Gunsmoke Masquerade

by Peter Dawson

  Pinto didn’t go along with the others but put his pony several paces out from the tree border and sat, looking down at the indistinct shapes of the bunched cattle, his face set bleakly yet triumphantly. It occurred to him that this was a shabby revenge, but it was next best to the impossible that, for him, would have been that often-imagined meeting with Pete Dallam, a gun in his hand.

  The minutes dragged for Pinto. He became restless, halfway suspecting that Riggs at the last moment was backing out. Finally he made up his mind to ride down and see what was the matter. Suddenly the guns cut loose, their thunder rolling in sharp echoes up the slope, their powder flashes winking in the downward darkness. With the explosions came a blend of sharp, yipping yells. The cattle started moving, slowly at first, then faster. All at once they were running away from the noise, away from the pound of hoofs coming from the head of the pocket. They were no longer bunched but spread out in frantic flight, each animal for itself. Then came a thin but solid line, gathering breadth, as the half-wild steers that had begun the stampede raced for the big meadow. Other tardy animals fell in with them and the thickness of the line grew until it was a formless and seething wave flowing toward the mouth of the pocket.

  From the meadow, a lone shot rang out. A man down there gave a shout that was all but swallowed by the thunder of the stampeding herd. That man, Pinto surmised, must be the rider who had been standing guard at the mouth of the pocket. Pinto now spurred his horse out into the open, lazily riding the flank of the herd. The moon’s light was strong enough so that he saw the main body of steers when they broke out of the pocket. Only then did Luke and Belden lend the terror of their guns to the panic already pushing the herd. Instead of spreading farther, as they had first threatened to do, the swing animals crowded back into the main body, trying in their headlong flight to get as far as possible from the thundering concussion of the guns flashing against the sideward darkness.

  From the high promontory of the slope flanking the pocket mouth, Pinto Sanders watched a grudging dream take shape in reality. He could see the dark mass of the cattle herd flowing relentlessly down the long gentle incline toward the main band of sheep, between the pocket and the fire by the creek. And now a shot or two came from off near the fire, explosions that sounded feeble and inadequate against the roar of six hundred hoofs pounding the turf.

  The massed sheep to this side of the creek broke rank at the last, feebly, then milled frantically as the crazed steers plunged down on them. To Pinto, it was like watching a blunted axe head descend lazily on a gray and aged round of cottonwood. But the axe, which was the herd, didn’t stop once it had buried itself in the wood. It went on through, as though some giant hand of tremendous power was pushing it, through and beyond the band, straight for the creek and the fire beside it.

  The details were blurred now by distance. Pinto couldn’t make out much but the scattering of the last remaining fragments of the broken band of sheep and of the relentless onward surging of the cattle, beginning to spread now. The main stem of the herd reached the creek and crossed it. The fire suddenly went out. There came ragged gunfire from the direction of the camp. Then the herd was climbing the far slope, the stampede slowing, yet just as relentlessly overrunning the smaller bunch of sheep across there.

  Pinto looked away, breathing a long, deep sigh. “That’s from me to you, Dallam,” he drawled beneath his breath.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dawn’s first feeble light filtered through the ground haze that lay over the meadow to reveal the shambles that had come during the dark hours. Westward from the creek, in line with the pocket mouth, lay a broad and grayish-red swath of sheep carcasses. Eastward and almost centering that slope were others, fewer, but their number awesome to the weary red-eyed men who circled and rode down to what had two hours ago been a pleasant camp.

  There they found utter destruction. The charred remnants of the fire lay scattered over a rough circle some thirty feet across. What had last night been Morg Prenn’s new buckboard, serving as chuck wagon, was now a mass of splintered wood and twisted iron. All but one wheel had disintegrated, and that single wheel leaned crazily on a two-foot length of broken hickory axle, its iron tire twisted and pointing to the sky like a gnarled oak branch. Vari-colored fragments of blankets lay beaten into the ground, a saddle with a broken tree and a torn skirt sat astraddle the cook’s overturned Dutch oven. Nearby the bean and beef breakfast stew that had been cooking on the fire made a muddy hoof-churned puddle.

  The cook had miraculously salvaged a few edibles from the ruins. At a new fire well away from the old camp, he was brewing coffee in a dented two-gallon pot and spooning pan bread into a smoking fry pan that had come through unscarred. Below his fire, legs up over the creekbank, lay a horse carcass while nearby a soiled tarp covered what had yesterday been a big and hearty Fencerail rider. Jim Brewster had been a heavy sleeper, the hardest man in the bunkhouse to wake of a morning; this morning he wouldn’t have to be awakened.

  Tom Buchwalter and Fred Kelso stared at the stricken camp, then up along the carcass-dotted western half of the meadow down which they had just ridden from the timber at its edge.

  “Morg!” Buchwalter called.

  Prenn and three others were digging a grave for the dead Fencerail man. At Buchwalter’s hail, Prenn straightened, running a hand over his sore back; he had wrenched it during the stampede last night in being thrown from his crazed pony but had miraculously escaped further injury by firing into the herd and swinging it away from him. He now thrust his spade into the mounded fresh earth beside the grave and strode over, weariness deeply lining his dark face.

  “I didn’t want the others to hear,” Buchwalter said as Prenn came up. His expression was grave, worried. “Morg, it looks bad. We’ve lost over a thousand head. Nearly a third.”

  Prenn’s brows lifted. “That all?” he said ironically. “I thought it’d be more. Well, what do we do about it?”

  Buchwalter glanced at the sheriff and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Fred says nothing.”

  “Nothing!” Prenn exploded. “Why, damn it, I’ll go after Bishop myself and . . .”

  “Hold on, Morg!” Kelso cut in. “We know who did this. It was Riggs and his sidekicks. I know for a fact that Frank Bishop fired the lot of ’em last night . . . even gave Riggs an order to Adams on drawin’ their pay while the bank was closed. They were in town and I saw Riggs. He bragged he was comin’ up here. I tried to beat him but wasn’t soon enough. So Bishop didn’t do this. Fact is, he showed he was through with this fight when he let Riggs go.”

  Prenn’s look was one of sullen impotent anger.

  “Of course, Riggs is on his way out,” Buchwalter said. “We could never catch him.”

  “What the hell are we supposed to do, take this lyin’ down?” Prenn blazed. “We lose a third of what we got in this in one night. If it can happen once, it can happen again. Bishop may have been through with the fight yesterday. But when he hears how easy it was to do this harm, he’ll damn’ well be back in it up to his whiskers again.”

  “I’ll see that he isn’t,” Kelso said easily. “You haven’t broken a single law gettin’ these sheep in. Bishop can’t make a move against you without breakin’ one. If he does, I lock him up.”

  Prenn gave a dry laugh that had its unspoken meaning, implying that he would like to see Kelso have to make good his brag.

  “I’ll lock him up, sure as hell’s hot!” the lawman repeated. With a last stony glance at Prenn, he reined his pony away and over toward the cook’s fire.

  When Kelso was out of hearing, Buchwalter’s face shed its benign look and he said quickly: “Two can sit in on this game, Morg. Just wait.”

  His tone, clipped and hard, surprised Prenn even more than the inference of his words. “Don’t go makin’ it any worse, Tom,” Prenn said quickly, suddenly about-facing in his attitude. “We can’t stand any more losses. It’ll be a month before we can gather in that herd again. I’m taking a big loss there,
too. They run a lot of weight off last night in that stampede.”

  “Never mind your loss,” was Buchwalter’s cryptic answer. “I’ve got an idea. This may be settled before you know it.”

  “That ain’t sayin’ which way it’ll be settled,” Prenn stated grimly. Because he had never before seen this side of Buchwalter, because he didn’t understand how such a mild-natured man could assume the cloak of hardness the Fencerail man now wore, he went on: “Tom, I’m worried. Let’s don’t do anything for a day or so until we can cool down and think things over.”

  “We’ll see, Morg,” was all Buchwalter would say on that score. “I’m on my way up the cañon. Got to see Paight about getting that rock blasted out of the channel. He left with the dynamite when I told him to, didn’t he?”

  “Been gone about two hours,” Prenn answered. He nodded across to the grave that was nearly finished. “What about Jim here? Hadn’t you ought to read a service over him before you go?”

  “How long before you’re finished?”

  “Oughtn’t to be much more than another hour.”

  “Then it’ll have to wait till I get back.”

  Prenn frowned. “When’ll that be?”

  “No telling. Maybe the middle of the afternoon. Maybe later.”

  Prenn’s look was one of shock. “Jim ain’t in any shape to stay long above ground, Tom. It gets powerful hot here in the middle of the day.”

  “We’ll bury him this afternoon,” Buchwalter said decisively, and turned away, starting up along the line of the creek.

  Prenn gave his friend’s departing back a long and puzzled inspection. Buchwalter obviously wasn’t himself this morning. Final proof of that lay in his callous attitude toward the burying of his crew man. He’d lost his gentleness, his milkiness of manner, the moment Kelso’s back was turned. That in itself amazed Prenn. He had never suspected Buchwalter of being capable of such cold brutality. He had the disturbing thought that he’d hate to cross the Fencerail foreman when he was in a mood like this. And, because he had never thought of Tom Buchwalter in this way, he was much impressed and unaccountably disturbed. It was he himself who usually needed to be hauled up short of an impulsive action; now, contradictorily, he had been trying to stop Buchwalter from some unexplained violence. Worst of all, now that Buchwalter had shown this little-known side of his nature, Prenn felt lost and uncertain. Buchwalter had always been a cool-headed leader, sure of himself. He was no longer that. Prenn didn’t like this new Tom Buchwalter he had just glimpsed.

  Because of his uncertainty, Prenn acted on a queer, inexplicable impulse. He went across to the cook’s fire where Kelso was wolfing a big slab of pan bread and drinking steaming hot coffee from a bent tin cup.

  “Fred,” Prenn began abruptly, “you’d better hurry that and go along with Buchwalter.”

  Kelso’s glance was puzzled. “Why should I?”

  Prenn was caught short in his impulse. For a moment his loyalty toward Buchwalter and his suspicion of Kelso as being a Bishop man kept him silent. But in the end his worry over the change in Buchwalter outweighed his reticence. “He’s actin’ a little off his feed,” he said finally. “Talkin’ about getting even with Bishop. Whatever he’s up to is important enough so that he’s holdin’ up the buryin’ until late afternoon. Says he’s goin’ up the cañon to see Paight about blowin’ the channel clear. Maybe he is, maybe he ain’t.”

  The sheriff’s glance swung up along the line of the creek to where Buchwalter was disappearing beyond the crest of a low knoll halfway to the mouth of the cañon. “I’ll just tag along after him,” he said.

  “Don’t let on like I told you anything,” Prenn cautioned.

  The lawman nodded, limped across to his horse, and climbed into the saddle. Yet he didn’t immediately follow the Fencerail man, going instead up toward the eastern edge of the meadow where several riders were working to round up the thin remnants of Prenn’s cattle herd. Only when he’d given Buchwalter a good ten-minute start did Kelso follow.

  He had at first been more irritated than surprised at Prenn’s strange request and might have acted on it less promptly had it not fitted in with his plan for meeting Streak up the cañon. The tempers of these men were worn thin with the ruin the night had brought and his first notion was that Prenn was imagining something. But then he’d had a thought that startled him, and it was this idea that had made him delay following Buchwalter until the man was well ahead of him. Wasn’t it possible, he had asked himself, that Buchwalter and the man who rode Snyder’s splay-foot were known to each other, that they might even be working together in this still obscure purpose that had involved paying a woman to pose as Pete Dallam’s sister? Yes, he decided, it was possible. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. Furthermore, hadn’t Streak already guessed that connection between the two in naming a meeting place?

  Entering the wide mouth of the cañon, riding past the last large bunch of sheep being driven toward the meadow by three Mexican herders, Kelso had added reason to respect the abilities of the man he had discovered wasn’t an outlaw but a federal officer. And because he had proof of the directness with which this Mathiot acted, he now hurried a little, afraid that in letting his quarry get so sizable a start he might lose sight of both him and Streak if the hide-out was in reality Buchwalter’s goal.

  Three miles of going put Kelso in unfamiliar country, with the cañon narrowing from its generous width to little more than the scant breadth of the dry streambed. He had often fished the lower cañon of the Squaw, but had never explored these narrows where the walls shut out the sunlight and the slender margins of the stream were a tangle of chokeberry, alder, and scrub oak. Once the deep shadows of the towering walls pressed in on him, he was uneasy with an insistent feeling of danger being close ahead.

  When Bill Paight stepped out from behind a dense oak thicket close ahead, when he saw the grave and dogged set of the Fencerail man’s face, that feeling became even stronger.

  And Bill’s first words didn’t ease his worry. “Better get in here out of sight,” came the Fencerail man’s clipped, low-spoken drawl as he turned and stepped out of sight into the brush.

  Kelso was quick to follow. Behind the thicket, in a shallow indentation in the wall, stood the bay gelding Streak had ridden out of Ledge last night. Alongside was a brown with a Fencerail brand. The cinches of the two saddles hung loose and the horses stood hipshot, reins knotted to the lone dead branch of a lightning-blasted pine stump. Beyond, against the foot of the sheer climbing limestone, were the two cases of dynamite Kelso had seen Bill pack away from Prenn’s wrecked camp in the darkness two hours ago.

  “Where’s Mathiot?” was the lawman’s first query as he dismounted.

  “Following Buchwalter. Wouldn’t let me side him. He was sure you’d be along.” Bill spoke softly, as though afraid of his voice carrying too far.

  “Well, now I’m here. Let’s get on after him.” The sheriff lifted a boot to stirrup, about to mount again.

  But Bill shook his head. “Streak said to stay set. That hide-out entrance is only a few rods above. He seemed to think Buchwalter was headed in there, ’cause he set out after him afoot. You think he’s right, Kelso?”

  “About what?”

  “Buchwalter being in with this jasper on the splay-foot.”

  Kelso nodded. “I thought of it. But what does Mathiot think he can do alone? There’s two of them. He isn’t in any shape to handle much trouble.”

  “He’s better’n he was when you saw him last. I made him get some shut-eye while I watched the hide-out. He was more like himself when I woke him a few minutes ago.”

  The lawman went over to tie his horse with the other two. “You and me are goin’ to walk up there after him,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t. So far Streak’s guesses have panned out. He told us to wait here. I’m waiting.”

  Kelso reluctantly accepted this verdict, reached his cane down off its saddle thong, and hobbled over to join Bill in hu
nkering down with his back to the wall close to the horses.

  Presently Bill asked querulously: “What’s this adding up to? Buchwalter ain’t what he lets on to be, the girl sure fooled us, and now Streak’s got it in his craw that Buchwalter’s working with this stranger on Snyder’s grulla. Not a bit of it makes sense.”

  “Not yet, but it will. We’re onto something this morning. I wish Mathiot would get back.”

  “He said he wouldn’t be long.”

  Half an hour dragged by, Kelso occasionally shaking his watch to be sure it hadn’t stopped. They could hear the whisper of a freshening breeze whipping across the top of the walls high overhead. At the end of forty minutes the sheriff abruptly came erect.

  “To hell with this,” he growled. “You can sit here if you want. I’m goin’ to see what’s wrong.”

  “Give him a few more minutes.”

  But at the end of an hour even Bill’s patience was ended. He agreed that they should go at least as far as the hide-out entrance.

  There, standing at the foot of the narrow wall crevice, Kelso looked in along its shallow length, turning finally to give Bill a quizzical glance. Bill had his gun in his hand and motioned the lawman on ahead with it. They went through the same wary pantomime at the notch’s second turning. Edging into sight of the third narrow passageway, Kelso abruptly stiffened. He didn’t wait for Bill but limped quickly on ahead. Only when he knelt down beside a man’s shape lying huddled at the pocket entrance did Bill see what had made him hurry.

  Tom Buchwalter lay face down, his head pillowed on one bent arm as though he had purposely stretched out there to catch a brief nap. But the swelling over his exposed ear belied this intent. His Stetson lay a few feet away, a dent at the side of its flat crown evidence of the severity of the blow that had struck him down.

  “At least it ain’t Streak,” Bill whispered finally.

  Kelso’s glance swiftly ran around the pocket. It was empty. Buchwalter’s horse wasn’t in sight. Neither was the grulla. A sudden panic welled up in Kelso and he called loudly: “Streak!”