by Noel Loomis
“But, Dad,” Sally Major insisted, “he didn’t do it.”
The old man tossed her a glance. “You always took his part, Sally, in the face of everything.”
Sally said hotly, “That isn’t true, Dad, and you know it; but if Dick says—”
“I’m not asking him what he says. I suppose that’s the last thing I want to know.”
“If you won’t even believe what we say any more,” Sally rushed ahead, “then at least use your own reason! The only gun Dick ever carries is that thirty-eight—” she pointed to the star-marked black butt at Clay’s belt—“and the empty shell that was found in the ashes up at Crazy Mule was a forty-five.”
“How do you know that?” Major demanded instantly.
“You could hear Bart Holt shouting his story from any place in the house,” Sally answered. “He sounded like he was rounding stock.”
“We don’t even know that that shell was connected with the killing, yet,” said Major.
“It’s a doggone funny thing, just the same,” Sally insisted. “But if you aren’t going to believe what Dick says—”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe him. He’s never lied yet, so far as I know. Well, I’ve noticed that the plain truth can generally do more damned clumsy damage than anybody’s cooked-up lies; I suppose that’s why he’s always stuck to it.”
“Do you aim to believe me or not?” Dick demanded.
“Oh, I believe you all right.”
“Then,” said Dick Major, “I tell you I never killed Hugo Donnan. I heard he was somewhere up on the rim, but I couldn’t even find him.”
Old Major sat up, his eyes opening. “You mean to tell me that after you’ve let everybody hear you threaten to kill Donnan, you set out to get him, and went where he was—and failed?”
“Yes,” said Dick.
A strange spasm of laughter contorted old man Major’s face. He bowed his head, his shoulders shaking. “This is good,” he gasped, half strangled by his extraordinary laughter. “This takes the cake! You do all the damage you can possibly do, and raise hell and high water by just letting your purpose be known; and then you go out and turn in just one more high grade, hundred percent failure!”
He raised his head and the laughter disappeared from his face like a snatched mask. “You might just as well have killed him as to have stacked the cards against us like you have. I was hoping you’d been someplace else, any place else but on the rim, so that you’d have an alibi. But as it is—” He made a gesture of futility.
“I—” began Dick.
“Why did you come sneaking in here without letting me know you were back?”
“I didn’t come sneaking in here,” Dick answered hotly.
“I talked him into staying out of your way for an hour, till you cooled off, was all,” said Sally. “Enough things have gone wrong here already because you two always blow up at each other.”
“What were you doing in the old gun room where we had Hughes locked up?” Major pressed his son relentlessly.
“Now just a minute,” Hughes put in sharply; but Sally signaled him to be silent, and he obeyed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dick answered. “I haven’t been in any locked-up gun room, with this man nor anybody else.”
“Then who was in it?” Major insisted.
“I tell you I don’t know anything about it. I never set eyes on this man before tonight, in this room.”
“What do you say to that, Hughes?” Major demanded.
Hughes had been listening for something that would tell him why Sally had first urged him to leave the ranch, and then within an hour or two had changed her mind; and how it was that she had disappeared from the gun room. Now, however, he was sorry that the question of the gun room had come up.
“He’s answered,” said Clay flatly. “I wouldn’t go against what he says, even if I knew different, which I don’t.”
“I didn’t ask you to go against what he says. I’m putting it to you straight: who was in that room? If you mean to—”
He checked. The door had opened softly, and Mona Major had stepped into the room. She started as she saw Hughes; and immediately turned to withdraw again.
“Wait a minute, Mona! Come here,” Oliver Major ordered; and once more Hughes was struck with the inept harshness of manner which the old man used toward his children. Perhaps he loved them so deeply that he tried to regulate every detail of their lives as he did his own, and unconsciously fell victim to a bitter resentment that they each insisted upon being as distinctly individual as himself. Certainly he took angry liberties with their pride which no cow hand would have stood for.
Mona hesitated, then closed the door and came forward listlessly. Her eyelids were inflamed, but the pale beauty of her face was apparent still; and Hughes noticed again the lazy grace of her walk.
“I hope you’re satisfied,” the old man told her brutally. “Dick’s got no alibi.”
“If you aim to jump her in front of this stranger,—” Dick Major began, the red color coming into the bronze of his face again.
“If you want me to get out, say so,” Hughes said.
“Stay here,” Major tossed at him. “This here is Clay Hughes,” Major told Mona. “He’s got hooked into this along with the rest of us through no fault of his own. You may as well know who he is, because it may be he’ll turn out the only living man that can pull the Lazy M out of its box.”
“Well, I know who he is.”
“I’m generally the last one to find out anything around here,” Major commented. “I suppose you know that your brother did not kill Donnan.”
Mona’s voice was very low and lifeless as she answered: “He meant to; it’s the same thing.”
“It’s very far from the same thing. It pitches us into the same kind of trouble exactly; but maybe since somebody else done it, we can turn the tables by locating the hombre that did do it.”
Mona’s eyes tightened, and a note of interest came into her voice for the first time. “You think you can do that?”
“By God,” said Major, his voice rising again, “we’ve got to! But first we’ve got to find out a little something about Donnan; and you, God help you, are the only one of us who had anything to do with him!”
“Now you be careful what you say,” his son flamed at him. “What’s past is past, and you’ve got no right to air it in front of a stranger. I tell you, I won’t—”
“What difference does it make?” said Mona in her lifeless voice. “I would have gone to the ends of the earth for Hugo Donnan—or with him. And I would have, too, if you hadn’t stopped it. It doesn’t make any difference who knows that now; for all I care the world can know it.”
So that, thought Hughes, was the reason that Dick Major went gunning for Hugo Donnan.… It seemed to him suddenly, as if the lives of these people lay open before him in brutal cross-sections. Especially it seemed as if the emotions of this girl had been laid bare before him in an exposure more stark and more unkind than if her clothing had been stripped from her. He stirred restively; and Sally Major turned her clear grey eyes upon him in a look of apology, understanding, and companionship in difficulty. It made him grateful to her, as if Sally and himself were the only ones there who remained clear-headed and realistic in the welter of blind loves and hates which had brought war back to the Buckhorn.
“Who would have been out gunning for Donnan except your brother?” Major demanded.
Mona shrugged faintly. “Anybody. I don’t think he had a friend in the world except me. All the Earl Shaw people had turned against him because they thought he’d come over to our side, because—because of me.”
“But who in particular?”
“I don’t know.”
“I suppose you realize,” said Major, “that you’re giving us no help at all?”
“I don’t see that it matters,” said Mona.
“You don’t see that it matters!” Oliver Major exploded. “Good lord, girl, do
you realize that your brother may never come out of this alive?”
“They can’t convict him,” said Mona, listlessly.
“Convict him? I doubt if they ever try. Once in the hands of an Earl Shaw posse, do you suppose he’ll ever live to see the jail?”
“These aren’t the old gun fighting days, Dad,” said Mona without interest. “There’s the law…”
“The law,” repeated Major, staring at her with an ironic hopelessness. “The law!” He seemed despairing of words with which to tell these youngsters that the machinery of the law itself, when owned and subverted to private ends, could become a weapon more ruthless than the six-gun had ever been; and so, in the end, clamp down so relentlessly upon a brand as to bring the six-gun back.
“I don’t doubt he’ll get out of it,” said Mona.
“I mean that he shall,” said Major, “but where do you think the Buckhorn water will be when we’re done?”
“The Buckhorn water—?”
“Who do you think has been standing off Earl Shaw’s Silverado project, that’ll leave the Buckhorn dry as a last year’s horned toad? What stands in the way of it but me, and me alone?” He crashed a fist upon the desk. “Once I’m discredited, once I’m shown as a renegade old gun fighter bucking the law, who’s going to block the water steal then? What stand will I be in to buck the politics of a state when Earl Shaw gets his own sheriff in again, and his posse is swarming up the valley trail to rope in Dick, and Clay Hughes, and who knows how many of us more, on a charge of being mixed up in shooting a man from behind? What becomes of the Buckhorn water then? This is the time that Earl Shaw’s been waiting for all his life—and my own flesh and blood has played me into his hands!”
Even the arrogant Dick Major seemed shaken to uncertainty by the old man’s fury; but he spoke up briskly, “If you mean to quit without a fight—”
“Quit, hell!” said Major. “Bell that telephone! Get me the telegraph operator at Adobe Wells. They’ll find there’s a buck in the old longhorn yet!”
Dick Major stepped to the wall phone and twirled the handle.
“Sally, go to the storeroom and get Clay Hughes’ gun belt for him. What’s the matter, Dick?”
“There’s no connection. The line’s busted again some place.”
“I expected that. It wasn’t cattle that busted it this time, you can bet your bottom cent. Go get out the—”
He was interrupted by the squeal of brakes, as a car slid to a stop close outside. Major flung open the shutter. “Who’s that?” he hailed.
“Jim Crawford,” came the answer from the dark.
Old Major snapped his fingers with a pop like an exploding firecracker. “That does it! I was beginning to think they got him. Dick, rout out Bob Macumber and Bart Holt. Tell ’em gun belts and six-guns—no rifles this time. Hughes, Sally’s gone to get you your gun—give Dick back his own. The rest of the boys are to stay in their bunks, Dick. Hump!”
Jim Crawford came clumping into the room, clean-shaved and competent looking, but with an active worry in his green-grey eyes.
“Jim,” Major told him without preface, “we’re going back with you to Adobe Wells. Is Earl Shaw in town?”
“Yeah, I’m sure he is, Mr. Major. I—”
“Then, if he’s still to be found, I mean to have him in jail by sun-up, and his brother with him, and Dutch Pete too, if we can lay hands on him!”
“On what charge?” said Jim Crawford.
“Conspiracy to murder.”
“You got any proof?” said Jim Crawford, uncertainly.
“Not a nickel’s worth,” said Major.
“Then how can we—” began Crawford.
“You were first deputy, weren’t you? That leaves you acting sheriff now, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“We’ll try to grill something out of some of them or their gang, and little enough we’ll get; but if we can bluff Shaw’s weak-kneed board of supervisors into leaving you in office for a few days—even a few hours—that’ll be something.”
An anticipatory gleam came into Jim Crawford’s eye. “I don’t think,” he said slowly, “that those fellers are going to leave us put ’em in the jail. Not if they see any kind of a break at all, Mr. Major. There’s going to be gun talk before morning, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“We’ll soon know; and boy, I’m praying to God you’re right!” The old man was strapping on his gun as he went striding out.
“Is Hughes going?” Sally called after him.
He grinned down at her as he took his gun belt from her hands. “Don’t you think I’m good for anything at all, child?”
Chapter Seven
The surprising night chill of the desert freshened them as they stepped outside. Dick Major had not yet brought around the car his father had sent him for. Oliver Major went striding off around the corner of the house, mumbling something about “infernal delays,” and Crawford followed him. Hughes loitered, buckling his gun belt; and in a moment or two Sally Major joined him at the door. When he had belted on the weapon she walked with him a few paces into the cool light of the stars.
The moon had set; but as Sally turned her face to the night sky the light of the near dry country stars gave it a dim and lovely radiance. So still she stood for a moment that Hughes, watching her with his hat in his hands, thought that she had turned her face to the skies in prayer. When she spoke, however, her voice was prosaic and practical.
“Look here. Do you realize that you’re the only one in this posse that seems to have his right sense left to him?”
“I don’t get that, exactly,” he drawled after a moment.
She made a gesture of impatience. “Dad is tied up, body and soul, with his dream of the Buckhorn water. It’s bigger than he is, bigger than anything else in his life. If he’s put to the wall, there’ll be no chance too desperate for him to try.”
“Yes, I see that all right.”
“Dick—he’s just a wild, crazy kid. He has all the courage in the world; but you never can tell which way he’ll jump. Bart Holt sometimes gets pig-headed notions of his own, but mainly he’s just a shadow of Dad. Jim Crawford will stand by Dad, but he’ll never stop to think for himself. Bob Macumber—but I guess you know Bob better than I.”
“Bob will play a game, steady hand,” said Clay. “I don’t know as I’d look to him to put in many new ideas of his own.”
“But you,” Sally went on, her words coming quickly now, “you’re different. You’ve just come here. You’re dragged into this thing almost accidentally, and with nothing in the world at stake. You can see things clearer than these others, and judge them for yourself.”
“I don’t know if—” Hughes began to protest.
“You do,” she insisted. “You do know it, and you must make the most of it. I have no right to say it, but it’s true: I’m counting on you for that.”
“You’re counting on me for—?”
“You’re one of the hot-head posse that’s going to jump down onto Adobe Wells from the outside, and try to make a roundup of some of the hardest men to handle in the country—men who hate us all from a long way back. There won’t be a single lick of reason nor common sense in the whole affair, and it’ll turn into a shoot-out at a second’s notice. The only hope that both sides won’t stampede into something crazy and terrible is that you put a cool head into it.”
“It’s a big order,” said Hughes.
“Sometimes a word, an interruption, will turn aside a shootout. If a chance comes will you do whatever you can to keep the guns out of it?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Hughes told her. “I expect it won’t be much.”
“This is a dreadful thing,” said Sally, her voice sounding dim and far away. He waited, watching her in the starlight. “You have your whole life ahead of you. When I think of that—I wish you hadn’t ever come here at all.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I don’t wish anything like that.”
She turned
her face upward, and for a moment seemed to study him curiously. The starlight was insufficient to tell him what was in her eyes; but it made her face a delicate thing, like a flower, or like something half-seen, half-dreamed, in the mountain mist. She was no longer the spurred and belted cowgirl she had been that morning, but something unfamiliar, and new. Her hair—it seemed the color of starlight now—was swept back from her face, dramatizing the fine lift of her head so that, delicate as she appeared, there was about her something of the look of conquerors. He was thinking, “This is a thoroughbred, if ever there was one in the world.”
“Mostly,” she said, an uncertainty in her voice that he had not heard there before, “I think I’m glad you came.”
He suddenly felt very humble. “I want to tell you something else,” he said. “I want you to know—”
The roar of an engine swept around the corner of the house and Dick Major skidded to a half-turn stop, reckless of his tires. It was a long touring car, topless, grease-streaked, and in wretched condition as to paint, but its voice was a deep, smooth drone. Jim Crawford dropped from the running board, ran to his own car, and stepped over the door to the wheel.
Oliver Major sung out from Dick’s car, “Jump in with Crawford, Hughes! Bring Macumber. We’re taking Bart Holt.” Dick’s engine roared; there was an angry smash of gears, and earth jumped from under the driving wheels as the car careened into the road.
Hughes swung aboard Crawford’s car as it turned, and let himself be thrown into the back seat by the lurch. A light in the bunk-house door showed them Bob Macumber running toward them, still trying to manipulate the buckle of his gun belt. Macumber made a final sprint and was with them as Crawford’s car swung into the dust kicked up by Dick Major.
Looking back, Hughes caught a glimpse of Sally’s white dress; she stood where he had left her, watching them go. It occurred to him that she wasn’t going to see some of them again if things broke wrong at sunrise. Any particular danger to himself had not occurred to him until then—nothing fatal had ever happened to him before—but it seemed to him now that if the unexpected happened, he was lucky to wolf-trot into eternity with so clear a memory of Sally’s face upturned in the starlight, and her low, faintly husky voice.
