The road agents were brutal, fast and efficient, three reasons why they had control of the situation from beginning to end. The first indication they gave of their presence was when the nearside leader dropped in the traces, shot through the head. That stopped the stage getting away, in the only certain way it could be stopped.
Next, three men appeared, two on one side and one on the other side of the trail. Each man held a revolver. Only one man spoke throughout the operation. He was a smallish man, dressed in a duster, like the other men, so that his clothes were concealed. A blue and white bandanna covered the lower part of his face. A broad-brimmed black hat was pulled low over his eyes. He spoke with a foreign accent.
‘Throw down the strong box.’
Without a word, Horry Wanlace and Wally Hunt climbed down from their seats and unstrapped the boot. They heaved the strong box onto the trail. Horry looked as if he was ready to burst into tears.
The road agents’ mouthpiece said: ‘Cut the dead horse free and drive on.’ The two men obeyed. Horry led the team round the body of the dead animal. The offside leader was awkward without his running companion, so Horry cut him loose too and tied him on behind. Then he and Wally climbed aboard and Horry drove on. It was no good their looking back, because they were around the bend in the trail and unable to see the road agents.
Horry said: ‘My God, that does it, Wal. Don’t it just do it?’
‘It sure does it,’ said Wally. ‘Christ, I couldn’t even get off a shot, Horry.’
‘Sure you couldn’t get off a shot,’ said Horry. ‘I got a dead horse. That’s enough. I don’t want a dead messenger too. The firm can’t stand that kind of a loss.’
‘That’s a generous attitude, Horry,’ Wally said, ‘and it sure is appreciated.’
Inside the coach, the passengers were looking decidedly sober. The young man from Chicago said: ‘We spoke too soon, all right.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ham Stoppard, ‘we sure did. My God, the old man’s going to play hell over this.’
The rancher said; ‘We’re still alive, ain’t we? I regard that as a reason for rejoicing. What was in that strong box, Ham?’
Stoppard shrugged. ‘I don’t have any idea.’
The drummer, who had produced a quart of bad but wonderfully powerful liquor which may or may not have claimed to be whiskey, offered the bottle around and said: ‘It must have been mighty valuable.’
The young man from Chicago nodded in agreement. He was the only one on that stage who knew just how valuable.
Chapter Three
Having his coach stopped and the strong box taken just about broke up Horry Wanlace. Every man has his weak spot, and pride in his little stage line was Horry’s. He did not go all to pieces, but he took it hard. One thing that he did not do was admit defeat. He took his stage on to Caspar, because that was what he had been hired to do and what was expected of him. Once in Caspar, he used the new telegraph wire to inform Sheriff McAllister of what had happened, just in case the sheriff could think of something smart to do, and Horry was damned if he could think of what else he could do. He had already made good his loss of one horse by picking up a fresh animal at his way-station between the hills and Caspar. Now he rested his team overnight at his stable in the town and slept on the whole problem. He was alert enough to take the names and addresses of the passengers on the stage.
When he woke the following morning, he was not a little surprised to find none other than Remington McAllister, maddeningly bright and cheerful as a cricket, sitting on the edge of his bed. Horry was never too bright and cheerful himself first thing of a morning. He snarled: ‘You didn’t waste any time.’
‘A friend in need …’ said McAllister. ‘Tell me all you know about the hold-up. Every last detail, unimportant or not.’
Horry groaned and said: ‘Before I even taste a cup of java?’
McAllister said: ‘Get dressed. I reckon every baby needs a tit.’
Horry didn’t think that too nice a thing to say, but he rose, slapped his face once with cold water, pulled on his clothes, stamped his feet into his boots and followed McAllister down into the hotel dining room. While he sipped his hot sweet coffee in deep disgust, he watched McAllister consume one large steak with onions and fried potatoes on the side and swallow three cups of coffee to his one. As he sipped, he talked. He gave McAllister credit for keeping silent until he was through talking.
Then McAllister said: ‘I already had the newsman’s name and paper from Stoppard, and I checked by wire with Pinkerton in Chicago. They owe me. There’s nobody called William Bentley on the newspaper, and what’s more he did not go on to Chicago. He walked off into the night from town in a southerly direction and was never seen again.’
‘You don’t mean that young feller—’
‘Most likely. Horry, we never had a hyste in our neck of the woods before and this has to be the last. So we catch these men.’
‘Just like that,’ said Horry, not without scorn.
‘First thing, I want to look at the tracks left by the road agents. I’ll ride back with you to where you were stopped.’ McAllister thought a moment. ‘You reckon the man who talked was a Mexican?’
‘Sure.’
‘You ever heard any other kind of a foreigner talk?’
‘Sure I did. All sorts. Dutchmen, Frenchies and all the rest.’
‘And you’d swear on your life this was a Mexican?’
‘Not on my life, I wouldn’t.’
Fifteen minutes later, Horry and Wally Hunt were up behind a team and Horry’s whip was cracking. McAllister had Oscar tied behind the stage and he rode inside. The vehicle was carrying more passengers back to Black Horse than it had brought out. Sitting opposite McAllister was Ham Stoppard. He was still pretty upset by what had happened, for he considered that he had been mainly responsible for the strong box. You could see him thinking to himself: ‘I don’t know what Mr J. Howard Lindholm is going to say about this.’ He kept swallowing, and his Adam’s apple jumped up and down alarmingly.
On one side of the bank teller sat a cattleman, smelling of cows and leather. On the other side sat a young woman with downcast eyes and a face and figure that was apt to snap a man’s eyes out of his head. McAllister thought it was a damn shame, with such a vision as that sitting opposite him, that he was riding no more than half way. She had dark brown hair, and under the duster which vainly tried to conceal her charms she wore a blue and white gingham cotton dress. Once, when a wheel hit a rock on the trail and the stage leapt like a living thing into the air and landed again with an almighty jolt, her eyes opened in alarm. They opened wide and gave McAllister the chance to see that they were of the purest cornflower blue and of quite breathtaking beauty. To add to their perfection, they were edged by lashes as dark as a raven’s wing.
As if to counteract too much pulchritude in one place at the same time, providence had placed next to McAllister on his right what can only be described as a ripe-scented hill-nutty. In short, an aged prospector for gold, who smelled of many years presence in the company of burros and absence from the society of men. If his ancient body had looked upon water during the last five years, McAllister would have been amazed. To face the perils of the stage-journey and the hazards of the trail, this old number had seriously imbibed of hard liquor for the most part of the night before. His frequent belches perfumed the air of the interior of the vehicle.
As if to complement this denizen of distant gulches, on the left of McAllister there was a younger version of the same breed who had apparently slept for long periods with unhygienic goats. This fellow was as talkative as his old counterpart was silent, throwing pearls of boring wisdom to the world in general with a generosity that must have earned him many enemies along the trail.
Except for the young beauty on the seat facing him, McAllister was glad enough to dismount when Horry pulled in his harness-hating mustangs at the very spot where the bandits had robbed him of the strong box the day before. Not, however, before McA
llister had ascertained that the young lady who had so aroused his interest was one Miss Allison Disart who was travelling west to keep house for her uncle, Josiah Ramage.
Josiah Ramage? thought McAllister. Who in hell was Josiah Ramage? An inhabitant of Black Horse? If so, he could not place him-which was a failing on his part, because he thought he knew every last man, woman and child in Black Horse country.
When he got out of the stage, Ham Stoppard, Horry and the messenger joined him. Horry described what had happened and where the hold-up men had been placed. The varmints had been at the dead horse, McAllister noted, and there was little left of it. Ham Stoppard, not wishing to go back to Black Horse immediately (for which nobody could blame him) asked if he could stay with McAllister to aid him in his investigations. McAllister solemnly thanked him and refused his company.
‘To tell you the truth, Ham,’ he said, ‘I could use you to better purpose in town. I expect to be in Black Horse by night and I would like to know exactly what was in the strong box.’
‘I guess that would be confidential,’ said Ham.
McAllister said coldly: ‘It’ll be staying confidential. You’ll be telling your sheriff, Ham, not publishing it in the Courier.’
Ham climbed back into the stage, a little hurt, but he cheered up considerably when Miss Disart favored him with a brilliant smile. Driver and messenger climbed back onto the box and Horry cracked his whip. McAllister tied Oscar to a tree at the side of the road and spent the next hour going over the sign that had been left in the locality.
At the end of that hour, he knew that there had been four men there. Four men and five horses. The fifth horse had been a powerful pack animal and it had borne away the strong box. The man who had shot the lead stage horse had never appeared from cover, but had stayed out of sight, most likely with his rifle covering the crew and passengers. McAllister learned a few other facts.
The man who had done the talking had been below medium height and heavily-made. To compensate him for his lack of height, maybe, he had worn unusually high heels to his cowman’s boots. Every man there had been well-mounted on shod horses. They had scattered in all directions immediately after the departure of the stage.
McAllister decided to follow the man who had done the talking, if only because he had led the pack horse. He did wonder if this was some kind of a bluff and hesitated for a moment, but he reckoned that the leader had been the talker and that the leader would want to keep the plunder with him. Leaders were like that. This leader had gone directly south along the line of the hills, hitting a good pace but not hurrying unduly. The tracks were not difficult to follow, even though the weather had been dry lately. But McAllister did not allow that to lull into a sense of easy success. He at once had the instinctive feeling that this man was smart and that if he had not wanted McAllister to follow him, it would not have been so easy. Sooner or later, McAllister knew, this man would lead him to a spot where the tracks could be lost.
A couple of hours later, he was proved right.
This did not please him. He wanted to move fast for many reasons, and this setback meant that there would be a long delay. If he picked up the fellow’s sign this side of dusk, he would be surprised.
The place where he lost the tracks was at a watersmeet, a place where a number of mountain streams ran together on a silt flat, which meant that there was a great shallow lake of moving and faintly rippling water, strewn with rocks and a few great boulders. He may be forgiven, I think, for expressing his feelings in a few words which would have sent the more respectable ladies of the Black Horse sewing bee into vapors and fits. He knew that he could circle this water till dark without finding a set of tracks which would lead him away from it. Each departing horseman (if indeed they had met here) could ride off along the bed of one of the numerous streams which fed this stretch of water. His utter defeat had been as simple as kiss your hand.
Never one to accept defeat without at least a loud bellyache, McAllister rode to a somewhat higher and drier point and surveyed the scene. The town of Black Horse lay roughly west of his present position. In between himself and the town were first the foothills, above which he was now poised, and the broad sweep of the valley.
It was possible, even probable, that one of these streams flowed through the hills and into the valley. It might even be that it flowed on across the valley and fed his own Howard Creek.
Now that was a thought.
Without leaving a trail, a man might work his way right across the valley to within rifle shot of the town. Some son-of-a-bitch could have robbed the stage, ridden over here, down into the valley and across to Black Horse. He might even at this minute be sitting in Tully’s doing his brave best to enjoy Tully’s foul whiskey.
That was a fantastic thought, and McAllister dismissed it. It did, however, return to him from time to time rather persistently.
He headed Oscar down towards the foothills. The bandits could have left the watershed singly or together. They could have gone in any number of directions and he could not have followed them all. So he would attempt to pick up the trail of one of them. If he could find just one of them, he would cajole, threaten, bribe or plain scare him into revealing his accomplices and the whereabouts of the strong box or its contents. Besides that, for private and personal reasons, he wanted the man who had killed the horse. He just naturally hated a man who could kill a horse out of hand.
McAllister was still following the little creek down out of the foothills when night overtook him. He did not have any supplies with him beyond the pocketful of jerky he never failed to carry on any kind of trip. As he never supped on jerky when he could encase a steak, he pulled off his path and visited with Carl Shiner and his wife Betty. They ran a hundred head on a small hill ranch not more than a couple of miles off his course.
Carl had been one of the wild ones until he met up with a dance-hall girl and offered to make an honest woman of her. He was still a mite wild, but there was no real harm in him in McAllister’s opinion, whose idea of wildness may not have been the preacher’s. Betty was a scrawny, wind and suntanned woman of thirty or so, who rode, swore and drank like a man. Though maybe a little better than the average man. She claimed to keep her man on the straight-and-narrow – bearing in mind it was her idea of straight-and-narrow, which may not have been the same as the local sheriff’s.
They ran a pretty good little outfit between them and were comparatively honest, though naturally they were not crazy enough to eat their own beef. When they had welcomed McAllister, offered him a drink and sat him down to his favorite bait – a large steak with onions and potatoes fried – he wondered what brand the steak had worn when it was walking the Black Horse hills.
Though he thought it improbable that Shiner or his wife could help him, he mentioned the mission which had taken him to Caspar and into the foothills. They showed interest. It even passed through McAllister’s mind that Shiner himself may have been one of the road agents, working on the assumption that to a lawman all men are suspect and others, by their very nature, more suspect than others.
Betty said: ‘Rem, there was a feller that rid down the creek bed late afternoon yesterday. Our creek. I was up on the hill turning back a maverick that I thought might as well carry our brand.’
‘Did you remember what he looked like, Betty?’
‘I had my hands full of this beef, Rem. I reckon I just saw a man on a horse.’
‘But you remember the horse?’
‘Oh, sure, I remember the horse. Whoever forgot a horse?’ That was a Westerner all over. Men were recognized for miles off from the horses they rode, when the rider’s details were indistinguishable.
‘Tell me all you can remember about the horse.’
‘Fancy. A real fancy horse. One color. Sorrel. A white stocking some place and a full-face blaze. California rig. And a how-d’you-call-it on its lines. You know what I mean, Rem. The lines’re kind of joined together like an eastern rein.’
‘With a romal?�
�
‘I reckon.’
‘The horse sounds like a thoroughbred.’
‘As near as I ever seen one.’
‘Where was this man headed?’
‘Howard Creek. Maybe your place. Maybe town. Going in that direction.’
She screwed up her thin and leathery face in distaste. She said: ‘I can’t abide a man that’d shoot a horse.’ Maybe she was telling the truth at that.
McAllister lay down in their barn alongside his horse and slept snug and well. In the morning, he ate for breakfast the same menu he had consumed for supper, thanked them courteously and went on his way. He did not fool around looking for tracks but rode home, letting Oscar stretch himself out across the valley before the sun rose high enough to make it too hot to run a horse that way. He reached home in the middle of the morning. Mose Copley was at work in the smithy and his boy, Lige, was gentling a colt in the round pen. They stopped work to hear his news. In response to McAllister’s question, both replied that they had seen no strangers. Lige, however, said that he had gone out to take a look at the horses around midnight and heard a man come along the valley road and head in for town. He was not hurrying. Now he came to think of it, he thought he heard two horses together.
‘Was he maybe leading a pack horse?’
‘Maybe.’
McAllister unsaddled the gelding and threw his hull on his mare, Sally. He threw Oscar into the starve-out and said he was going on into town.
‘What do you reckon was in that strong box?’ Mose Copley wanted to know.
‘I’m asking myself the same question. Maybe J. Howard Lindholm could tell me. And maybe he couldn’t. We’ll see.’
Chapter Four
Josiah Ramage was known from Taos to the Dalles as Whiskey Joe, not so much because he was a boozer (which occasionally he was on an impressive scale), but because he swore that whiskey was the elixir of life. Inside and out, he reckoned and frequently announced, it was beneficial to man. It cured fever, ague, smallpox, cowardice, bellyache, healed wounds, bites, stings and ulcers. Nothing as precious as whiskey had ever been revealed to man by divine providence. That his real name was Josiah Ramage was unknown to all mankind with the exception of J. Howard Lindholm, the owner of the Black Horse National Bank.
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