by Lauran Paine
Cass stared. “You’re about as smart as Walt!” he exclaimed. “And what would the ragheads do if they seen the three of us out there alone, crossing their damned territory? I’ll tell you what they’d do . . .” But Cass did not have a chance to finish his statement. Out front a man swung his horse toward the jailhouse and stepped from the saddle with a loud grunt, and Cass reached again to pull the cell-room door almost closed.
This time, when the stranger walked in, he brought a scent of sage and heat and open spaces with him. He was, like the pair of older men who had previously visited the jailhouse, a range cattleman. His attire spoke volumes about his ability, his rugged confidence, and his cow savvy. He was tall and squinty-eyed and pleasant in the face, although his hide was leathery, lined, and currently unshaved. He smiled pleasantly at Ladd and asked about Brennan. When Ladd said the lawman wasn’t around this tall, rugged individual shoved back his hat, fished forth his tobacco sack and brown cigarette papers, and went to work as he laconically said: “My name is Harrison. Brennan will know me if you tell him that name.” Harrison lit his smoke and continued to study Ladd Buckner. “I got raided last night and lost maybe thirty, forty steers and heifers on the east range.”
Ladd said: “Ragheads. Do you know a feller named Longstreet?”
“We got adjoinin’ ranges,” said Harrison. “Him, too?”
“Yes. He and a man named Morgan were in here not more than minutes ago. The Apaches hit them, too.”
Harrison smoked and gazed at Ladd, then gazed around the office, and for a man who had lost cattle to Indians he did not act nearly as fired-up as Longstreet had acted. “When will Lew be back?” he asked.
Ladd answered cautiously: “I don’t know, but he shouldn’t be much longer. I think he just went around town somewhere.”
“You a friend of his?”
Ladd shrugged. “We know each other.”
Harrison did not appear to be in any hurry to leave. Unlike the other visitors who had stopped by this morning, Harrison acted more as though he were paying a social call than as though he were an outraged cowman. In fact he strolled toward a chair and with one hand on the back of it, he said: “If it won’t be too long, I could set here and wait.”
Ladd had mixed feelings about this. He needed reinforcements but there was no guarantee Harrison would turn out to be his ally in the event of trouble. On the other hand, as long as the range cattleman was there, in the office, even if Brennan walked in, he could hardly afford to denounce Ladd in front of his friend. Ladd decided not to protest, and asked if Harrison wanted some cold, stale coffee. The cowman surprised Ladd. “That’s a right good idea,” he said, and pulled aside the chair as he sat down facing the side wall and the back wall of the jailhouse office. He seemed never to allow his eyes to widen out of their perpetual squint, nor did it help that cigarette smoke trickled upward, also compelling him to keep his eyes narrowed.
Ladd drew off a mug of the bitter coffee and handed it across. Harrison accepted it gravely. “Much obliged,” he said, and shoved out long legs that he crossed at the ankles as he studied Ladd some more. “Seems to me I may have seen you around the countryside somewhere, friend. I run cattle on the north and east ranges.” He smiled a trifle. “I also got ’em on the south and west ranges, only they aren’t supposed to be in them places.”
Harrison rambled on. He was a pleasant man to talk to as Ladd discovered while they faced one another across the room, and it also developed that Harrison was an observant individual. He said: “Mister, did you know you’d lost your six-gun?”
Ladd looked down. He had made a particular point of trying to keep his right side turned to the wall. Evidently he had not wholly succeeded. “Left it with a gunsmith to be fixed,” he lied. “The firing pin is so badly chipped it only detonates the bullets about every third or fourth time.”
Harrison smoked, sipped coffee, and offered no comment for a while, not until he leaned to drop his smoke and stamp on it. Then he said: “We don’t have no gunsmith in Paso.”
Ladd reddened a little. “Didn’t leave it to be fixed in Paso, friend. I left it up at . . . Pine Grove . . . to be fixed.”
Harrison raised skeptical eyes. “And since then you’ve been riding around wearing that empty holster? Well, amigo, we all got different ideas, don’t we? Me, I got no use for guns at all. I wear one because I figure I’d get killed within a week or two if I didn’t wear one, but guns are the devil’s tools for a fact. Nothing good ever comes of men relying upon guns.”
Ladd tried to figure this man out, and he could not even come close to doing it, and he knew he was not coming close.
XII
Cass eased the cell-room door open as quietly and as surreptitiously as he had done with Ladd Buckner, but this time the man sitting before the constable’s desk was facing in that direction and saw the three men with their aimed six-guns. Harrison did not lower the coffee cup but continued to sip coffee for a moment, for as long as it took him carefully to determine what was across the room from him. Then, gradually, he lowered the cup and blew a little smoke but neither moved nor opened his mouth. He seemed surprised, but he also seemed perfectly capable of living with this astonishing situation. He leaned to put the cup atop Brennan’s desk, then he eased back again as Cass and Walt pushed out of the cell-room corridor, and youthful Abner briskly shouldered past the older men and approached Harrison with his cocked Colt pointed squarely at the cattleman’s face.
Harrison turned slightly to cast a sardonic look in Ladd Buckner’s direction. “Friends of yours?” he asked quietly.
Ladd did not answer; he simply stood and watched Abner disarm the range man exactly as Abner had also disarmed him. When Harrison was defanged, Walt lowered his gun a notch and said: “Cass, it’s goin’ to get a little crowded in here directly.”
Cass was in no mood for levity and acted as though he had not heard the older man. He cocked his head though, as heavy footfalls approaching from the south out upon the plank walk made a solid, heavy sound. All of them listened, including Harrison. Ladd Buckner was half of the opinion that this time whoever that was out yonder would stride right on past. Cass did not feel this confident, apparently, because he snarled for his companions to retreat again, and led the way into the cell-room corridor. They had scarcely got the door almost closed before Lew Brennan walked in out of the hot sunlight of mid-morning.
Brennan stared from Ladd to Harrison, then over toward the cell-room doorway as Cass stepped forth with his gun hand stone steady and said: “Where in the hell have you been? What took you so long?”
Instead of replying at once to the outlaw’s question Constable Brennan pointed: “What the hell are you doing with this feller? He’s a local cowman.”
Cass turned bitingly sarcastic again. “Yeah, we know he’s a local cowman, and we also know that, if you had shagged your butt back here at a decent time, you could have handled the flow of callers been coming in here all morning to complain about some lousy Indians running off livestock on the east range. Instead, you been horsing around over at the saloon, or somewhere, and we didn’t even get any breakfast. Brennan, I got half a notion to . . .”
“Wait a minute,” protested the law officer. “What was the sense of taking this one? He’s harmless. He runs cattle west of town . . . and now you’ve gone and made a lousy mess of everything.”
Brennan looked at the cowman and Harrison smoked, looked steadily back, and, when the silence began to draw out, he dryly said: “Lew, you always were a worthless bastard.”
Normally, perhaps, Brennan would have hurled himself upon someone who had insulted him like that, but right at this moment Brennan’s thoughts were upon a much more critical phase of what had happened in his absence. Harrison, the respectable local cowman, would be able to identify the Piñon bank robbers and killers as the same men Brennan was hiding in the Paso jailhouse. What Cass actually had done by taking Harrison captive was destroy Brennan’s credibility in the town where Brennan was not
just the local representative of the law, but where Brennan also lived and enjoyed living. Now, when the outlaws departed, Brennan would also have to depart. Unless something happened to Harrison. But Brennan did not think of that at this moment; he instead turned a brooding gaze on Cass and Walt and the youngest renegade, then jerked his head in Ladd’s direction.
“There’s just one of those freighters still in town. A big feller with a beard all over his face and he can’t talk very well.”
Ladd scarcely drew a breath. For Lew Brennan to identify Simon Terry as a freighter implied that Brennan had not as yet discovered the hoax. Ladd was almost ready to start breathing again.
Cass holstered his six-gun. “All right. So Buckner told us the truth about how he got here. That’s the only true thing he told us. Now we got to get away from here.”
Brennan frowned. “You don’t go alone.” He pointed. “You fixed it so’s I can’t stay the minute you let this range man figure things out.”
Abner disagreed with this. “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Get away from his chair and I’ll do it.”
Cass swore. “You crazy devil, Abner. You ease off the hammer of that gun. You pull a trigger in here and, log walls or not, everyone in this lousy town’ll hear the shooting and come a-running. Anyway, this cowman isn’t our headache. I said ease down the hammer on that damned gun!”
Abner obeyed. He even leathered his Colt but his expression was sullen and he turned away from Cass to face in Buckner’s direction.
“What a god-damn’ mess,” groaned the constable, moving around to his desk chair and sinking down over there.
Harrison dropped his smoke and stepped on it. He shot Ladd a glance, then swung slightly to rake the three renegades with another look. He sighed audibly and waggled his head as though he were monumentally disgusted. “And I thought I had trouble,” he muttered, “when I come into town this morning. Lew . . . ?”
Brennan snapped at the cowman. “You do have trouble, Harrison.” Brennan turned toward Cass. “Remember, I got money coming. Ten percent of nine thousand.” Brennan leaned thick arms atop his desk. Evidently he was beginning to try and ameliorate his dilemma, and, since money was apparently his measure of all things and all kinds of success, he was beginning to reason that he would be paid well for having to flee the country.
Cass did not even answer that, did not even act as though he had heard it. “We’ll set around here until nightfall, then we’ll have to ride on.” Cass said this for the benefit of Abner and old Walt, his fellow renegades, but to Ladd it had the unpleasant sound of something a cold-blooded individual might say whose private decision, whatever it was, had been reached. If this were so, then Ladd felt instinctively that he and perhaps the range cattleman were not going to see another sunrise. If the renegades abandoned Paso and their hide-out, which had become increasingly perilous for them this day, they were probably not going to leave a couple of hostages behind who could not only identify them but who could also recall a number of particular details regarding each renegade.
Walt said: “Take Buckner along and head back into the mountains.”
Cass flared back. “You darned fool, haven’t you heard what these cowmen been saying all day? There’s Indians out there. If they could pick up the tracks of just four riders, they’d be after us like a pack of wolves after a crippled doe.”
Walt was not affronted, perhaps because he was by this time well accustomed to being derided by Cass. He shrugged and said: “All right. Then where? We can’t go south again. What does that leave?” Walt had a point. If they went northward or eastward, they ran a fine chance of encountering those rampaging Apaches. Southward lay the aroused area around Piñon. Westerly, as the range cattleman had been saying since his arrival at the jailhouse, there had also been an Apache raid. “Stay right where we are,” said Walt, looking sardonically at the outlaw leader, “and take us some more hostages.” He jerked his head in Brennan’s direction. “It’ll look like we got Lew here as a prisoner and that had ought to get him out of trouble with the folks here in his town.”
“Lew?” exclaimed Cass. “Who gives a damn about Lew? We got just three hides to worry about, and that don’t include Lew Brennan.” Cass turned upon the constable. “How good is the road west of here along the foothills?”
Brennan didn’t answer, the range cattleman did. “Lousy,” he said. “In places it hasn’t been filled in since the rains of last winter. You don’t have trouble on horseback but you can’t use it with wheels and teams.”
Cass glared. “I didn’t ask you!”
Harrison was uncowed. “I know that. But I happen to have ridden in by that road this morning and I don’t know when was the last time Brennan was out that way.” Harrison continued to look steadily at the glowering outlaw. “You might make it out of here on a stagecoach. So far the ragheads haven’t attacked one of them, and, if you could keep ’em from downing the harness horses while you were protected inside the rig with plenty of ammunition, I think you could probably make it all the way up to Pine Grove. There hasn’t been any redskin trouble up there yet. Not that I’ve heard of anyway.”
Abner and Walt exchanged a glance, then turned to see what their leader’s reaction to this might be. Cass did not keep them wondering very long. He sneered at Harrison. “What the hell do you take us for, anyway? If the ragheads are on the north range beyond Paso, they’d sight anything as big as a stagecoach from a couple of miles out. I think you’re trying to get us killed. That’s what I think.”
Harrison still did not drop his eyes. “Mister, if you got a way out of Paso, and you don’t get all the wood and what-not around you when you make your run for it . . . they’ll bury you right here. Go ahead and try it on horseback.”
Cass went to the window and leaned to gaze out into the sun-bright roadway. Paso lay utterly still on all sides. For a long while the outlaw chieftain looked out and around, then he very slowly straightened up and turned. “Brennan,” he said sharply, “there’s no one in the damned roadway. Even the tie racks are empty.”
Paso’s lawman heaved up to his feet and crossed over to look out. Cass was correct; the town was as silent and empty-seeming as a cemetery. Brennan looked more puzzled than anxious as he strained to see up the roadway as far as possible before saying: “It’s high noon. This time of year it’s pretty much always like this in the middle of the day . . . and later, too . . . for as long as the heat lasts.”
But when Lewis Brennan turned back toward his desk, Ladd Buckner got the impression from his expression that Brennan was a lot less puzzled now, that he was just plain worried.
Cass was slightly less anxious after Brennan’s pronouncement, but, when he, too, moved away from the window, he shot a cold look around at them all, then echoed the constable by saying: “What a damned mess. The whole blasted thing’s got out of hand.” He fixed Ladd Buckner with a vicious look. “When you walked in and commenced your lousy lying, the trouble started.”
Ladd borrowed a leaf from the cattleman’s book by saying: “The trouble started down in Piñon, not up here.”
Cass ignored that contradiction to say: “What idea have you got about us pulling out of here?”
“I’ve been telling you all morning,” replied Ladd, “to sneak out the back way when no one is looking and head up into the mountains with me. I don’t see that you can do anything else, now that there’s a band of raghead marauders on the upper cattle range. Like you said yourself, if you bust out of Paso heading across all that flat, open country, they’ll see you sure as hell.”
“Not in the dark,” said Cass.
Harrison spoke up. “You can’t get plumb across it by morning even if you ride fast all night. You’d still be sitting ducks out there.”
Abner turned on his chieftain. “Damn it, Cass, quit buttin’ your head against a stone wall. These fellers know this lousy country. You heard ’em. We can’t get out of here except by Buckner’s route.”
Cass turned. “Sonny,�
� he said in his most condescending tone, “all these fellers want is to see the three of us get killed. All I’m trying to do is to prevent that from happening. If you want to head out on your own, there is the damned door and good riddance.”
Abner did not say any more. He and Walt looked a little more worried as time passed, but they did not again offer to challenge Cass’s comments or his judgment.
XIII
Ladd longed to cross the room and look out into the roadway. He was confident that something had happened out there. Perhaps Orcutt, Terry, and Reilly had guessed his difficulty inside the jailhouse, and maybe they had somehow learned that the outlaws they had come north to find were also inside the jailhouse, but whatever people knew around Paso, it most probably had something to do with the men in the jailhouse. If he’d dared, he would have engaged Lewis Brennan in conversation to see if Brennan had even unconsciously seen or heard anything that might have had significance. Instead of doing any of these things Ladd remained over along the rear wall smoking and being unobtrusive. Of one thing he was reasonably certain—this charade was not going to last much longer. If the men outside didn’t force the issue, the outlaws themselves would do so.
Cass in particular was becoming increasingly worried and restless as time passed. He walked to the stove to get some coffee and cast a sulphurous glance in Ladd Buckner’s direction. “How could we get plumb clear of this town,” he asked surlily, “and into those mountains without anyone knowing we’d done it, for as long as we’d need to get a good start?”
Ladd answered bluntly: “You said it yourself. Wait until nightfall, then leave in the dark.”
The outlaw lifted his coffee cup. “We got to have horses,” he said, “and not just old pelters, either. Riding the mountains requires good saddle stock.”