by Noel Loomis
Silently Tom Ireland tossed his own tobacco sack down the table to where Clay Hughes sat. Hughes let it lie. “I’m much obliged,” he said, “but if you’d just as lief, I’ll smoke my own.”
“I don’t see no objection,” Ireland mumbled. He dug a key out of his pocket and tossed it to Harry Canfield. “Let him get into his things, Harry.”
Hughes rose slowly. Canfield was waiting for him at the door. Hughes knew that somehow he must get rid of Canfield—once the door was unlocked. Then as Hughes moved leisurely around the end of the long table, the voice of Rowdy Lee was raised again.
“What’s that coming?” he wanted to know.
“Horses,” said Harry Canfield, helpfully. “You know—horses? They make that noise putting their feet down.”
“Wait a minute, Harry,” said Tom Ireland. “That’ll be the old man coming back. There’s no call to do anything more until he gets in.”
“Give me your key,” said Hughes, “and I’ll get my tobacco.”
“To hell with your tobacco!” said Tom Ireland, looking at him square and hard for the first time that night. “It can wait.”
The silence that followed seemed to last for a long time while Clay Hughes and Tom Ireland held each other’s eyes; yet long as it was, it seemed longer to Hughes. The particular and immediate object of the game seemed to have become the opening of a door. If he slipped his chance now, he could not tell what further delays might follow.
“I don’t know what to make of you people,” he drawled at last. “You act a whole lot like a bunch of old women in some ways. What do you think I aim to do with my bed-roll—hit somebody with it? Hide it out on me if you want to, like you’ve already hid out my guns!”
“No call to jump the fence,” mumbled Ireland, dropping his eyes again.
“I’ve ridden the cow country for a long time,” Hughes went on, “but I guess maybe I’ve always ridden on a different kind of range than this. After this sheriff of yours died on my hands I rode on down here, open and above board, and of my own free will. What do you do? You sneak-thieve my guns out of my bed-roll behind my back, and you set a Mexican horse-wrangler to watch what I do. Then you show me my bed, and when I go to it you padlock the door. Maybe I was wrong in thinking that I’m still in the cow country. Some of your ways of doing business here strikes me a whole lot less like cattle than like sheep.”
Nobody moved. Only Tom Ireland’s hands became suddenly quiet upon the table before him, as if he were listening to something beyond.
“Now,” Hughes went on, “I tell you I’m through. From here out I’m taking full charge of myself, and my war bags too. Those that don’t like it, speak up! Because that’s the law according to Hughes. To begin with,” he said to Harry Canfield, “I’ll take that key!”
Canfield turned alert, faintly entertained eyes to Tom Ireland and waited.
“You talk pretty big,” said Ireland; “but I wouldn’t jump into no trouble if I was you. In the first place, you got nothing to jump with.”
“Haven’t I?” said Hughes.
Ireland’s head came up with a curious widening of his eyes, as if he were just coming awake. “Have you?” he said.
Hughes showed his teeth in a peculiarly personal, humorless grin. “That,” he said, “puts a different light on it, does it?”
He saw Tom Ireland’s anger; but it was the curbed anger of a man old in the saddle, old in the man-killing work of the range. It was the uncertainty of his own position that was troubling Ireland now. He was a man who found himself under sudden responsibilities without knowing where he stood, or much about the undercurrents of his situation. It was the uncertainty of Ireland’s position that Hughes had counted on, sure that the straw boss would concede a minor point, in order to delay a definite breach until he could turn the whole thing into the hands of Oliver Major himself.
But now the dusty drum of hoofs was very close. Hughes saw Tom Ireland hesitate; then rise and shoulder his way toward the door. “Just a minute,” he said. “I got to see the old man.”
Without exception the others got up to follow him; but at the door Ireland turned on them savagely. “Stay there, will you! All of you! By God, this is going to be one time you fellers can be found when you’re wanted. Come on, Harry.” He went out, a huge lurching figure on his high heels, accompanied by Harry Canfield. Hughes, uninvited, followed them out.
Chapter Four
The three from Crazy Mule Canyon and the Gunsight trail were already swinging down from the saddle as Hughes and Canfield followed Tom Ireland outside.
“Have someone corral these horses,” Oliver Major told Ireland. The old man looked very grim. “Is that you, Hughes?” he asked, peering against the light from the doorway. “I want to talk to you.”
“Mr. Major,” said Ireland, “a funny thing happened here a little while ago.”
The old man waited, watching him sharply.
“This feller, Hughes, had just gone into that room we give him, and we’d locked him up like you told us to; and somebody throwed down on him through the window.”
A faint smile, very weary but very hard, crossed the old man’s face as he slowly turned his eyes to Clay Hughes. The two exchanged a slow glance; to Hughes it almost seemed as if the old man’s brief stare were saying, “Yes, you were right. I thought you were a fool, and I was wrong.” Then Major turned hard eyes upon Tom Ireland again.
“Well, what did you do?”
“We let him out,” said Ireland nervously.
“Naturally, man!” Oliver Major exploded. “What then?”
“We got all of the hands into the mess hall and asked them where they was, but seems like nobody knowed anything. All the boys back up each other, except two of ’em that was alone.”
“Who were they?”
“Chris Gustafson and Walk Ross.”
“Uh huh.” Oliver Major seemed to be puzzled.
“After that,” Tom Ireland went on, “Harry looked over the ground with a gas lantern, but he didn’t find nothing; and we was just talking it over when you come up. I told all the fellers to stay in the mess hall where they’d be handy if you should want ’em.”
“Keep ’em there,” said Major, stalking into the house. “You go on to the mess hall, Bob, and see they set tight. Me and Bart Holt is going to talk to Hughes; and then maybe I’ll call the whole crowd in. I ain’t decided.”
Hughes and the man called Bart Holt followed old Major into the room in which Hughes had first met the boss of the Lazy M.
“Mr. Major,” said Hughes, “before we talk I’d like to take a minute and get a couple of things that I want from the room where they’ve got my stuff locked up. Harry Canfield has the key, and I—”
“Just a minute,” said Oliver Major. “We want to ask you a couple of things here, and after that—”
“All the same,” said Hughes, “I’m getting good and tired of having everybody on this place paw through my stuff, and I—”
“You got something in your stuff you’re right anxious to get rid of?” Bart Holt demanded, unexpectedly.
“Certainly not,” said Hughes.
“I guess your stuff is safe enough for the next five minutes,” said Major, grumpily. “I told ’em to stay in the mess hall, and I’m used to having what I say acted out around this dump. Come on in here.”
So again the unlocking of the door was delayed; and once more Clay Hughes found himself standing before old Oliver Major, in the room in which he had first been questioned. Major’s big-boned frame was relaxed, as if he might be weary; but in the light of the kerosene lamp which lit the room his eyes were glowing coals. Bart Holt, gaunt and weather-scarred, stood square planted beside the table in the middle of the room; his thin mustache was grey against a face of deep-carved leather, and his deep-set eyes were faded blue gleams which seemed to have squinted into ten thousand suns. The fact that Holt had not sat down gave a sense of imminence to that meeting, as if the old range wolf smelled action—perhaps had the
makings of action already in his own hands.
“This is Hughes, is it?” said Holt.
“Yes,” said Oliver Major. Hughes waited.
Major slowly rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “That was a kind of a lucky shot for you, boy,” he said to Hughes.
“Lucky it was punk shooting,” Hughes agreed.
“Luckier than that,” Major said. “Lucky in other ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bart Holt wants to ask you a few questions,” said Major. “You’ll see what I mean when he’s done.”
Bart Holt turned his deep-set eyes upon Clay Hughes. “You own a forty-five six-gun?” he began, his voice bleak and lifeless as winter rock.
“I did own a forty-five six-gun,” Hughes challenged him. “Where it is now, you people know better than I do, I expect.”
“When you load that gun, do you load it with six shells or five?”
“I carry my hammer on an empty cylinder, same as anybody else,” Hughes said, his voice unpropitiatory.
“After a shot, do you reload that cylinder right off; or do you maybe leave it go?”
“Sometimes one way is handier, and sometimes the other,” said Hughes, “as anybody who put his mind to it ought to be able to figure out for himself.”
“Did you throw down on anything this morning or last night?” Bart Holt asked quietly.
“No.”
“Nor the day before?”
‘“My gun hasn’t been out of its bed-roll for a week.”
Bart Holt leaned forward, and for the first time his voice took on an edge. “And yet you carried an empty shell in your gun all that time, and didn’t reload until you bedded down in Crazy Mule?”
“I made no reload in Crazy Mule, and I fired no shot,” said Hughes definitely. “The six-gun wasn’t out of its leather.”
Bart Holt turned to Major with a brief, conclusive gesture: “There you are,” he said, his low voice ironic.
“No, go on, Bart,” said Oliver Major.
Bart Holt hesitated, then turned to Hughes again. “Then, just how,” he said slowly, “does it come there was an empty U M C shell, forty-five caliber, in the ashes of your fire?”
There was a silence while Hughes studied old Holt. The inescapable intimation that he had lied made him suddenly wary. He knew, however, that he must not bend to this man. “I don’t so much mind,” he said, his voice low, “being taken for a liar; but it sure riles me to be taken for a fool.”
Bart Holt swayed forward to toss the empty shell of a forty-five cartridge onto the table in the light of the lamp. “There it is, just like I took it out of your ashes,” he declared, his voice rising a little. “The ash dust still sticks to its grease. You claim you never chucked it there?”
Hughes also leaned forward as he answered. “I give the flat lie,” he said, “to the man who says he found the cartridge there at all.”
Both Oliver Major and Holt stirred. “No, you’re wrong, Hughes,” said old Major. “I’ve known Bart near all my life, and I know that he’d no more back a lie than he’d twist a brand.” He paused. “It ain’t hardly necessary to put in, seeing that it’s Bart, that I seen him sift that cartridge out myself; but I so done.”
Hughes stared. “I’ll take back that last,” he decided. “In place of it I’ll say this: if that cartridge was in the ashes of my fire, someone else put it there.”
Bart Holt’s voice turned abrupt and gruff, as if he was eager to be done with words. “I don’t claim to be no long tracker,” he said, “but I guess I can read plain sign. I’d say by the ground it was a month, anyway, since any man come into Crazy Mule from the Gunsight side except you, as you say, last night. And only one man came into that part of Crazy Mule from up above—and that man was Hugo Donnan. You and Sheriff Donnan were the only ones there last night—and the only ones since!”
“You sure you want to lay that down flat?” said Hughes.
“It’s one of them things that can’t be got around,” said Bart Holt. “No half-way tracker could have read that canyon any other way, not in a hundred years!”
Hughes considered. When he spoke again it was directly to Holt. “Then,” he said, “if you back-trailed Donnan to where he was shot you know that I wasn’t there.”
“No,” said Holt, “but you went up on the rim rock! Hugo Donnan was shot from the rock of the rim!”
“Wait a minute,—pull in, Bart!” old Major intervened. Evidently he had not foreseen the potential turbulence of Clay Hughes, who, in his own resentment, had stirred Bart Holt to an active and virulent antagonism.
“If you mean to—” began Hughes hotly.
“I can read plain sign as good as any man,” said Holt angrily; “and when I’ve read it I don’t want to see my word bucked, nor my horse sense neither!”
That he had climbed the long flank of naked rock which these men called the rim, Hughes could not deny. A blind instinct had made him do that; an instinct perhaps inherited from men before him, who had penetrated these far places in a day when the man who hunted beaver and the man who searched for gold forever had to think about keeping his scalp on, if he wasn’t going to be rubbed out. Now, in a tamer west, that lonely look-around ritual had become as meaningless as the revolving of a dog in lying down—but remained equally automatic. Hughes had gone through it a thousand times without ever questioning why he did so, or thinking about it at all. But now it seemed to him that he had been drawn up onto that rim by an impelling fate. He knew that he probably might have followed the rock a long way, if he had been careful, without leaving any visible trail.
“I don’t dodge that, Holt,” he said slowly. “I was up on the rim all right.”
“And there you are,” said Holt again, turning to Major.
“There we was an hour ago, Bart,” Major said. “But we’re no place now. You see that, don’t you?”
“I don’t see nothing of the sort,” Bart answered harshly.
“This morning,” said Major, “Hughes stood where he’s standing now, and stood pat when we asked him what Hugo Donnan spoke before he died. I’ve told you that. And I’ve told you I judged he was making a fool play. But now I’m ready to back down on that. Bart, I swear, we’ll come to find out that half the Buckhorn already knows about Hughes holding out the word that’s going to hang a man. It’s a game, gutty play this boy’s making: and it’s already drawn fire tonight. It’s only by the grace o’ God he stands there alive right now. Only one man could have wanted to down Hughes out of the dark—and that’s the man who wants to keep Hughes from telling what he heard Donnan say before he died. Find that man, and you’ll be right close to finding the man that downed Hugo Donnan.”
“You can’t get around the shell in the ashes, Ol’ver,” Bart Holt insisted, stubbornly.
“Hughes,” said Major, “don’t you reckon you might have chucked that shell in there and forgot about it?”
“No,” said Hughes.
Major banged a fist upon the desk beside him. “There you are, Bart. No man would pass up his chance for an out unless he was telling the truth.”
“I don’t know nothing about that,” said Holt. “Donnan had friends that were mighty bitter against us here, as well you know. How do you know it wasn’t one of them that took a shot at Hughes, knowing that he was the man who put down Donnan.”
“For that matter—” Major began.
“For that matter,” said Holt, “I’m not a-feared to say that I was never no friend of Donnan’s, and more power to the man that downed him. But I don’t figure to have it throwed in my face that I’m a liar and a fool. By God, I know what I’m talking about, and I aim to prove I do!”
“Nobody would make a point of coming in here and taking a chance of a night shot with all hands in except for some reason a lot more pressing than evening up a killing,” said Major.
“Maybe that’s hard to swallow,” Holt agreed, “but if you’re going to take his story you’re going to have to believe that s
omebody stood on the rim and threw that empty shell a hundred and fifty yards through the trees and it lit in the ashes of his fire.”
“Until we know more about it,” said Major, “we’ll have to take our choice between the two impossibilities.”
“Well, I’ve made mine,” said Bart Holt.
“And I mine,” said Major, “but it’s a different one from yours.”
As Major met Clay’s eyes, Hughes thought that for the present, at least, he could count on the old man of the Lazy M to back his play. Yet, the inexplicable appearance of the cartridge in his camp fire gave him a new sense of hazard, as if he no longer could be sure that the impossible would not rise against him. And the stubborn and virulent Bart Holt was a man whom Clay Hughes would far rather have had on his side. It was too late for that; it had already been too late when Bart Holt, sifting the ashes of the Crazy Mule fire, had made up his mind.
“Bart,” said old Major, “I’m going to call the hands in here. I’ve got a couple of things I want to say to them all. And I want you to hold your cards close to your belly, Bart. Until I get new light, this boy stands on a par with anybody else around here, or maybe a half notch higher. I kind of like the way he stands up and spits in a man’s eye… Go sing out for the hands.”
“One way or the other,” said Holt, moving slowly towards the door, “the harm’s done now. We’re against a finish fight this time, Ol’ver. The time for turning back’s past.”
Old Oliver Major answered him with a slow, hard grin. “I thought the fight was gone out of me. I thought I was too old and tired to care about standing off Adobe Wells any more. But today when I stood on the rim, and looked down at the Buck-horn spread out below—something always kind of happens to me when I stand on the rim. And there’s a fight in the Lazy M yet! I tell you, Bart, I may be broken down and old, but by the Almighty, I’m still boss of the Buckhorn water! I’ve taught ’em that twice before. This time, so help me God, I aim to teach ’em so they’ll never forget!”
