by Peter Dawson
As Blaze rode up, Billings spoke without taking his glance from the trio before him: “Yace is out back somewhere. A couple of these jaspers grabbed irons while I wasn’t lookin’. What’ll I do, boss?”
“Make tracks,” Blaze told him. He lifted his voice, shouting: “Yace! Get back here!”
His answer came in the form of a single gunshot from out behind. Fear was suddenly in Blaze. He put his horse around the near side of the bunkhouse and brought the barn lot into sight in time to see Yace ride, bent low over the saddle, from the shelter of a shed to that of a larger crib.
As Yace crossed the open space, he lifted his gun and emptied it in the direction of the barn. Two guns answered from the loft door, and Blaze saw them stab flame from the shadows in the big opening under the roof’s peak. One of those bullets found its target. Suddenly, with ten feet to go to get out of line, Yace’s pony fell in a frontward roll. Yace, thrown clear, landed hard. But Blaze saw him lunge to his feet and run to cover.
Blaze put two shots into the barn loft and reined back behind the bunkhouse wall. Billings came up behind him. “What about Shorty?” Blaze asked his crewman.
“They got him,” Billings said. “I’m goin’ to take him back with me or I don’t go.”
“Hurry up,” Blaze warned. “Harper made the house. He’s got a gun.”
From up in the timber a rifle shot broke the momentary stillness. Another of Sherman’s Winchesters joined the first. Twice his fire was answered by the deeper-throated explosions of six-guns from the barn loft. Blaze saw Yace run back and up toward the timber from the big crib he had hidden behind, keeping it between him and the barn. But presently it no longer sheltered him and the guns in the barn spoke again. When Blaze saw the bullets sending geyser-like puffs of sandy dust close to Yace’s feet, he reined out into the open once more and lined three swift shots through the loft door. The rifles on the hill joined him, not breaking off until Sherman had ridden down out of the trees and helped Yace up to the saddle behind him.
Once he saw Yace and Sherman safe, Blaze turned and rounded the bunkhouse again. Billings was lifting the body of the dead man across his horse’s withers, ahead of the saddle. No Diamond men showed in the bunkhouse doorway now. Blaze looked off toward the trees that blocked a view of the house. He said urgently: “Get going, Billings!”
Shortly Billings was in the saddle and they were making a wide circle around the bunkhouse toward the trail they had taken in. Blaze’s glance was constantly directed toward the rear until they were out of rifle shot from the trees screening the house, where he expected Harper to appear at any moment.
“This makes it a sure thing, don’t it, Blaze?” Billings said at last.
“A sure thing?”
“This business we been steppin’ around the last year or so. A showdown with Diamond.”
“The part that makes it bad is that Harper and his men didn’t push that herd down the gorge,” Blaze said. He kept his glance away from the limp form ahead on Billings’s saddle.
Billings gave him a queer look. “No?” he drawled mildly. “Then who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll say you don’t. As for me, them hardcases will do till someone better comes along. Hell, they gut-shot Shorty, didn’t they? You goin’ to let that pass?”
Blaze didn’t answer. Some minutes later, riding up on Yace and Sherman and the others, he knew he wouldn’t stand a chance of even beginning to explain his doubts.
Yace waited until they had come up and reined in. His bleak glance went briefly to the body slung across Billings’s saddle.
“We split up here,” he said then. “Blaze, you’ll head up to Clark’s and pass the word to him. Andy goes to Workman’s. Sherman, yours is Merrill’s. Don’t bother the girl any more than you have to. She’s got enough on her hands as it is. Abe, give me your horse. I’ll go across to Staples. We’ll bring back every man that can be spared. Meet at Yoke. It’s closest.”
“What about Vanover?” Blaze asked.
“What about him? He’s responsible for his men. Whatever they do is his look-out.”
“Killin’ included?” Blaze drawled.
“Great jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Yace’s deep voice boomed. “You want us to take this sittin’? Look at Shorty there!”
“We could go in and get Lyans. He’d put Harper under arrest.”
“If we could find Lyans . . . and if we happened to catch Harper gone blind or deaf!” Yace gave a mirthless laugh, eying his foreman coldly. “You turnin’ yellow on us, Blaze?”
Blaze’s only answer was to rein out from the others and start out along the trail.
“Where you goin’?” Yace demanded querulously.
“Clark’s!” Blaze called back. “That’s where you said I was to go.”
Blaze’s hot anger didn’t cool until he was well up into the trees, out of sight of the others. He would follow this trail, he decided, leaving it short of the basin to cut across the hills and reach Clark’s layout, which sat far back in a peninsula of grass high along the Troublesome at the northernmost point of the mesa. He’d talk things over with Clark. Maybe, between them, they could get an idea that would stop Yace and the others before there was more killing.
Hearing a sound close to the left in the trees, Blaze looked that way in time to see Shorty’s loose pony, reins caught on the horn, trot deeper into the timber. The riderless Anchor horse had already worked the saddle down under his belly. Before long, if he stayed in the timber, he might catch the reins on a tree or bush or ruin the saddle. He was a good horse, a big-chested bay. Blaze, knowing the outfit might lose a good horse and saddle, reined off there. After a brief chase he caught up the loose animal, a little irritated at the thought of having to lead it all the way to Clark’s where he could turn it loose in the open. Abruptly he had another thought. Joe needed a horse. It would cost him an extra hour at least to go up to the cave. But it would give him the chance to talk to Joe, and he was badly in need of talk with someone who could consider this new development rationally. Leading the dead Anchor man’s pony, he turned up on the trail.
Plans
So he’s framed me with this, too,” Joe said. He gave Blaze a long, level look. “In three days he’s built up four counts against me. Murder, robbery, horse stealin’, and now kidnappin’ a woman. Can they hang a man more than once?”
“Not that I ever heard of. But it was me that brought the girl here. They can’t saddle you with something I did,” Blaze argued.
“You didn’t leave that note in Acme’s box.”
“No,” Blaze admitted, “he did. Who’s he?”
Joe shrugged and hunkered down in the shade of a nearby piñon. They were below the cave mouth, close to the spot where Blaze had two nights ago staked out Jean’s horse on a patch of grass. Shorty’s bay now grazed near the Diamond branded animal at the end of a picket rope twenty feet away.
Joe studied the animal, its sturdy clean legs, its big chest and high withers. “Shorty cut himself out a nice chunk of horseflesh this mornin’,” he remarked.
“He’s a little hard-mouthed. Shorty liked to ride the bit.” Blaze picked up a pebble and flicked it into the narrow stream made from melted snow that foamed close by along the bed of the ordinarily dry cañon. They’d had their brief words about Shorty, who had been too good a friend to both to occasion any more talk. “You’re still seein’ Saygar tonight?”
Joe nodded. “After I take care of something else.”
“What?”
“How fast is this bay?” Joe asked in seeming irrelevance.
“Plenty o’ legs,” Blaze answered. “But what’s that got to do with this other thing you’re takin’ care of, Joe?”
“We want to stop a shoot-out between Vanover’s bunch and the old man’s, don’t we?”
“Sure. But how?”
“With Shorty’s horse.”
“All right,” Blaze drawled bitingly, “let me in on it when you get good and set.”
“Don’t think I will,” Joe told him. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Since you’re goin’ back down there, you might give it away. Can you be up here tonight right after dark to side me across to Saygar’s camp?”
“I’ll be here,” Blaze said. “But what’s this other about Shorty’s jughead?”
Joe smiled meagerly and gave a slow shake of the head. The motion set up the throbbing ache again and he held his head in his hands until it had passed. Then: “I’m going to send the girl on down.”
“With what kind of a story?”
“That’ll depend on what she has to say when I talk to her. Hadn’t you better head for Clark’s?”
“I should’ve a half hour ago.” Blaze stood up. “Ain’t you goin’ to let me in on it, whatever it is?”
“No.”
“You didn’t make out so well the last time you were on your own. There’s too many against you, Joe.”
“That’s one thing I’m countin’ on.”
“On too many bein’ against you? I don’t get it.”
“I don’t want you to get it. You’d better hightail.”
Blaze showed his disappointment and a little anger as he picked up his reins and climbed into the saddle. But when he looked down at Joe, his expression softened. “Whatever it is, be careful, son,” he finally drawled.
“I’ll be careful.”
Joe watched the redhead until he rode out of sight around a near bend in the cañon. Back there a minute ago he had caught himself when on the verge of telling Blaze what he was about to do, deciding on impulse that his friend already had too much to worry about and that he might not approve anyway. Now he was filled with a nervous anxiety to put his idea into motion. But a look skyward at the sun at its zenith told him it was too early to start.
Last night Joe had slept fitfully after Blaze left. Waking at dawn, he had felt more like himself. He had tested his legs and found them weak. The throbbing in his head had eased off except when he moved too abruptly. He had spent a long time looking down at the sleeping girl, realizing what she had done for him. Then he had gathered some of the food stacked in the corner and crawled out of the cave as quietly as he could so as not to wake her. He’d built a breakfast fire of smokeless dry cedar on the shelf directly in front of the cave mouth. While waiting for his coffee to boil, he had walked upcañon and stripped and washed in the stream. The icy chill of the water had put new strength in him. He had relished his meal.
Twice before Blaze had ridden in, Joe had crawled back into the cave to see if Jean was awake. Each time he had found her sleeping soundly. She had moved only once during the night, a plain indication to him that she was exhausted and needed as much rest as she could get.
The clash between Anchor and Diamond seemed to be a part of a slowly emerging pattern Joe was beginning to recognize. The destruction of Singletree’s and Anchor’s herd and the note, pointing directly to him as being responsible for the girl’s disappearance, were both pieces of that pattern. Mike Saygar was part of this puzzle, one of its key pieces, perhaps. But the outlaw was in no position to feel accurately the pulse of what was going on in town and on the mesa. No, someone was behind Saygar, a man shrewd enough to make the most of every chance, wise enough to stir up trouble between the cattle company and the mesa outfits to gain his own ends. What those ends were, Joe had no way of knowing. His hunch was that he would find out when he saw Saygar. But before Saygar came this other thing, the stopping of more of the killing that had already cost one loyal Anchor man his life.
Joe heard a sound above and looked up there to see Jean step into sight at the edge of the broad shelf fronting the cave mouth. Looking at her in that unguarded interval before she saw him, seeing her tall figure outlined against the sky, he was struck by something that had passed unnoticed that early morning in the upstairs hall of the hotel and last night in the cave. The bright sunlight edged the girl’s chestnut head with coppery highlights; her face held a startling quality of freshness and fragile beauty of which he was only now aware. And in this moment, for the first time since Blaze’s outburst last night, Joe’s thoughts turned briefly to Ruth Merrill. Then Ruth left his mind, obscured by the newly found loveliness of this girl.
Jean’s glance came down to him and her look was momentarily startled before her face showed outright relief. As she hurried down the gravelly slope to him, he was keenly aware of her grace and poise and her swinging boyish stride.
She stood before him a little breathless, high color on her cheeks, giving him a glad smile. “You are better,” she said. “I thought you’d gone.” She seemed to realize only then how openly she was betraying her gladness at finding him. “Is the head better?”
His hand went up to the bandage and he felt of it gingerly, a wide smile on his lean face. “Lots,” he said. “I had a good doctor.” His smile was gone then as he added: “You got yourself in for something when you let Blaze drag you up here.”
“I’m glad he did, Joe. Besides, I knew where he was taking me.”
“You did?” Outright admiration came to his face. “One day I’ll try and make this up to you.”
“There’s nothing to make up. You didn’t deserve to just . . . just die.”
Joe’s grin was wry. “There’s some that wouldn’t agree with that.”
“I know. And maybe I’m a little selfish in wanting to see you get well. You see, some of the things that have happened lately have . . . well, they’ve been things neither Dad nor I could understand. Blaze has told me enough to let me know you couldn’t give the answers to all those things. I think you’re the only one who can help us.”
“And you’re the girl who helped Keech get that gun on me,” he drawled.
“I’m sorry for that, terribly sorry. You must believe me.” There was no mistaking her sincerity. “If I had known what I know now, I would have warned you, hidden you there in the room. You could have seen Ruth. That’s something else.” She paused, studying him intently. “I’ll go tell Ruth anything you want me to. Perhaps that will help make it up to you.”
He tried to find something to say but couldn’t.
She went on to cover his embarrassment: “Ruth didn’t like it at all. I don’t suppose we’re friends now.”
“Let’s forget her,” he drawled. “What’s more important . . . what will you tell your father?”
“The truth.” Her head tilted up in a determined way. “When I tell him, he’ll believe as I do, that you’re innocent. Naturally I wouldn’t let anyone know where to find you.”
“There’s been trouble this morning, trouble that may change that,” Joe told her gravely. “Blaze was in on it. Last night someone pushed a herd into the gorge below Anchor. Staples lost heavily, Anchor, too. This morning Yace took a crew over to Diamond. They tangled with Harper and lost a man. They’re gathering more men now to go back.”
“Where was Dad?” Jean asked quickly. Her face had gone pale.
“Out somewhere with Bill Lyans, lookin’ for you. If he’d been there, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Why would this change what I think of you, Joe?” she asked.
“You’ll have to take sides. They’ve got it that I’m the one that carried you off the other night. Someone left a note in Acme’s mailbox and signed my name to it.”
“But you didn’t! I’ll tell them it’s a lie!” Her look became alarmed. “Who’s behind this, Joe? Someone’s doing everything they can to make trouble.”
“I know. We can have a try at findin’ out. You could help by tellin’ your father to hold off until I see him.”
“How will you find out? You’re sick, weak.”
“Not as bad as you think,” he told her. “Let’s get you some breakfast and then start down. I’ll ride a ways with you.”
“You can’t, Joe. What if they see you?”
He drawled: “That’s what they’re supposed to do . . . see me.” He told her why.
Vengeance Riders
By
2:00 that afternoon thirty-one saddled ponies stood at Yoke’s yard tie rails and along the near side of the holding corral by the barn. Down-headed and hip-shot, they drowsed in the sun, tails switching at the flies. Inside the house, the talk was muted and sparse. John Merrill’s death had done as much to sober these men as had the fight and the loss of Shorty Adams at Diamond this morning. Added to that was Staples’s predicament. Singletree had been all but wiped out.
Clark had brought four men from Brush and sent out for six more who were gathering Merrill’s shipping herd. Staple’s crew was there in its entirety, angry and chastened over what they considered a betrayal of their owner—their having left the herd the night before in favor of their bunkhouse. The rest of the count was made up by Anchor and Yoke, with more Yoke men expected down out of the hills shortly.
They were waiting for the return of a man they had sent in to try and locate Bill Lyans. Yace Bonnyman had had no scruples about immediately returning to Diamond and settling matters any way that seemed best. But Slim Workman had said flatly: “Damned if I want any hangovers when this winds up. We’re law-abidin’ citizens, always have been. I don’t budge from here until we get the law to witness what we do.”
So Yace and the rest had agreed to wait until Lyans was summoned. As Clark Dunne put it: “We can do all the better after dark anyway.”
When Blaze rode in, Clark was talking to Charley Staples off in one corner of the plainly furnished main room of the house. Blaze came up to them, said—“Like to see you when you’re finished, Clark.”—and drifted over with some others. Clark was puzzled by Blaze’s look and tone, which was urgent, but he had reached the crucial point in his talk with Staples and didn’t want to leave it unfinished.
He went on now with the point he’d been making when Blaze interrupted: “I’ll leave it up to you, Charley. It’ll take some time for Ruth and me to get John’s affairs settled. We may get away for a short honeymoon. A rest, I mean. This isn’t any time to be talkin’ a honeymoon, considerin’ what’s happened. But when we get back, I reckon Ruth and I can see our way clear to helpin’. Either by buyin’ your spread outright or through a loan.”