The Fourth Western Novel

by H. H. Knibbs

  “Where do you stand in this deal?” he asked in Spanish.

  Miguel thrust out his maimed right hand. “One of Benavides’ vaqueros did that, when I had the sheep in the Datils. I have waited a long time. I am going back to the cantina. But you are a boy—and it is not your fight.”

  “All right. If you get a chance, tell Charley I’ve got the horses out here.”

  Assuming indifference, Pete swung round and started up the street. Miguel sidled back to the saloon doorway and entered. At the far end of the high bar stood Tonto Charley, facing the doorway. Facing him was Benavides, a bottle and two glasses empty on the bar between them. Across from them, seated at a table, three cowpunchers toyed with a deck of cards. As Miguel came in two Mexicans sitting at a small table toward the back of the room rose and stepped quietly out through the rear doorway. One of the card-players glanced up.

  “Hello! You back here again, Miguel?”

  “Si. I am here.”

  “Sit in—and make it a four hand game.”

  “Go ahead! Show ’em how to play,” said Tonto Charley, chuckling.

  Benavides, his back to the bar, watched one of the punchers shuffle the cards. Miguel, standing halfway between the front door and the group at the table, curled a cigarette.

  “You boys can entertain Miguel,” said Benavides. He turned toward Tonto Charley. “I found that horseshoe, Charley.”

  “Got it with you?”

  “Right here!”

  And as Benavides went for his gun, the three punchers leaped to their feet and covered Tonto Charley. Charley put up his hands. The bartender dropped behind the bar. As he did so, Pete stepped into the doorway.

  “Look out for the kid!” cried Benavides.

  Miguel grinned and, humping his shoulders, jerked out his gun and fired at Benavides. Benavides replied. Miguel staggered, but kept on firing. Tonto Charley, laughing, jumped back, and began to throw slugs into the group near the table.

  Pete shot at the hanging lamp, shattered it, and, drawing down on the lamp beyond, blew it to atoms.

  “Come on, Tonto!” he cried shrilly.

  Tonto Charley backed down the room in the darkness firing at the flashes that leaped toward him. Pete called again. Charley’s gun was empty. He turned and sprang through the doorway.

  “This way!” cried Pete.

  “Coming,” answered Tonto.

  Side by side they lurched up the street and round the corner. They jerked the reins loose, mounted, and swept up the side street toward the north. At the first cross street they turned and rode toward the river, the horses stretched out on a dead run. Across the river they slowed to the heavy pitch that led to the mesa level above. Tonto Charley reloaded his gun.

  “The Mexican got his,” said Pete, “and I saw Benavides drop.”

  “Got it all figured out to suit yourself?” asked Tonto Charley, chuckling.

  “No. They had some fresh horses back there in that corral.”

  Tonto laughed.

  “Miguel wired the corral bars before we went into the saloon. It’ll take some time to get those bars loose. That gives us a pretty fair start.”

  They rode steadily northward, saving their horses all they could. Tonto Charley seemed to go to sleep as he rode. Several times Pete spoke to him, whereat Charley sat straight and rode for a while before he again nodded. Just before daybreak Pete’s horse stepped into a gopher hole, struggled, and, too leg-weary to pull himself out soon enough, fell and broke his foreleg between the fetlock and the knee.

  “Shoot him,” said Tonto Charley. “My horse can carry double.”

  “I can foot it awhile,” said Pete.

  They went on, Pete walking, Tonto Charley leaning forward, his hands clasping the saddlehorn. The dawn shot long lances of fire across their trail. The cold, gray edge of the eastern hills melted to gold. With the coming of the light, Pete noticed that the back of Tonto Charley’s shirt was wet, that the cantle of the saddle was streaked with dry red.

  “Hell! I didn’t know you were hit,” cried Pete.

  “I got mine. Pretty soon you’ll have a horse to ride—a good one.”

  Pete gritted his teeth. “You’ll make it all right, Charley.”

  A few minutes later, as they dropped down into a shallow draw, Tonto Charley lurched forward and slid to the ground. Pete turned him over, unbuttoned his shirt. What he saw told him Tonto Charley had made his last ride. But he was not dead yet. His eyes were closed, the muscles of his jaw rigid. Each breath was a groan he fought to stifle. Pete eased the saddle on Tonto’s horse, placed his own hat where it shaded Charley’s face, for Charley’s hat had been lost during their getaway. Sitting cross-legged beside him, Pete curled a cigarette and smoked. Presently Tonto Charley’s heavy eyelids unclosed.

  “Did you take a look at the back trail?”

  Pete shook his head. But he rose and climbing the slope of the draw, surveyed the morning desert. Far to the south he saw a black dot that presently separated into several smaller dots and then drew together again. Benavides’ men were closing down on them. He came back and sat beside Tonto Charley.

  “Nothin’ in sight, yet,” he told him.

  “Don’t try to git smart with me, kid. You stayed lookin’ too long. You take my horse and git out of here.”

  “You go to hell!”

  Tonto Charley raised on his elbow. He tried to grin, but his lower lip sagged.

  “Sure! But what’s the hurry? Give me a little time.” He lay back, and seemed to have ceased breathing.

  Pete leaned over him.

  “See how near they are,” said Tonto.

  “What’s the difference?” said Pete.

  But curiosity drew him to the edge of the draw. He could count the black dots now. Not over an hour away. Tonto Charley was done for. But he might live an hour or more, yet. Reason told Pete to take Tonto Charley’s horse and go. But something infinitely more compelling told him he could not do that. Pete knew that if he had been down, Tonto Charley would have fought for him until he was killed. Pete would stay and make a fight of it.

  Tonto Charley’s voice came strong and clear. “So long, kid!”

  Pete turned swiftly, saw Tonto Charley put the muzzle of his gun against his temple. Before Pete could cry out or make a move to stop him, Tonto Charley pressed the trigger. His head dropped back and the gun slid slowly from his hand.

  Pete staggered into the draw, knelt, and laid his hand on Tonto’s face.

  “So long,” he murmured.

  Rising swiftly, he shook the hot tears from his eyes. He caught up the hanging reins of the big, iron-gray horse, swung to the saddle, and rode on down the draw. Far above him a buzzard circled in the hot morning sky.

  Within the hour Benavides’ men rode down into the draw and dismounted. One of them stooped and picked up Tonto Charley’s gun. Another cursed.

  “The kid killed him—to get his horse.”

  The man who had picked up the gun shook his head.

  “No. Tonto knew he was done. And I’ve heard he liked the kid a whole lot.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Tonto Charley was dead. Pete touched the neck of the big iron-gray—Tonto’s horse, Tonto, who lay back there in a coulee, his broad, battered face to the sky. Tonto Charley was a fool to have picked a fight with Benavides of Socorro, especially in Benavides’ home town. But Charley always had been like that, shrewd enough when sober, but when in liquor a chucklehead. Didn’t seem square to think hard of him now, though. Tonto had paid for his fun and hadn’t whimpered about the price.

  Young Pete rode steadily north. The big iron-gray, tired as he was, challenged this new country with sharpened ears. Raw desert. No grass, not even the sparse bunch grass usually found in desert country not actually bad lands. Nothing here but red rock and sandflats reaching out to the pale blue of space. Th
ere were a few thin cattle trails, but horse tracks, none.

  Young Pete glanced at the morning sun. The Benavides men must have reached the coulee by now. All they would get for their hard ride would be a look at a dead horse with a broken leg and a dead man with a bullet-hole in his back and a bullet-hole in his temple. The joke wasn’t on Tonto, after all. His troubles were over. The Benavides men would never figure Tonto Charley had hastened his end by shooting himself that his partner Young Pete might escape. They would say Pete had killed Tonto Charley to get his horse.

  No black dots appeared down the long, palpitating stretch of desert behind Young Pete. Perhaps the Benavides men had had enough and had decided to return to Socorro. Charley had got three of them in that saloon fight. And Miguel, Charley’s friend, had killed Benavides. Pete shrugged his shoulders. Maybe they thought a kid didn’t count.

  And maybe a kid didn’t. Luck hadn’t seemed to think so. Orphaned when two years old, adopted into a family that considered children unavoidable accidents, cuffed and kicked and made to work harder than the foster-parent who cuffed and kicked him, Young Pete had held the belief as a boy that no one cared for him nor ever would. Only one being in the world had been kind to him then—his foster-sister—and it was through his liking for her that he had again become a stray. His essential grit and pride kept him from feeling sorry for himself, hardened him into manhood long before his time. The Hemenway gang had tolerated him because he was handy and active. They had used him, but Young Pete knew all along that none of the gang, except Tonto Charley, would have batted an eye if he had broken his neck wrangling horses or had got shot while holding their mounts in town.

  Tonto had been kind, in his clumsy way. Yet Young Pete knew that Tonto and he could not have traveled together long. Sooner or later their trails would have separated, even if there had been no fight in Socorro. And now Tonto was gone. What was there to be done about it? Nothing. Young Pete rather disliked the abruptness of this conclusion. Bitter toward circumstance that had lost him his friend, Pete, as he rode north on Tonto’s horse, decided to do something about it. He would take Tonto’s name. But ‘Tonto Pete’ didn’t sound just right. He dismissed the idea abruptly. Some day he would choose a name in memory of Tonto Charley. Just now it didn’t matter much what his name was. All that mattered was food, and grazing for his horse.

  Drifting a little east, the big iron-gray swung on at a steady walk. Occasionally he slanted an ear toward the distant red butte at the right. Water hole there, probably. Young Pete saw that the thin cattle trails had begun to swing in that direction.

  Another mile and the iron-gray quickened his stride. Pete’s gaze held level on the butte. A water hole could be sanctuary, or a man-trap. “And me,” he reflected, “the last of the Hemenway gang. Pretty soon it’ll be time I changed my horse and my clothes.”

  A quarter of a mile out from the butte the horse stopped and gazed, his ears stiffened toward the great red rock. “Yes,” said Pete, “I saw ’em a half an hour ago. Step up and we’ll introduce ourselves.”

  Near the water hole a horse stood with reins down. Near the horse, his back against a rock, sat a lank figure, reading a book, a patent-medicine almanac. A wisp of red hair sprouted through a hole in the man’s shapeless black sombrero. Faded overalls, cracked and wrinkled boots, and a sag-pocket vest covering a dingy black cotton shirt advertised anything but prosperity. A Winchester stood within handy reach against the red rock wall. Pete saw at a glance that the rifle had been well taken care of—an old, black-powder 45-70, its stock scarred and scratched by brush, but barrel and receiver speckless and bright.

  “Help yourself,” said Pecos Jim, nodding toward the water hole. “I saw you comin’ and I thought I’d wait for you.”

  A mighty easy-going and offhand invitation. (The stranger had already begun to read again.) Wasn’t a sheepman, or prospector, and he didn’t look like a cattleman. “Thanks,” said Pete. “That’s just what I figured to do.”

  Pecos Jim’s faded blue eyes lifted from the almanac. His face with its high-bridged nose, tufty red eyebrows, and its thin-lipped, mobile mouth, told Pete nothing, just then. The man wasn’t there at all, but bogged down in that book. And though his gaze was on Pete, he didn’t seem to see him as he said, “I’ll talk to you when I finish readin’ this page.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Pete. He dismounted and watered his horse, meanwhile trying to determine the stranger’s line of business. The red-headed man seemed altogether too casual, and his rifle altogether too well-cared-for. Accustomed to be continually on his guard, Young Pete became suspicious. He filled his canteen and mounted.

  “I’m ridin’ north, myself,” said Pecos Jim, rising and carefully tucking his almanac in a saddle-pocket. He was a lank, tall man of over six feet, and apparently much older than he had seemed when seated by the rock. He was stoop-shouldered and walked with a slight limp.

  Pete swung alongside the stranger’s left, not caring to take any chances.

  “Come far?” asked Pecos Jim as they followed a dim trail north.

  “Far enough.”

  “You’re older than I took you for,” said Pecos.

  “How’s the grazin’ up this way?”

  “Cattle, you mean?”

  Young Pete nodded.

  “I ain’t noticed,” said Pecos Jim.

  Pete flashed a glance at his companion. “You’re older than I took you for.”

  Pecos Jim reined up. “Say, kid, just what’s on your mind, anyhow?”

  “Huntin’ a job with a white outfit. I was askin’ about the grass in Pecos valley.”

  “Well, it’s good grass, mostly. But it never gets so long you can hide out in it.”

  “I said a white outfit.”

  Pecos Jim’s pale blue eyes filled with a strange, an almost wistful light. “Kid,” he said solemnly, “a white outfit wouldn’t last six months in this country. Steal or starve is the handwritin’ on the wall, up here.”

  “I ain’t had no breakfast yet,” said Pete. “And I don’t see nothin’ worth stealin’, right now.”

  “You been a good boy, up to now?”

  “Hell, no!” laughed Pete.

  “My shack is over yonder in the Notch. You’re welcome to a feed and a rest till you find that job.”

  “Thanks. I’ll eat with you.”

  They rode on, Pecos Jim’s gaze fixed on the distant Notch, Young Pete’s eyes roving about, noting landmarks. Shortly before noon they entered the mouth of a high-walled and somber cañon. Another hour of heavy travel up a boulder-strewn river bed and they arrived at a windowless stone house hidden away in the brush of a wide ledge.

  “This here cañon is called Horse Thief Hollow,” said Pecos Jim, glancing about as he entered the stone house.

  “It looks it,” said Pete.

  “Just why, now?”

  Pete gestured toward a big stone corral at the western end of the ledge. “Took a lot of work to build that corral. She’d hold fifty head of stock without crowdin’. Now who would want fifty head of stock to feed up here and no grass nearer than the timber, yonder?”

  “That’s right,” said Pecos.

  The stone house had but one door, built of heavy hewn timber. It faced the east, commanding a view of the cañon clear down to the desert. The interior of the stone house was bare save for three bedrolls against the west wall, a huge, tin-covered box containing provisions and cooking utensils, and a couple of canteens on a peg near the doorway.

  While Pecos Jim busied himself at the crude stone fireplace, Pete fetched water from the spring near the corral. The log drinking trough had not been used for a long time, nor were there any tracks on the narrow trail leading to the timber and grass above. Evidently the place was used but occasionally. Why Pecos Jim had called it his home did not concern Pete. Perhaps the lank, redheaded Pecos was hiding out himself.

 
While sitting in the dim light of the windowless house watching Pecos Jim cook breakfast, Young Pete heard a faint whistle down the cañon. Pecos Jim stepped to the door. “It’s all right,” he told Pete as he came back to the fireplace.

  “Well, it better be.”

  Pecos turned and stared at Pete, shook his head. “You’re kind of young to feel that way. But you needn’t get nervous. Charley and you’ll get along all right. You look a whole lot like Charley, at that. Only he’s a growed man.”

  “Charley who?”

  “Charley Lee. Friend of mine. Tom Kimballs with him.”

  A few minutes later two horsemen arrived. With a casual nod to Pecos Jim and a glance at Young Pete the visitors entered and, squatting by the fire, drank coffee. They seemed very much at home. More so, thought Pete, than Pecos Jim himself. Charley Lee’s companion, a tall, heavy man, talked but little. Most of the time he sat staring at the doorway. Charley Lee, dark, active, and quick-witted, talked with his companions in a half-jesting, half-earnest way that left no doubt in Pete’s mind as to who was chief in that camp. Lee intimated that he and his companion, Kimball, would keep Pecos Jim company for a day or two. Aware that they wished to be alone, Pete gathered up the breakfast dishes and carried them out to the spring.

  This outfit, he thought, didn’t work for wages. Hands that worked for wages talked about their work, or the road, or range conditions. Pete glanced at the two sweat-marked horses. Hands that worked for wages didn’t usually pack saddle-guns as well as six-shooters. And if they had been hunting strays they would have said something about it.

  Whistling as he returned to the stone house, Pete stacked the dishes on the hearth.

  “Pecos tells me you’re looking for a job with a white outfit,” Charley Lee smiled.

  “I got to eat,” said Pete.

  “I told him he could bed down here till he got a job,” said Pecos Jim, “if you don’t mind, Charley.”

  “Plenty room. What you calling yourself this morning, kid?”

  “Pete!”

  Again Charley Lee smiled. It seemed to Pete that Charley Lee’s smile hid something he might have said had there been no one but himself and Pete present. “If you ain’t too proud to wrangle horses,” said Lee, “you can help Pecos keep an eye on the stock.”