by Lauran Paine
“But hell, Ethan … what’s the purpose? I mean, suppose Thorne got through with a coach. What good would that do? There isn’t another town for twenty-seven miles and …”
“Son, a man like Ray Thorne only figures one way. He doesn’t care about the coach, the next town, or even the senselessness of breaking DeFore’s blockade. All he’s concerned with right now is the simple fact that twice he’s had the wind knocked out of his sails when he tried to break through. He doesn’t care how he does it or what happens afterward. All he wants to do is to prove to the world … as if the world cares … that no one can scare or stop two-gun Ray Thorne.”
“For that he’d maybe kill six men with these homemade bombs?” John asked, taking up one of the dynamite clusters.
“For that,” responded Ethan grimly, “he’d bomb this whole blessed town and everyone in it … not just DeFore’s crew. John, we’ve got to find Thorne, and we’ve got to find him fast.”
The sheriff put down the dynamite and half turned at the sound of the road-side door opening.
Richard DeFore stepped into the room, looked over at the two lawmen with a great deal of bitterness before closing the door. He took two steps into the room and, without any trace of gratitude in his voice, said: “Thanks for bringing Travis in.”
MacCallister barely inclined his head. He said nothing, and neither did John. They waited, knowing DeFore would tell them what was on his mind without being asked, and he did just exactly that.
“Ethan, John, I want this gunfighter … this Ray Thorne. Where is he?”
The former sheriff shook his head at DeFore. “He’s not in town. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Hell, I know that,” snarled the grizzled old cowman. “I had my boys search all over for him. What I want to know is … where is he? Ethan, you got him in one of your back-room cells?”
“No.”
DeFore stared skeptically at the deputy. “Mind if I check?” he said, a look of distrust still in his face.
MacCallister’s face got rusty red. “You’re damned right I mind if you look,” he said. “I told you he wasn’t here. Are you calling me a liar?”
DeFore stood a moment in silence. He saw the surge of fierce anger turn MacCallister stiff and fighting mad. He gently shook his head. “No. No, I’m not calling anyone a liar, Ethan. Not yet, anyway. But I’m going to tell you boys something. I want that man for what he did to Travis, and for what he had in mind with those dynamite sticks he sent those men up into the pass to use. I aim to get him, too, even if I have to comb every inch of the hills between here and my home place. When I do … I aim to hang him. Anyone with him will get hanged right along with him, unless they got awful good excuses.”
MacCallister waited patiently until DeFore had said all he had to say. When the rancher had finished, he looked the older man squarely in the face, controlling the annoyance that was turning to anger and starting to boil in him. He made DeFore wait, just as the rancher had the two lawmen wait when he entered the jailhouse. Then he stated with emphasis: “Dick, we’ve known each other a lot of years. I never craved your company, and I reckon you never craved mine, but, by golly, I always had a lot of respect for you that I sure don’t have when you talk like that. You’re not going to hang anybody. Not Thorne or any of his hirelings, and you’d better get that through your thick skull. Because if you try it, so help me, I’ll see you buried up there in your lousy Cheyenne Pass sure as I’m a foot tall.”
DeFore returned MacCallister’s uncompromising glare. He backed to the door, shaking his head as he reached for the door latch. “There are different kinds of law, Ethan MacCallister, and I prefer the kind that was in this country when we were young men. You try and stop me from hanging that gunfighter, and we’ll see who goes into the ground with him … you or me.”
DeFore went out the door, heaved it shut, leaving behind a rank and troubled atmosphere.
Chapter Ten
Neglected, MacCallister’s cigarette had died, so he relit it, and his usually steady hands shook from suppressed anger. He flung down the match and avoided Klinger’s gaze as he stepped over to the desk, perched upon the edge of it, and unconsciously swore.
“That’s how quick things can change,” he said ultimately. “Last night we thought we had everything under control. DeFore had agreed to stay out of town for two days, and Thorne was on foot as far as taking a stage up into the pass was concerned. Now everything’s changed, and all hell’s about to bust loose.”
He glared at those two bundles of dynamite on the table in front of John. “Of all the lousy ways for men to fight … using things like that.”
Considering the dynamite in silence for a moment, John said: “I wonder how much more of this stuff they have?”
MacCallister grunted. “Trot over to the general store. That’s the only place Thorne could buy dynamite in Winchester. Find out if he bought it there and, if so, how much he bought. At least maybe we can be sure of one thing in this mess.”
Klinger departed on the errand. MacCallister killed his smoke, got himself a cup of coffee, and drank it. He was so full of resentment, he didn’t even notice the brew was cold, just sipped it steadily as he thought. He was pondering making a fresh pot of java when John returned.
“Eight sticks, Ethan,” John informed him. “The same number that are here, so I guess we can quit worrying about that at least.”
Ethan began to feel a little better as he shifted in the desk chair. It wasn’t just this information which was responsible, though. He had an idea forming in his mind. “Come on,” he said, getting up and striding over to the road-side door. “We’ve got a ride to make.”
The pair of them hiked toward the livery barn, but on the way Ethan stopped in at the stage office, with John trailing some several feet behind him.
At sight of Weaver aimlessly studying some manifests, Ethan asked: “Hank, what time is that northbound stage due in town tomorrow morning?”
Weaver looked up, gazed a moment at the two lawmen who had entered so quietly he hadn’t heard them, and answered: “Not until about noon. Why?”
Turning, MacCallister walked out without answering, John again following behind. The former sheriff strode briskly to the livery barn and called out to Lemuel for their horses. Not until the hostler came tumbling from the office to obey that sharp order did Ethan say a word to his son-in-law.
“I’m probably wrong,” he confided. “But I sure hope I’m not. If you were Thorne, where would you be this morning?”
John puckered his brow and shrugged. “Hard to say. If I knew the DeFore crew was after me, I’d probably be as far away as I could get.”
“But you wouldn’t know that, John, because you’d have left town last night before you even knew whether or not those two hirelings got safely hidden up in the pass or not.”
“Well, then I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you where you’d be. You’d be somewhere south of town along the stage road, awaiting the appearance of that coach bringing in the company official from Denver. You’d be down there to get in your licks before the company man talked to anyone else. You’d have to do that, in order to justify what trouble you’ve caused to happen in town and on up in Cheyenne Pass.”
The sheriff’s eyes gradually widened until he snapped his fingers and said excitedly: “I’ll be damned. Ethan, I think you’re right.” He hesitated a moment as the picture became clearer to him, then he added: “DeFore’ll be combing the northward hills. He’ll never find Thorne or Thorne’s men.”
“He might find two of ’em,” contradicted Ethan. “The last we heard, those two were heading north. Maybe they got around DeFore’s riders and struck out back for town, but if they did, and they couldn’t find Thorne, I doubt they’d stick around. Not after what happened up in the pass last night, and not after we ordered them out of the county.”
“Bu
t it’s possible those two knew Thorne was going to meet the northbound stage, and if they did, there’s a good possibility they might have ridden on south to find him, wanting to tell him what happened up in the pass last night.”
Ethan fell silent briefly, all the while thinking. It was then that Lemuel appeared breathlessly with their saddled animals. John put his index finger to his hat in a gesture of gratitude to the livery man. Quickly, both men swung up, reined on out into the roadway, and swung out in a southerly direction. Once they had cleared town, they boosted their fresh mounts over into a mile-consuming lope.
He thought what John had suggested was entirely possible. So they had not wasted time seeking those two rough-looking drifters in town. As he recalled it, yesterday Rusty Millam had said that Thorne and his hirelings had sat for a long time in the Teton Saloon talking together. Now it seemed to Ethan likely that what they had discussed had been not just part of Thorne’s plan, but perhaps all of it, including Thorne’s idea of seeking out the northbound stage before it arrived in Winchester. If this were so, then it was very likely those two men were indeed down south somewhere with Thorne right this minute.
But the whole notion was based strictly on conjecture, which is what he now told John, as they sped along through the dazzling morning sunlight.
John’s reaction was sanguinary. “We better be right, Ethan. If we aren’t, and if DeFore gets his lariat around a couple of necks up in the pass, there’ll be enough fireworks around Sherman County for the next few months to last us both a lifetime.”
There was no denying the validity of this statement, and Ethan, least of all, would dispute it. But he said: “Any action is better than no action. Furthermore, I don’t believe Thorne would have any reason to go up into the pass without a coach, and if he’d tried to take a coach, Hank would have told us when we saw him this morning.”
“True,” John agreed. Then he smiled ruefully at something that had just come to him. “Hank’s been so scared all through this, though, that I think only about half his mind is functioning … the scared half.”
* * * * *
Southward, beyond Winchester, the valley where the town lay gradually narrowed. Gigantic black peaks and slopes rose up, mostly barren rock and therefore without ground cover. Where the sunlight struck, those great lifts and sidehills gave off a dull reflection. At the base of those gigantic slopes lay a crevice-like pass. In times past this had been a favorite ambushing spot first for Indian warriors, then later on for their successors in the trade of arms—outlaws. But for some years now, the Indians had been gone, and law enforcement had been so powerfully unrelenting that no trouble had erupted down in that gloomy pass.
Klinger, riding briskly along, considering the onward countryside, said he thought Thorne might try halting the northbound stage in that narrow place. But MacCallister disagreed.
“Too close to town for one thing,” he explained, “and if the coach doesn’t hit Winchester until noon, it’ll be miles south of the pass. No, Thorne’s got to make good time. He’ll hit the coach somewhere well beyond the pass.”
“He’ll have to do more than just make good time,” John said bleakly. “He’ll have to convince that stage-line official that what he’s done was a good thing, and I can’t see anyone with much sense believing that.”
MacCallister put a long look over at his son-in-law. “You never know about people. What makes sense to you and me makes damned little sense to someone else. Besides, what kind of a company official would send a man like two-gun Ray Thorne up here to settle a dispute in the first place?”
John had no reply for this, so he directed their conversation to a new topic. “Just what does DeFore expect to accomplish with his toll road? He’s already wealthy, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s got all the money he’ll ever need.”
“Then what’s he trying to prove?”
Ethan slowed his horse as they came within good sighting distance of the pass ahead and its darkly forbidding black rock haunches. “DeFore,” he said thoughtfully, “is a pretty complex man in a lot of ways. But I don’t know. He never told me what he had in mind when he tried to close the pass … but I’ve known him a long time, and I’ve got a guess about that.” Ethan looped his reins and began fumbling for his tobacco sack.
“A long time ago, Dick DeFore had a wife and a baby daughter. That was when he was a young man … when he first took up land north of what’s now Winchester.”
“I didn’t know that,” John said, looking somewhat dumbfounded. “I’ve never even heard it before.”
Ethan struck a match to light up and then blew a geyser of smoke straight ahead. He didn’t turn to see his son-in-law staring at him as he resumed speaking.
“Well, there was a bad Indian attack. A massacre, I reckon you could call it. That’s when the army moved in. DeFore’s young wife and baby daughter were killed. He buried them somewhere up in Cheyenne Pass. I never asked him where, and he never told me. In fact, I’ve never heard him mention his wife and daughter from that day to this, so maybe I’m all wrong about the matter, but I think he wants to keep their burial place a secret. I’ve sort of figured, since this whole matter commenced, that DeFore wants his shrine … or whatever it is up there … to remain as it’s been since the day he buried his family up there, and that’s why he’s dead set on making his toll road … to keep out people. If he wanted to really close the road, I think he would have said so. But he doesn’t, he’s just making folks pay to use it, and obviously that’ll limit the traffic.”
“You don’t believe he’s out to bankrupt the town?” John asked. “Because that’s what I’ve heard some people saying when DeFore’s name comes up around town.”
“I’ve heard that, too. But I don’t believe that. And I’ll tell you something else, I don’t believe he really cares whether the stages use that cussed road or not. I think what he’s trying to do is stop people from snooping around his land.”
John was silent as they rode on down toward the gloomy pass leading out of Winchester Valley to the country to the south. He obviously was digesting what he’d just been told.
They’d gone another mile or so, when he said to Ethan: “I’ll say one thing for you old-timers around here. You sure can keep a secret. As long as I’ve been in this country, I’d never before heard that Richard DeFore had ever been married, let alone had started a family.”
Ethan killed his smoke, unlooped his reins, and looked right and left as they entered the pass. In years past he’d charged down into the forbidding place many times after outlaws. Now, in his sundown years, he never entered it without feeling a twinge of uneasiness, apprehension.
As he rode along, scanning the slopes on their right and left, he said quietly: “It’s not a matter of keeping secrets, son. It’s just a matter of there being damned few folks still around who remember back that far, and of those who remember, they respect DeFore’s desire not to gossip about something so painful that a man like Dick will never forget as long as he lives.”
They entered the pass, the sunlight diminished, and the shadows thickened around them, creating a sinister atmosphere. They traveled for about a half a mile, neither saying a word until they passed out into sunshine again.
Beyond the pass once more, Ethan raised his left arm, pointed far ahead where the land tilted away below them, and said one word: “Dust.”
Down where that dust stood up in the crystal-clear, dazzling brightness of this fresh, warm morning, the road angled from west to east as it traced out a course among arroyos and little grassy hills. Far away was another necklace of dark mountains, but in between lay a broad, open plain, bowl-shaped, which was gradually depressed toward a central lowlands where trees grew in profusion, and where, through those trees, they could see a silvery sheen from a meandering watercourse. Down here lay some of the richest cattle ranches in Sherman County. Down here, too, at one time, had been an
ancient Indian gathering ground, called a rancheria. There were innumerable faded hieroglyphics painted upon roadside boulders, their meanings entirely lost now, but their presence strongly indicative of another race and another time.
That lazily hanging dust seemed to rise up from the farthest reaches of the stage road. It was much too far for either lawman to make out what was causing it, but Ethan thought it could only be the northbound stage. As soon as he said this, John had another complementing thought to voice.
“If that’s the coach then where is Thorne?”
Ethan nodded toward that central lowlands where the obscuring trees stood. “Probably down there. He’d have a camp, more than likely, and a man doesn’t make camp away from water when he doesn’t have to.” Ethan paused, threw a look off on his left, and reined over in that direction, leaving the road. “I reckon we’d better go sort of carefully from here on. I’d wager Thorne will be having this north route watched.”
They passed over into fetlock-high, tough, and wiry buffalo grasses, moving eastward until they were easily a mile from the roadway. Then Ethan turned and headed almost due south. He was, John could see, making it a point to keep the bulk of those trees ahead between themselves and whatever might lie beyond the trees.
That dust came closer, but because the distance was so great, it did not seem to advance very rapidly. In fact, they got to the first thick stand of cottonwoods near that watercourse they’d seen earlier from up near the black-rock pass, before suddenly the dust seemed no longer to be advancing at all. It seemed to have stopped rising up into the pristine morning air altogether.
