The Outlaws 2

by Brian Garfield

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Bannerman said, ‘but what happens if he turns against you? How do you know you can trust him?’

  ‘I’ll worry about keeping him in line.’

  Bannerman was still shaking his head. ‘Maybe you can, and then maybe you can’t. I just don’t like this idea of fighting fire with fire. You can put a fire out with water, too, you know.’

  ‘All right. How?’

  Bannerman mumbled something but made no real answer. McCracken grinned lazily. ‘Take it easy,’ he told the man, and reined his horse around into the uphill trail. ‘So long,’ he called.

  The horse took him rapidly deeper into the mountains while overhead the sun swung down ahead of him, throwing long shadows.

  Bannerman sat his saddle frowning long after McCracken had disappeared over the next hilltop. Presently he got down and checked his mailbox, finding only a mail-order catalogue in it to represent the week’s mail. He uttered a mild oath and mounted his horse, gigging it up the right-hand fork through a thickness of piñon and manzanita, past an aspen-bordered creek and into his own ranch yard, a sizable scatter of buildings set slightly up the hill from the creek, so as to have a good command of a large part of the district roundabout. The buildings were constructed of hand-hewn aspen logs and fir and the corrals were multiple and extended for some distance along the slope. The Box B crew at this hour were all out at their work, and except for the ring of hammer on iron from the smithy shack, the yard was deserted. Bannerman sat a moment regarding the place with a mild pride and then rode into the big horse barn. There he unsaddled the bay and rubbed it down before turning it loose into the corral where it mingled with a half-dozen other horses and managed to stir up a choking pall of dust.

  Bannerman went back through the barn, past a smell of soaped leather and baled straw and fought down the impulse to sneeze; he paused at the open-ended smithy and said hello to the man who was shaping glowing red horseshoes and finally went on up to the main house.

  His older brother had built the long, low-roofed log structure and it was constructed to withstand the hard punishment that mountain years could give. Hard-driving Vince Bannerman, in fact, had built all of this, and moreover, he had built it all up from scratch. Bannerman liked to think that his own work had been of help, but privately he knew that anyone could have done his part. It had been his brother who had had the vision, who had gathered his herd in Texas—against the advice of everyone—and had driven the herd west to Arizona in the face of desert sandstorms, Indian raids, mountain blizzards, and outlaw thefts. Vince had scoured the Territory for a crew, had assembled what men he could find and then had manhandled them into shape as a working outfit. By sheer force of will his brother had kept them in line and coaxed from them the immense expenditures of energy and time that had resulted in the establishment of these buildings and all that surrounded them —grass and water and mile after square mile of land, and the big herd, scattered all over these mountains.

  Now Bannerman stood on the front porch of the house, looking uphill to the little grove of aspens near the top of the slope where Vince was buried.

  Then he turned inside the house, stepped across the bearskin rug in the parlor—his brother had shot the bear—and took down a clay jug of corn whisky. He poured a tin cup full of the colorless liquid and swallowed a mouthful. It burned its way savagely down his throat and chest and belly. Shaking his head to clear it, he moved across the room to stand by the massive stone fireplace. His glance swept the big room.

  Everything in it reminded him of his brother. Even dead, Vince’s shadow was a solemn overcast that Bannerman walked in. The bearded buffalo head above the fireplace. The heavy, dark wood of the tables and chairs and divan. The hand-split boards that paneled the walls. The massive rafters that crisscrossed above his head. The brown-gray bear rug; the rifle rack with its shotgun and buffalo rifle and saddle carbines. All of it bore the mark of his brother’s hand, and Bannerman felt that he lived always under the threatening upraised giant fist of a dead man.

  In a wall mirror he considered the deception that was his face: a strong-jawed face, level-eyed, prematurely gray at the temples—he was only thirty-one—and dark and smooth of flesh. His once-broken nose accentuated the tough appearance of his face; it looked like the face of a fighting man.

  But it was not. He looked down at his knuckles and went back to refill the tin cup. He was holding it up to his mouth when the door opened and Florence came in from the bedroom.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘No mail,’ he said. ‘Just a catalogue.’

  She looked at the jug. He saw the bitter, yet understanding look disappear. She said quietly, ‘Isn’t it a little early?’

  He shrugged and put the cup down unfinished, and stepped restlessly away to look out through the window. He spoke without turning: ‘I met McCracken on the trail. He’s hired a gunslinger to get our stolen beef back from Six.’

  ‘Good for him,’ Florence said immediately. Her instant reply made him turn and look at her curiously. She went on, ‘What we need up here is some backbone, Knox. Ben McCracken can give it to us. Do you begrudge him that?’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ he told her. ‘I know what these things can lead to. When Six learns there’s a gunman set against him, he’ll tighten up. He might even bring in his own gun hands. Who can tell where it will stop?’

  She was frowning a little at him. Her hair, he noticed absently, was done up smoothly in a bun—soft, brown hair that looked younger than her face. The lines in her skin, the coarseness of her thin face, the raw surfaces of her hands—he noticed these things and regretted them, but could do nothing. It was the life they had chosen.

  She said to him now, ‘If you want to eat a banana, you’ve got to peel it, Knox. Do you expect to let Six do as he pleases until we’ve all starved to death?’

  ‘I think we ought to rely on the law,’ he said, turning again to the window, uneasy under her gaze. ‘That’s what Tom Moss grove’s there for.’

  ‘He can’t do anything, and you know it. Six is too quick and too shrewd. He laughs at the law.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, troubled and uncertain. ‘Maybe. But if we let McCracken go ahead with this, we’re throwing away any respect we might have for the law. Where do things go from there?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ she replied quietly, ‘that it’s a question of letting McCracken do it. You’d have a hard time stopping him, Knox. He’s a determined man and a tough one.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, and in that moment he hated Ben McCracken. He said bitterly, ‘He’s all the things I’m not—that’s what you mean to say, isn’t it?’

  She made no immediate answer, but in a moment she was touching his sleeve and when he turned to look into her face, she was smiling a sad little smile. She said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t jump at me, Knox. We’ve been married seven years and we’ve loved each other all that time. But lately you’ve let yourself get bitter simply because you’re not the same kind of man that some others are. But there are things in you that none of them have, darling—don’t you see? Your respect for the law—your kindness to men—your gentleness. Now you want to trade all that for the cheap kind of toughness you see around you. It’s no good, Knox.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ He wheeled uneasily away and, as a minor gesture of defiance, picked up the whisky cup, threw his head back and drank. He said, ‘Look what happened to Felix Ochoa’s outfit. Ochoa got old and weak, so his place went on the rocks. Hell, Florence—if Ben McCracken hadn’t come along to pull Ochoa out of the hole, Wagon Wheel would have been auctioned off for taxes before now. And the same thing’s liable to happen here. My brother built up Box B. And I’m beginning to wonder if I’m man enough to hold it together without him.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  He shook his head. ‘Am I? I go to town—I go to cattlemen’s meetings. I see the way they look at me. They listen to me out of respect for Vince’s memory, but they don’t pay any a
ttention to what I say. I’m weak—that’s what they all think. I’m a coward who hides behind the skirts of the law. I know what they think, and it’s not good, Florence. Box B is a big power—and if I were half the man I ought to be, I’d have their respect. But I don’t.’

  ‘Is public opinion that important, darling?’

  He had no answer for her; in a bleak mood, he put the cup down, touched her arm, then went outside into the sun.

  Five

  The buildings of Felix Ochoa’s Wagon Wheel lay on the flank of the mountain, facing a meadow, shaded by thick leafy trees. The main house was built of stone and logs, and was surrounded by a litter of outbuildings, some of them boarded up now, for the ranch had once been a good deal bigger than it was now. Six years ago, the lean Pennsylvanian Scott Kramer had come into the hill country with coolly competent eyes and a fistful of money, and had bought almost half the Wagon Wheel grass country from old Felix Ochoa. Now Kramer’s Turkey Track was a cattle barony on a par with Wagon Wheel and Box B and the other old-line outfits of the timberline. And as Kramer had prospered, so Ochoa had withered—until a drizzly day three years ago when tall, redheaded Ben McCracken had appeared on the doorstep looking for a riding job.

  McCracken had taken the limping outfit strongly in hand; he had fired the listless crew and recruited three hard-skinned cowhands, seasoned riders who knew their business. And now, gradually, Wagon Wheel was regaining its feet. It was, in fact, doing quite well—or would have been, were it not for the constant gnawing depredations of Chet Six and his back-country crew of rawhiders, who lived on stolen beef and laughed at the law. As it was, Wagon Wheel’s slim profits were eaten up by the moonlighting raiders.

  But now, with Cody Longwell in the mountains, all that might change. So McCracken was thinking when he trotted into the yard and turned his horse over to old San Saba, the cook. San Saba grumbled his usual bad-tempered greeting and hobbled toward the barn, leading McCracken’s tired horse. McCracken, batting dust from his trousers with his hat, went up to the big house and knocked.

  Grizzled and dark-skinned, Ochoa pushed the door open and frowned. He spoke in his softly liquid Mexican accent: ‘Damn it, Ben, you ought to know by now you don’t have to knock.’

  ‘Habit, I guess. I just work here, remember?’ McCracken smiled a greeting and stepped inside, holding his hat.

  Elena was sitting across the room, half in shadow. McCracken glanced at her and saw her quick grin. She said, ‘Hi, cowboy,’ and brought her attention back to the quirt she was plaiting out of rawhide strips. Sheathed in Levi’s and a flannel shirt, with her long black hair falling about her shoulders, she was a wild and primitive-looking creature. She said, ‘Shut the door, Pa, before every horsefly in the county gets inside.’

  Ochoa closed the door and gestured with a veined hand. ‘Sientese,’ he said, pointing to a cowhide-covered chair. When McCracken lowered his giant frame into it, the old man pulled up a bench.

  McCracken said, ‘I talked to Mossgrove. It didn’t do much good.’

  ‘Didn’t expect it would,’ the old man murmured. ‘But now you’ve warned him—at least that is something.’

  ‘I did a little more than that,’ McCracken said, and told him of hiring Cody Longwell. ‘I don’t think he’ll succeed in getting much of our beef back but at least he’ll be a thorn in Six’s side. It may give Six something else to worry about for a while—and give us a chance to get everyone organized.’

  ‘A fact,’ the old man agreed. ‘The trouble is that the ranchers are all as independent as hogs on ice. We will have a tough time getting them all to throw in with us against Six, I think. There is Bannerman—he would shrink from a harmless lizard—and then there is Kramer. I do not believe he ever took an order in his life, that Kramer.’

  ‘He’s too independent for his own good,’ Elena put in, looking up from her lacing.

  ‘Here, now,’ McCracken said gently. ‘I thought you were soft on him?’

  ‘He’s soft on me, all right,’ she said. ‘But maybe it doesn’t work the other way around.’

  McCracken chuckled. ‘You never soften up, do you?’

  ‘Why should I?’ she snapped back. ‘I’m no lily-fingered town girl.’

  It was an indirect slur against Ada Stewart and McCracken recognized it as such but ignored it; he was used to Elena’s tomboyish baiting. Having lived all her life on a mountain ranch, Elena was just what a man would expect her to be—untamed, a little arrogant, cocksure, and as able as a cowhand when it came to ranch work. She had a natural contempt for weakness—especially for what she considered to be weakness in the manners and ways of townsfolk.

  McCracken stood up and stretched, taking up his hat. ‘Been a long day,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll take a ride over to Kramer’s and see if we can set up a cattlemen’s meeting to make some plans about Six.’

  ‘A good thought,’ Ochoa said. ‘We cannot drift any more while Six steals our cattle from us.’

  McCracken nodded, put on his hat and stepped to the door. The old man’s voice stopped him: ‘Have you decided what to do about Apache Springs?’

  McCracken frowned. Apache Springs, the line camp and two sections of land were his for the taking, in lieu of the back wages that Ochoa owed him. But today in town Ada had expressed her dislike for the idea. McCracken shook his head. ‘I’d like to think on it a while.’

  ‘All right,’ Ochoa said blandly. ‘Take your time.’

  ‘Sure.’ McCracken swung outside and headed for the cookshack, hungry for his supper. Over the rise he saw Nate Shattuck bringing the crew in from the day’s work. Shat-tuck raised an arm in salute and disappeared into the trees on the way down. McCracken swung up the steps into the kitchen while the last rays of the dying sun painted the clouds crimson.

  Dragoon Pass, Chet Six’s headquarters, was a timber-walled gorge sliced through the tops of the Arrowheads. On the floor of the pass four or five dilapidated buildings passed for a headquarters; from this yard trails wound away in all directions through the vast reaches of the mountain range—trails along which the slightest rumor came quickly to Chet Six’s ears. Thus, at the nerve center of his empire, Chet Six sat on the porch of his store, somnolently puffing at his pipe and then holding the pipe in his hands to consider the dim red glow in its bowl. Twilight was painted violet and pink across the sky; three or four horses were tied up at the hitch rail in front of the store, and from inside the place Six could hear the chink of poker chips, the slap of cards, the drone of men’s lazy voices and the occasional scrape of a chair as a man went to the bar to pour a drink.

  Six was an immense barrel of a man; it was said that his men traveled far and wide to find a horse capable of sustaining his great mass. His head was mostly bald and his cheeks were concealed by a close-cropped beard of indeterminate hue; his eyes had a deceptive sleepy droop and his expression was normally the expression of a mild, complacent, self-satisfied mole.

  Channing Pierce, Six’s bantam, button-eyed segundo, came from the poker game and stood rocking on his heels on the wooden porch, looking up into the trees and dangling a whisky bottle idly from his fingers. ‘Cool evenin’,’ Pierce observed.

  ‘There’ll be a quarter moon later on,’ Six said. He always mumbled because he seemed too lazy to move his lips, and his voice was always the growl of a well-fed bear. He said, ‘You might round up a few of the boys and work over Bannerman’s north section tonight.’

  ‘The ranchers have all got men riding night guard,’ Pierce said. ‘Do we shoot?’

  ‘No. Let them drive you off, if they spot you. The time ain’t come for killings—not yet, anyway.’

  Pierce shrugged in his cocky way. There was a mean look in his little eyes. Six looked at the little man’s underslung chin and protruding ears and for a moment savored the thought of how much he hated Channing Pierce.

  Pierce said, ‘When does that time come, Chet?’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ Six rumbled. ‘Don’t get impatient, little fella
. Leave everything to Daddy Six, hey?’

  ‘Come off it,’ Pierce said quietly. ‘Somebody pulls the strings and you jump. Who’s running this show, Chet?’

  Six grinned through his beard, through the fat bulge of his cheeks and jowls. ‘The trouble with you, Channing, you ain’t got no respect. You say something like that, it means you’re hinting around that I ain’t big enough to be handling things here by myself. Now, offhand, who can you think of that’s a bigger man than Chet Six?’

  ‘You’re not foolin’ me,’ Pierce said. He raised the bottle to his lips and drank. Wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve, he said, ‘Somebody gives the orders up here. Somebody calls the tune and you dance to it.’

  ‘You got an over-active imagination,’ Six murmured, unruffled. He was not a man to anger easily. He knocked his pipe against the arm of the oversized rocking chair and proceeded to occupy himself repacking the pipe from a leather tobacco pouch. That done, he put a match to the bowl and sucked noisily.

  Pierce took another drink and spoke musingly, ‘Now, if a smart man was to find out who was behind Chet Six, that same smart man might be able to make himself a nice piece of money just for keepin’ his mouth shut, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Smart fellows like that,’ Six observed, ‘generally end up gut-shot out in the desert with the coyotes feeding on their bones. You keep that in mind before you set out to do any blackmailing, Channing—that is, provided you ever figure out who this nonexistent gent is.’ Six drew his chin back and laughed low in his chest. ‘A man pulling strings on Chet Six—that’s a good one.’

  ‘Sure it is,’ Pierce muttered, and swung inside the building.

  Alone on the porch, Six allowed himself the pleasure of a satisfied grin and sat back with his hands laced over his bulging belly, puffing quietly at the pipe. Against the pine-scented cool air, the taste of the pipe was warm and comfortable. Gently he moved the creaking rocker.

  When the last of the crimson twilight was fading, a horseman breasted the foot of the pass and trotted forward, advancing at a steady gait and displaying no particular concern.