by Lauran Paine
Ladd, with enough time to formulate a defensive idea, said: “Constable, I can identify their outfits for you, and lead you up to them. They won’t suspect anything coming from me.”
Brennan was on his feet as he replied: “If they’re just freighters passing through, why should they expect anything? And the liveryman can identify their outfits.” He turned toward the cell-room doorway. “I get the feelin’ our visitor here wants to get out of here.”
“He’ll be here when you get back,” said the outlaw leader. “Dead or alive, he’ll be here.”
Ladd watched Constable Brennan leave the jailhouse with misgivings. Brennan would examine the horses, saddles, and effects of his companions from Piñon, and he would also make enquiries around town. Since Orcutt, Reilly, and Simon Terry would be expecting nothing, Brennan would also be able to walk up behind them more than likely. There was no way for Brennan not to return to the jailhouse with a report substantiating his suspicions, unless a miracle occurred, and Ladd Buckner had no faith in miracles.
He rolled a cigarette to occupy his hands, and, when the oldest outlaw filled in the unpleasant silence with another enquiry concerning a man they had both known in prison, Ladd was willing to tell what he knew. He and the oldest outlaw got into quite a conversation. The youngest outlaw listened, then leathered his Colt and yawned, walked around behind Brennan’s desk, and sat down back there. The outlaw leader, though, was not nearly as impressed with Buckner’s bona-fide outlaw credentials from Canon City. He was evidently one of those lifelong skeptics one encountered more, perhaps, among outlaws than among other kinds of people. He broke into the conversation between his older companion and Ladd Buckner by asking who else had taken the outlaw trail from Piñon.
Ladd told the truth. “As far as I know, there wasn’t any pursuit.”
The outlaw leader scoffed. “No pursuit? After we busted their bank and shot their citizens?”
“Maybe that’s why,” stated Ladd. “I can tell you for a fact the whole darned town was stumbling over itself. And you killed their lawman, the only feller around who could organize and lead a posse.”
The youngest outlaw smiled for the first time, but not at Ladd, at his leader. “I told you Henry’d fix it for us.”
Their leader ignored that statement to say: “By now, though, they sure as hell got a posse on the way.”
Ladd was cautious when he answered that. “I’d guess by now they have, but if you follow me off into these mountains back yonder, all the posses on earth can’t find you. Mister, I can set you up a camp in a big meadow back in there where the ragheads hid out for ten years without anyone ever finding them.”
“Yeah? And suppose they’re still in those mountains,” stated the head outlaw. “Not too long ago some cattle outfit over around Piñon got hit by a bushwhacking band of ’em.”
Ladd brushed this aside. “Weren’t more than eight in that bunch. Reservation jumpers, I’d guess. Anyway, I can take you back in there where even the ragheads can’t find you. I can set you up alongside a lake in there that’s got trout in it as thick as your arm, and all you’ll have to do is lie around, fish a little, and get fat, safe as you can be.”
There was nothing wrong with the presentation or with the idea; if there was one thing renegades of this kind yearned for, it was a place where they could stop running and hiding, and sleeping with a cocked gun at their side. Ladd knew the psychology of men like these, which was why he had fabricated this alluring prospect. But that man over in the cell-room doorway was not as influenced as were his companions. He said: “Buckner, a feller who would try what you tried by coming after us like a lousy coyote skulking along would work for the law.”
Ladd flared up. “What law? Damn it all, you saw him get killed back there.”
“Not him,” snapped the outlaw. “The law that pays bounties for us fellers.”
The oldest outlaw broke in: “Cass, what in the hell . . . ? Listen to me. Let Buckner guide us back into them mountains where we can hide out for a month or two. If he turns out to be double-crossing us some way, we’ll simply kill him.”
“Sure,” assented their leader in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “we’ll kill him . . . after he maybe leads us up in front of a lousy posse. Walt, just keep out of this, will you?” The spokesman faced Ladd again. “I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you,” he stated. “As far as I’m concerned, it’ll be up to Brennan what he wants to do with you. You come in here lyin’ in your teeth as neat as a whistle. Not only that, but you had to go and say we got nine thousand instead of the four thousand Brennan figured we’d got.”
“How the hell was I to know you’d lied to him?” demanded Ladd. “And you don’t have to trust me. All you’ve got to do is keep me in front of you until we’re so far back in those mountains the Indians couldn’t even find us. Mister, why would I be willing to go back in there with you fellers if I didn’t know exactly where to hide you? I didn’t come down in the last rain. I know you can shoot me if I don’t deliver what I say I’ll deliver. Your trouble is, damn it all, you got your tail feathers burned off down at Piñon and now you figure everyone is against you.”
The youngest outlaw chimed in with an opinion of his own. “We got our tail feathers singed all right. That lousy town accounted for damned good men. But by God I paid ’em back. I shot their banker and his dog robber, that other feller behind the wicket in their bank. I evened things up a little.”
Cass remained over in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for the younger man to say all he had to say, then the leader of these men asked Ladd a question: “Who was that son-of-a-bitch come out of the jailhouse and cut loose on us out front of the bank?”
Ladd lied as deftly as he’d been lying for the past fifteen minutes. “Feller by the name of Sanders. All I know about him is what I heard in the saloon. He was down there near the harness works when the marshal walked out. Someone said Sanders is a former lawman from down in Texas. That’s all I heard.”
“We owe him,” said Cass gruffly.
Ladd shrugged that off. “All right. But you sure as hell hadn’t better try going back over there to settle up with him. Not for a couple of months anyway.” Ladd scratched his middle and glanced toward the door. He had been bold up to this point and he might just as well continue being bold, because when Constable Lewis Brennan walked through that doorway again, Ladd Buckner’s chances for survival were going to start plummeting immediately.
“Too bad Henry couldn’t signal about this Sanders feller, too,” said the youngest renegade from his comfortable position in the constable’s chair.
That touched a nerve in Cass. “Damn it!” the outlaw leader exclaimed. “Why couldn’t he have come up north of town and warned us about that feller, instead of just staying in the lousy store and signaling where the town marshal was?”
The way the youngest renegade sprang to the defense of Henry, whoever he was, seemed to imply at least a friendship. “You yourself told me all he had to do was put on one of those four hats in the store-window so’s we’d know where the marshal was. And he done it, Cass, exactly like you said. You can’t blame Henry for what happened.”
Walt, the oldest outlaw, went to the stove, padding soundlessly across the floor in his stocking feet, and hefted the coffee pot over there atop the wood stove. Evidently Walt’s hard existence had inured him to cold stale coffee, because he poured himself a cup of the stuff and went over to a wall bench to sit and sip. He seemed very relaxed now, very comfortable in fact, and the fact that he and his friends were inside a jailhouse evidently did not trouble Walt in the least. At least this particular jailhouse belonged to them as a hide-out, and perhaps that amused Walt. Ladd had heard a lot of outlaws up in Canon City boast of bribing lawmen. They always seemed to derive enormous satisfaction from their ability to do it. Maybe Walt got the same satisfaction from having the run of a jailhouse whose legal custodian had been bought with some of the blood money from Piñon.
Cass straighten
ed up over in the doorway and walked to a front wall window to stoop slightly and peer out. “What’s keeping Brennan?” he growled.
Walt idly said: “Maybe he’s the feller we’d ought to worry about instead of Buckner.”
Cass turned. “You damned fool,” he growled, and went to work rolling a cigarette, scowling unhappily as he did it.
Ladd tried to guess what Cass’s weakness was and decided it had to be his inherent mistrust of everyone. But how something like that could be exploited eluded Ladd. Gradually it began also to occur to him that Brennan had been out there an inordinate length of time. The possibilities were tantalizing, and they were also manifold, but Ladd’s main consideration was what would happen if Brennan returned, and he thought he had a fair idea about that.
Cass blew smoke at the ceiling, then stepped back to lean and peer out into the roadway again. Paso was quiet, as it probably was two-thirds of the time. A morning stage arrived from across the vast expanse of prairie land northward, and momentarily this appeared to rouse the place a little. A man’s hearty laughter up the road beyond sight rang reassuringly.
Walt said: “Brennan better get his butt back here. He’s got to fetch us some breakfast yet this morning.”
Ladd, remembering what the lawman had told him a half hour earlier, offered a placating suggestion: “He’s probably at the café filling up. He said he hadn’t eaten.”
Cass sighed, and padded back over into the cell-room doorway to finish his smoke and be thoughtful. He ignored Ladd. It was very probable that he had already made up his mind what to do about Ladd Buckner. If this were so, and considering Cass’s suspicious, deadly nature, it was not difficult to imagine what his decision amounted to.
That coach that had rattled into town raised a fine dust part way along the central thoroughfare. Ladd did not leave his chair but he could see the dust in the air. He was frankly fearful and he had every right to be that way. Even though Reilly, Terry, and Orcutt would be wary and watchful, they would be susceptible to Brennan’s approach; not knowing what had happened inside the jailhouse or what lies Ladd had told, they would be unable to offer believable support for those lies—and that would simply mean that, when Brennan walked through the door of the jailhouse, Ladd Buckner would be living on borrowed time. He had no illusions, either, about Walt, the moderately congenial old renegade who had recognized Ladd from their prison days. Walt, Cass, and especially that venomous-eyed youngest outlaw would gun down Ladd Buckner without a qualm. Inside the Paso township jailhouse, they would not dare use guns, so they would use knives or clubs, whatever came handy, but they would kill Ladd Buckner as surely as the sun would set this evening.
XI
Brennan did not return and Cass was more worried than he allowed the others to see. How Ladd knew this was so was in part a deduction based upon the outlaw leader’s increasingly waspish and derogatory comments to his partners, and also by the way Cass paced the room from time to time, always ending up over along the front wall where he leaned down to look out of a barred jailhouse window.
Ladd worried, also, but in a different way. In fact, the longer Brennan remained away, the better Ladd’s chances seemed to be. At least they seemed to be better in the area of personal survival. Until Lew Brennan returned and blew Ladd Buckner’s story sky high with the simple truth, no one was going to attempt to murder Ladd. Cass no doubt would murder him offhandedly, but now neither Walt nor the youngest renegade was still that deadly minded. Particularly old Walt, who talked to Ladd about the old days up at Canon City as though they were alumni from the same school. Maybe, in a sense, this was a logical spirit since Walt had obviously never attended much school.
Finally someone out front stamping up off the roadway to cross planking in the direction of the jailhouse door brought the three hiding men to their feet. Walt and the youngest outlaw hastened over to be near the cell-room door. All three of them sidled through and Cass reached with one hand, partially to close the door. He shot a savage glare at Ladd and wigwagged with a drawn pistol. Ladd had no difficulty in understanding, even though Cass did not say a word.
The man who entered the jailhouse was not Constable Brennan. He was heavy-set, bald, and slovenly, and he stared at Ladd Buckner as though he had expected to see someone besides a total stranger sitting there. He said: “Howdy, where’s Lew Brennan this morning?”
Ladd offered a bland reply. “I reckon he’s around somewhere. I haven’t seen him in the past half hour or more.”
The heavy-set man stroked his chin and continued to gaze at Ladd. “You a friend of Lew’s?” he asked, and Ladd smiled a little.
“You might say that,” he conceded. “Thing is, you’d be askin’ the wrong feller, wouldn’t you? Only Lew Brennan could say whether he considers me his friend or not.”
The heavy-set man looked a little disgusted with that answer. He glanced toward the desk, around the room, then turned back to place a hand upon the door latch as he said: “Tell him Johnny Wheeler was in and I’ll be up at the stage station for another half hour or so, if he wants to look me up.” Johnny Wheeler swung back the door.
“Anything else you want me to tell him?” asked Ladd.
Wheeler considered a moment before saying: “I reckon you can tell him I picked up some word on them fellers who shot up Piñon and robbed the bank down there. Tell him I got some information on them boys up at Pine Grove. The law up there went and captured one of them fellers. Well, he can look me up.” Wheeler bobbed his head and departed.
Ladd arose, stepped to the door, dropped the bar into place across the back of the door, then turned as Cass and his companions came back into the office from the cell-room corridor.
“Who in the hell,” mused Walt, “could some cow town constable have arrested for what we done down in Piñon, I wonder?”
Cass was also interested. In a different tone of voice than he’d used toward Ladd up to now, he said: “You plumb certain those three fellers we had to leave down in Piñon are dead?”
Ladd knew for a fact that each of those men lay dead in Enos Orcutt’s shed, but to help his own situation a little by creating more diversion, he said: “That’s what they told me in the saloon. They said that Sanders feller dropped all three of them and they was dead.” Ladd shrugged heavy shoulders. “But I didn’t see their corpses. All I know is what they were saying around the saloon.”
Cass turned to the youngest outlaw. “Abner, you was out there in front after we came from the bank. Did you see ’em lying out in the roadway?”
Abner nodded. “I seen them, Cass, blood all over them and the ground. But, like Buckner says, maybe . . .” Abner looked at Ladd for support and did not finish his remark.
Ladd frowned a little. “Why would one of them go north to the next town instead of looking you fellers up here in Paso?”
It was a valid question. Walt echoed it to Cass. “That’s not very sensible. They knew we’d paid up in advance to hide out in this damned jailhouse until the noise died down. Cass, why would one of them head on northward and by-pass us here in Paso?”
Before the leader could reply, Ladd said: “Because it’s not one of your crew, Walt. It’s some other feller up in Pine Grove that the law leaned down on. Maybe it’s the law who made up that story so’s he could maybe collect bounty on someone. Maybe it was the feller he leaned on acting like he was a lot bigger than he is.”
Cass nodded. “That’s got to be it. Something like that.” He returned to the front window again and stooped down. As he systematically studied as much of the main roadway as could be seen, he said: “That son-of-a-bitch Brennan.” He added nothing to this, and a moment later, when he started to turn away, he froze at the window for a moment, then swore exasperatedly. “Two men coming across from the store. Let’s get out of sight.” He turned, looked at Ladd, and made a small hand gesture. “Get rid of them,” he ordered, and retreated with Walt and Abner beyond the cell-room door again.
This time when the visitors walked in, Ladd
arose and went to stand over near the gun rack on the far wall, his right side turned away from the pair of cowmen who looked from the desk on around the room and over to Ladd as one of them gruffly said: “Where’s Brennan? We got business with him.”
Ladd answered forthrightly. “He was here about an hour ago. Since then he hasn’t been back. If you’ve got a message, I’ll be glad to give it to him for you.”
“There are Apaches on the east range,” said the gruff-voiced older man, his expression reflecting the bleak mood he was in. “This here is Jim Morgan. I’m Jeff Longstreet. You see Brennan, you tell him we come by to see if he wants to do anything, and, if he don’t, we’ll do it for him. We’ll make up some riding posses and chase those darned redskins all the way down to the border and across it. You hear?”
Ladd could have heard the angry cowman if he’d been out back in the alley. “I’ll tell him when he gets back, Mister Longstreet. By the way, if you really want to recruit riders to go against the Indians, just post a notice that you’re paying a decent wage and you’ll get all the men you’ll need.”
Old Longstreet grunted. “I don’t need advice, young feller, and us fellers who run cattle on the east range don’t need recruits. We got a small army of riders betwixt the lot of us.”
Longstreet and his silent companion stamped out of the office. From the cell-room doorway Cass said: “Buckner, I thought you said there weren’t no Apaches in the hills around here?”
Ladd did not recall having said any such thing. But he did remember saying he could hide the outlaws so well in the mountains even the Indians could not find them. He repeated this, then he also said: “No better way under the sun to get out of this country, if you want to leave it, than to join a raghead-hunting expedition, and just keep on going. Posse men don’t go traipsing after outlaws over territory inhabited by hostiles.”