of dust.

  The horses were massed and running when they burst out into the full thrashing force of the storm. Clay glimpsed Howie Quist off to the right, spurring his jaded horse at a tangent. Gunshots were faint off to the left as Clay led the trampling rush of horses into the veiling maw of the sandstorm.

  Howie rode alongside. “Gimme some of them ropes!” he yelled, and caught them in a big hand. His question cracked through the blue face cloth. “You clean out their camp?”

  “Tried to.” Clay waved Howie on. They had ridden out from the ridges for miles before Clay pulled up and said: “I’ll get your saddle on a fresh horse. Water in those canteens.”

  Howie dismounted with slow effort. His voice had a new exhausted note. “Two come in on foot. The rest was followin’, I think.”

  “I cut their cinches and stirrup straps and put ’em afoot without bridles or water,” Clay said grimly. “But they’ll water some of Bell’s horses, rig hackamores, and come on bareback.”

  Keeping his back to the wind and sand when possible, Clay transferred the saddle to a short-coupled roan with powerful withers and the look of bottom. He dumped the mass of bridles and reins out of the blanket and reached for his sheath knife to slash strips off the blanket.

  “Open up that side, Howie. Got a corset for you.”

  They stood in the lee of the massed horses and Howie Quist opened his coat and shirt. There was no time for swabbing or probing. Only time in short, sand-lashed minutes to shove the rough blanket strips around Howie’s powerful back and haul the strips tight until the torn, gaping wound was bound in. Clay tied the strips with hard knots.

  “Ought to do you,” he said finally.

  Howie drew a constricted breath as he closed his shirt and grinned wanly. “If this is how a corset feels,” said Howie, “I’d rather bleed.”

  There was one last chore. Clay used the keen sheath knife on the tangle of bridles and reins. The short lengths he hurled aside would never help guide a horse.

  They rode again, and night seeped in, filled with the shrill of the wind and rattling assault of blown debris. And they were both conscious that old Ira Bell, bowed, silent, alone on a ridden-out horse, was also moving through the blackness. If his horse had lasted this long.

  A long time later, Howie called: “Ain’t it easin’ a little?”

  Milder notes were in the violence of the gale. In another half hour the disk of the moon could be located. The wind continued to die. In the quiet that fell, the scuffing steps of the horses had an unreal loudness.

  “They know we’re heading this way,” Clay said.
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  “Big country . . . no tracks,” Howie said. He sounded drowsy. Clay saw that Howie was sagging as he rode.

  “Howie! Drink more water!” Clay said loudly. He had to repeat it before Howie’s hand slowly went to a canteen.

  “Like t’catch some sleep,” Howie muttered.

  A man began to die like this in the desert. Dried-out, bled-out, he slowly faded like Howie was fading.

  Clay rode close and said: “Hold up, Howie.” He dropped the lead ropes, leaned far out, and shoved a hand under the dusty coat that Howie had unbuttoned when the wind had died. The blanket strips had a foreboding stiffness. “Wait,” Clay said. He swung down, stripped headstalls and ropes off all the lead horses but one, and slapped them away. “They’ll head for the hills and leave fresh tracks to puzzle over,” Clay said. And when he looked again at Howie, Clay said roughly: “Keep awake!”

  “Sure,” agreed Howie docilely.

  Clay’s mouth was a hard line when he topped the saddle again, holding the single lead rope of the extra horse. “Going to cut north a little,” Clay said. “Old man Bell should be over that way if he kept going.”

  “Ole coot’s tough,” Howie said. The drowsy note was stronger, warning of what was happening.

  It was sometime after midnight. Howie had a good chance if they headed straight for the hills. But moonlight on the desert floor was bright enough to sight fresh tracks. Clay made the reluctant decision. Howie, riding sleepily and agreeably, made no protest as they angled off the direct line to the hills and safety, and rode to find old Ira Bell, if possible.

  VI

  Eastward some seventy miles, the gray dawn brightened along the horizon and sunrise came. And, a little later, Patricia Kilgore stood motionlessly before the marble top of her bedroom dresser, with three hairpins forgotten in the corner of her smiling mouth. Matt Kilgore’s off-key singing had not boomed like this in years. In the wide yard behind the house, sawing, hammering, men’s voices were audible. Listlessness and defeat had vanished on the ranch. It was stimulating, exciting—and Roger Travis had brought it all about.