Gunsmoke Masquerade

by Peter Dawson

  He came suddenly upon a small park-like glade clear of trees. It lifted with the gentle slope of a hill, grassy, open for a scant hundred yards except for the shadow cast by a giant fir growing at nearly its exact center. A covey of dusky gray grouse whirred out of the grass and drummed across into the shadowed obscurity of the timber off to his left. He didn’t know why he stopped at the tree margin, but he did, that deep instinct of wariness strangely halting him.

  Streak saw the blue gunsmoke blossom from the tree border across the glade even before the hard pound of the shot sounded. He felt the searing burn of the bullet along his left upper arm even as he rolled from the saddle. His hands took up the shock of his fall and he threw his body in a tight roll toward the thick bole of an uprooted tree close by. A geyser of black earth mold whipped his face, marking the striking of the second bullet. Then he was safe, the gnarled roots of the tree with its pressed earth shielding him from the gun over there.

  A brief silence held on, during which he reached for his gun and laid it on the dry matting of pine needles ahead of him. He felt a cool wetness along his left arm and shifted position a little, looking at the crimson stain on the sleeve of his shirt. Through the tear in the cloth he could see the shallow bullet crease in the flesh. A meager smile touched his face and a rash devilment was all at once in him. He pushed up onto elbow and called: “You’ll have to do better than that, Dallam!”

  A mocking yet pleasant-sounding laugh was his first answer. Then Pete Dallam’s deep bass voice warned: “Just keep your distance, friend. That’s all I ask.” There was a brief pause, in which the stillness, with even the wind momentarily gone, pressed in on Streak. Then: “Who are you? Mathiot?”

  “Good guess,” Streak replied. “Come out and show yourself.”

  “No, thanks!”

  Streak could think of nothing further to say. He began to look around and finally saw how, without exposing himself, he could worm his way under the dead tree’s horizontal trunk and across to the thick trunk of a nearby fir. He had crawled under the tree when abruptly the sound of a pony’s hurrying run sounded across to him. He lay still, listening, as the animal went away. Pete Dallam hadn’t stayed to fight.

  As he was coming to his knees, Streak all at once went rigid. From across the glade where Dallam had been came a crackling sound. He stood up, looked across the expanse. A sheet of orange flame was jumping from the bottom branches of a pine over there. Before Streak could move, it had consumed the crown of the tree in an explosive puff, whirling sparks aloft. Dallam had set the forest afire!

  Chapter Twenty

  Cathy Bishop had left her room early that morning, glancing in at her father’s door across the hallway to see that he was already up. Crossing the living room, she found the table at its far end strangely lacking the breakfast furnishings. Only then did she realize that she had heard no sounds from the kitchen since she had wakened.

  The kitchen was deserted. There wasn’t even a fire in the big iron range. Cathy went to the outside door and glanced out across the yard to see her father climbing the knoll from the creek bridge.

  The look on his face as he came up gave her a twinge. He shrugged and held his hands outspread. “Looks like we have the place to ourselves, Cathy,” he said in a lifeless voice. “Even Pinto’s gone.”

  Cathy was suddenly and strangely happy with a deep, new feeling toward her parent. Last night she had wanted to go to him, to talk to him, to try to heal the open wound of their relations, but he had been busy with Riggs until very late, so late that she gave up hope of seeing him. His statement that they had the place to themselves this morning put a new light on the outcome of that talk with Riggs. But Cathy wasn’t thinking of getting an explanation for the absence of the crew, for Pinto’s abandoned kitchen. She was thinking of the father she had once known, that sure, calm-spirited man of a year or so ago. Frank Bishop was no longer himself. Now, by the look on his face, she could see that he didn’t know where he stood with her. He was humble, appearing almost apologetic for having spoken. The crew had obviously deserted, and he seemed to expect that his daughter, too, was on the point of leaving. An impulse she wouldn’t have resisted could she have checked it sent Cathy down out of the doorway and to him, reaching up to lay her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes became tear-filled as she looked into his face and saw its wonderment and uncertainty. Abruptly the emotion that was in her welled over and she murmured: “Dad, it doesn’t matter. We’re together, you and I. Dad, I . . . I’m glad it’s just us.”

  The amazement, the stunned elation that crossed Frank Bishop’s face was good to see. All at once his arms came out and swept her to him. He pressed her head gently to his shoulder. Then, tenderly, he kissed her on the forehead, saying thickly, low-voiced: “Cathy, girl, you mean it. Can an old man say he’s made some mistakes?”

  “If you’ll let me say the same, Dad. My mistakes have been the worst.”

  That morning was to be long remembered, both for this beginning and its final ending. Cathy cooked breakfast, and for the first time in many months the big main room of the house rang to her laughter. The change that gradually came over Frank Bishop wiped years from the look of his face and ended once and for all that aloofness and severity behind which he had retired these last weeks. He seemed almost young again.

  The only serious talk they had was of the crew’s desertion. “Riggs combed me over last night for not making a fight of it,” Bishop explained. “I gave him his time, along with half a dozen others he brought in. They evidently decided not to stay the night, because Riggs wanted an order to Adams to get their pay. But Pinto . . . I can’t understand his not being here.”

  “Where are the others, Shorty and Phil and the rest?”

  “In town,” Bishop said. “I told ’em at supper last night that they needed a night off. George wanted to get a letter off home. Two of the boys stayed on after Riggs had gone. I sent them in later to keep an eye on him. But I don’t know about Pinto.”

  “What’s going to happen from now on, Dad?” Cathy asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind to anything. I’m going across to see Jensen this morning and talk it over with him.”

  “Can we get along with sheep across the valley?”

  “We’ll have to. I’ll have to make my peace with Buchwalter. I could even go in and have a talk with Laura Dallam.”

  “Would you let me do it . . . see Buchwalter and Laura?” Cathy asked on impulse.

  Her father gave her a surprised glance. “Why, of course, Cathy. But that’s my chore.”

  “No, it’s mine. In a way, all this has happened because I loved the . . . wrong man.” She got those three words out with difficulty but meant them. The old hurt was gone. “It’s up to me to make the peace. I’ll find Buchwalter and tell him how we feel. Laura likes me. I can make her understand that we’re sincere.”

  “Go ahead. Only I’d just as soon do it.”

  “But I want to. You can go on over to Jensen’s.”

  He helped her saddle the black at the big corral and watched her ride out the trail. It was like old times, like those early mornings when she had been a gangly girl and he had invariably come down to the corral to see her off to school. This morning, Cathy realized, was a momentous one in her life. She had made peace with her father. Never had she felt quite so deeply thankful for anything. The growing realization that she no longer cared for Pete, that she wouldn’t even if he were alive, was so contradictory that she wondered at herself. But the feeling was genuine. Trouble and worry had pushed her to the breaking point; now, in this rearrangement of her thoughts and hopes, Pete Dallam became nothing more than the cause of the most unpleasant and heartbreaking period of her life.

  As she came abreast the lane to Schoonover’s place some miles below the ranch, Cathy was assailed by memories of Pete that were too strong to put down. This had been the place she many times had secretly met Pete in the days when her father wouldn’t allow him to come
to the house to see her. Off this side lane branched a little-used trail that ended on a small section of abandoned farmland topping a rim some three miles to the north. Cathy had often ridden to the rim with Pete. The memories of those days were alive and fresh and a little galling.

  On sudden impulse, she turned into the lane and was presently headed up the rim trail. Some small inner doubt needed satisfying. If she could but stand there on the rim and come to grips with her sharpest memories of Pete, suffering no regrets, she felt that she finally and absolutely would know that his memory meant nothing to her any longer.

  Once, when the timber flanking the trail thinned, she happened to glance behind and notice the sky to the south. A hazy cloudbank was building over the far desert. It might mean that rain was on the way, or it could mean nothing, for late summer weather in this country was unpredictable. Cathy was only later aware of this thought; at the time it was an almost unconscious one.

  The rim was as she remembered it, the bare ground weed-grown and badly eroded. She got down out of the saddle and ground-haltered the mare while she walked over to sit on a low outcrop very near the edge of the drop-off. The cliff fell sheerly and it had always made her uneasy to look down that hundred feet. Pete, she remembered, had been scornful of the height and would stand at the very edge with his back to the void.

  Sitting there, her memories of past visits to this place very dear, Cathy could feel no sense of loss or sadness over Pete’s death. It’s gone, forever, she thought, and was suddenly glad to be alive and free, to be here without Pete at her side.

  For the first time her glance went into the distance rather than to things close at hand, out across the vast tree-mantled sweep of hills lying between this rim and the upward Arrowheads. She saw something she couldn’t understand. It made her catch her breath and abruptly come to her feet. At first she didn’t believe what she was seeing. But there it was, a stark reality. Miles to the north and higher than this rim, a pale grayish pall of smoke lay over the forest. For a moment it looked like a low-hanging cloud. Then she knew it was the smoke of a fire. Even as she watched, it fanned out before the wind, growing in density.

  Through the years, Cathy had come to a growing awareness of the danger threatening the east slope by the occasional late summer droughts. Once she had seen a small timber fire and it had terrified her, even though it had come in a comparatively wet season and consumed only a small acreage of trees. Now, to see the awful possibilities of what that distant blaze would do to dry timber on this windy day, she stood rigidly in cold terror.

  She ran across to her horse, her first impulse to ride to Schoonover’s and give the warning. In the saddle, she reined the black over closer to the rim, looking northward again, trying to pick out some landmark she could name to locate the fire. Now she saw a second blob of smoke, much nearer than the first. Her panic mounted. She lifted the reins to turn away from the cliff’s edge.

  Suddenly a sharp echo from below the rim shuttled up to her. Its rock-on-rock explosion startled her as it did the mare. It came again, more plainly. She looked downward and saw nothing. Dismounting again, she walked closer to the drop-off.

  A hundred feet below, straight downward, the rotten talus of the rim’s footing sloped out to the rocky dry channel of a wash. Beyond the arroyo a wider strip of ground strewn with broken boulders climbed to the margin of a belt of jack pine blanketing a near hill spur that paralleled the rim. Riding that slope was a man who kept looking back over his shoulder toward the trees. There was, even from this acutely upward angle, something familiar about the firmly erect way he sat his grulla pony.

  Once he stopped, half turning his horse so that he could get a better look behind. Then Cathy knew what it was about him that seemed so familiar. He rode the way Pete had ridden, standing in stirrups, free hand gripping the swell to keep erect, rein arm held close to chest. It was the way nine out of ten men rode a trot. Still, the exact stance was so strikingly like Pete’s that it gave her a start.

  She laughed nervously, and was turning away when the sharp explosion of a gunshot racketed up to her. She looked downward again. The grulla’s rider was out of the saddle, behind his pony, a gun in his hand. Suddenly he came erect and emptied the weapon in burst of sound upward toward the trees. Out of the trees plunged a rider on a sorrel horse. The sorrel took three strides before it all at once lost footing and pitched forward in a broken roll. The rider was too late in kicking his left boot from stirrup. Cathy choked back a cry as the animal rolled on its rider’s leg. The man’s upper body was wrenched back sickeningly, knocking his hat off. At the instant Cathy recognized the man she knew as Kincaid from the slashing of gray on his head, his long frame went limp and he lay back loosely, the horse rolling clear.

  Cathy knelt transfixed with horror as the grulla’s rider calmly walked up the slope, the gun still in hand. He stood over Kincaid, lazily pushing back the curl-brimmed Stetson. He took it off and ran his hand across his dark sorrel head. And by that gesture, Cathy knew that she was seeing Pete Dallam. It was the way he did it, his gesture so soundly remembered, so distinctive of Pete. Had Cathy doubted the move itself, there was the color of the hair to label him. Her whole body trembled, a dappled wave of white light danced before her eyes, and she grew faint. Still, she couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes from the pair below.

  Pete presently leaned down, took Kincaid roughly by an arm, and heaved him up onto his back. He staggered under the load as he went up the slope and disappeared into the trees. Cathy felt hysteria begin to work in her. She checked it with a force of will she hadn’t known she could command. Pete Dallam was alive!

  Knowing that, the peace of mind she had found this morning crumbled like a rotting, spineless thing, crumbled and lay in ruins. Pete not only was alive; he had killed a man. Or he had watched a man die as coolly and as heartlessly as he would have watched the painful branding of a yearling. Pete was alive! Her thinking became an intolerable torment. What did this mean? What furtive errand had brought Pete to this out-of-the-way spot? Why had he fought Kincaid and what was he doing with him now?

  Even though every instinct warned her to leave this spot and be gone, Cathy had to see the end of this. She waited, straightening her arms to keep them from trembling, trying to regain control of herself. The thing that finally quieted her was sight of a blue curling finger of smoke mounting above the crests of the pines across from her to flatten to the wind. Hardly had she seen that telltale mark of a fire when Pete reappeared. He sauntered down to the grulla and built a cigarette. In the saddle, he stared a moment in the direction of the smoke. Then, with a lazy touching of hand to hat brim in a mocking salute, he put the grulla on down the wash. In less than half a minute he was lost to sight around a lower turning of the rim, the grulla at a run.

  With the last sight of him, the dread deep within Cathy at the knowledge that Pete Dallam lived died slowly. Yes, he was alive. But she had seen him kill a man; she had seen him carry the body of that man into the trees and set fire to the forest, probably to destroy the evidence of his act. It was Pete, then, who had started those other fires!

  At that point of stunning insight, Cathy became utterly confused. Couldn’t it have been Pete, then, who had made the attempt at ambushing her father the other morning in Ledge? If he was alive, then who was the man in the grave marked with his name in the cemetery down at Agua Verde? Did it mean that Pete had committed two other murders to arrange the sham of his own death? Yes, she was sure of it. But why? Why these murders and now the final staging of this fire that would so completely ruin all the east-slope ranchers?

  Then the picture lay clear. Pete Dallam, balked by her father’s stubbornness, by his own inability to make himself one of this country’s biggest men by fair means, had seen the chance to do it another way. Ambition had always driven him relentlessly, although Cathy had never realized until now how strong a part of his make-up that ambition was. By disappearing, by shamming his death, he had relaxed the vigilance of the men
who held rein on him. By bringing in his sister, deceiving even her, he had roused sympathy for his cause. But for a poor turn of luck, he would have killed Frank Bishop and gone unpunished. With a better turn of luck, coming in the form of Kincaid’s brilliant maneuver of bringing in the sheep, he had accomplished what might otherwise have taken him months, even years. And today, his sheep safely in the valley, Pete Dallam was surely and decisively putting an end to all opposition by starting a forest fire that would gut the entire east slope and ruin the men who fought him.

  A blend of loathing, disgust, and fear was in Cathy. The loathing and disgust came when she realized that she had once, even yesterday, loved this power-mad killer with her entire being, even to the point of not stopping at the betrayal of her father. The fear was for the awful picture of what this valley would become before the day was over. With this wind, there was nothing to stop the ruin promised by those three smoky marks so palely patterned against the dark blanket of the forest.

  A gusty shifting of the wind brought the acrid smell of smoke to her. She looked downward, faintly hearing the crackling of flames as they gained headway in the tinder-dry undergrowth of the jack pine across from her. Knowing she should at once start for home and give the warning of what was coming, she still hesitated. She was thinking of the man who had, before yesterday’s dawn, forced her to accompany him to the sheep camp above the pass. A subtle attraction she had found toward Kincaid still lingered. Perhaps it was backed by her now conscious comparison of him to Pete and the knowledge that he had been a far better man than the one she had loved. There had been no arrogance in him, only a sureness tempered with a genuine kindliness. He had been so courteous and soft-spoken. A genuine sadness was in her. Of all the indictments so suddenly and staggeringly shaped against Pete Dallam, this killing of Kincaid was the worst in her mind. She felt an unaccountable sense of deep loss and realized now that Kincaid had been very much in her thoughts since that morning he had carried her in off the street in Ledge. She knew, too, that his seeming poor opinion of her had been the first thing to open her eyes to the injustice of her attitude toward her father. One of the sharpest regrets she had ever experienced came at the moment she realized she could never now tell Kincaid that he had been wrong about her, that she hadn’t betrayed her father. For Kincaid was dead, struck down by a man she had once loved. She wanted to cry. Yet the tears wouldn’t come. It was as though the shock of the past minutes had numbed her to the point where she could only dully feel any emotion.