by Noel Loomis
“What was that?”
“Washog Kickaninny Two Whoop,” said Holt. “Or something like that.”
“Huh?”
“It means ‘The Valley of No-Peace.’”
Dick Major went into Sally’s room and brought out his sister’s own gun, a light thirty-thirty rifle, beautifully made. And now Hughes suddenly realized why the place had relapsed into such empty desolation. Those leather-faced men of the saddle with whom he walked—a hundred of them could tramp about upon the ringing tiles and the place would still harbor a sense of utter loneliness, a dismal void. The heart and the meaning had gone out of the Lazy M with Sally Major. Here were the halls through which she had walked so often with her quick, vitally energetic stride; here was the bench where she had sat and listened to the banjo thrum; under these cottonwoods she had stood with the night breath of the desert stirring the faintly gleaming mist of her hair about her throat.
If she returned, this house would come alive again, filled with a merry hope of the future, though the walls themselves were debris. If she did not come back, the place would be empty and lonely forever, and the Buckhorn water itself would have no meaning at all.
It was drawing on toward morning by the time their work seemed finished at last. Oliver Major turned to Clay Hughes. “From now on I’ll keep my eye on Sessions,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about him no more. You go and get Walk Ross moved. He ought to be feeling all right by now.”
Bart Holt and Dusty Rivers were in the room where Walk Ross was lying. An argument that was going on there checked as Clay Hughes pushed in, but picked up again.
“Walk,” Bart Holt was insisting, “you’re absolutely the only man from here that’s been to Adobe Wells since Tanner spilled his story. You must have dropped some word. It’s up to you to figure out who you dropped it to.”
“I never so much as—” began Walk Ross. His voice was very dry and thin.
“I tell you you must have,” declared Bart Holt. The room was very dark. Hughes could hardly make out the figures of Holt and Dusty Rivers, and the dim outline of the man on the bed.
Dusty, at the foot of the bed, stirred restlessly. “Oh, leave him alone, Bart,” he said wearily.
“The old man wants you to move to the pump house now,” Hughes told them. “You need a hand, Walk?”
The figure on the bed raised itself slowly, and for a moment sat head in hands. “I sure feel goofy,” said Walk’s voice. “Just a minute… Just a minute.”
“Here, catch hold of him on that side, Dusty,” said Bart Holt, moving forward.
Walk Ross suddenly sat bolt upright, and his voice snapped out sharply. “Wait a minute! I got it! By God, I know what it was! I got to see the old man.”
Walk Ross heaved to his feet, so that for a moment Hughes saw him outlined, a black swaying figure, against the dim starlight of the window beyond. Then the silhouetted figure disappeared as if a trap door had opened under it, as Walk Ross lost his balance and fell forward to hands and knees. Springing forward to assist him, Hughes found that Ross was stripped to the waist; his skin was so hot that it almost burned Clay’s hands. They put him on the bed again, where he sat braced unsteadily on his good arm.
“Good God, I’ve sure been a fool.” His voice came dimly through the dark. Then more sharply, as he tried to rise again, “Quick, I got to see the old man! I tell you, I see through it all!”
“Set easy,” said Bart Holt, holding him down.
“Maybe he’s gone delirious on us,” suggested Rivers.
“Delirious, hell!” Ross declared. “Let me go! I got to—”
“I’ll get the old man,” decided Bart Holt abruptly. “Here, keep him where he is, Dusty.”
“I got him.”
Bart Holt swung out of the room. They could hear the pound of his feet as he ran stiffly down the tiled hall.
“What is it? What is it, Ross?” Dusty was demanding.
“It’s all my fault. It’s my own damn fault!” Walk’s tormented voice sounded very loud in the dark. “If I had any sense. Grasshopper would be alive right now!”
“Walk, what is it?”
“I—”
At the window the black outline of the casement seemed to bulge and close slightly, as if by a trick of the eye.
From the shadow at the window’s edge burst a red flash, and the smashing concussion of a shot, unexpected as a dynamite blast within the confines of that narrow room, almost jumped Hughes out of his boots. Walk Ross jerked convulsively, and fell sideways, face down upon the bed.
Dusty Rivers, jerking out his gun, fired twice through the window into the empty starlight. Hughes, however, checked the streak of his hand to his gun. He caught up a chair as he sprang to the window, and with it smashed out the wooden bars. Dusty Rivers, whimpering curses, launched past him toward the opening he had made.
Hughes caught at Dusty’s sleeve. “Wait! Not yet!”
His fingers slipped their grip as Dusty sprang to the four-foot window ledge and drove through the shattered bars. Once more a gun spoke, this time beyond the massive walls. Dusty Rivers crumpled in the act of leaping to the ground, and, pitching forward heavily, was lost to view.
Clay Hughes set a foot on the window ledge and counted five. Then, and not before, he sprang outward to the ground, across the body of Dusty Rivers. Once more a gun cracked, the bullet droning over his head. A black hulk was turning the corner of the house, away from him, to the frantic hoof-drum of a viciously spurred animal. Hughes fired once at the vanishing shape; his bullet clipped the corner of the adobe, and he heard the brief explosive growl of the ricochet as it hurled itself off into space. Running to the corner of the house, he fired twice more, by sound, as the running animal disappeared into the night beyond the cottonwoods. He heard Gustafson’s gun speak twice, slowly, from the roof as he holstered his gun, and he ran back to Dusty Rivers.
Dusty spoke in hoarse gasps as Hughes bent over him. “Clay—quick! Find out what Walk knows! If he cashes in—”
Hughes obeyed. He went in through the broken window bars again, and bent over the figure on the bed.
“Walk; can you hear me, Walk?”
Walk’s chest labored under Clay’s hands but he did not speak.
Now lantern lights showed outside the window, as Bart Holt and Oliver Major came up from the pump house on the run. Behind them, coming more slowly, Hughes could hear the voice of Dick Major, to whom Stephen Sessions appeared to have been turned over, urging Sessions to “shake a leg, before I take a crack at you!”
“It’s Dusty!” came Major’s voice. “Dusty, have they got you?” Rivers did not answer.
“Where’s that damn Hughes?” snarled Bart Holt. “I’ve known all the time that he—”
“Here I am,” Hughes sung out to them from within. “Somebody got Walk Ross; and he got Dusty as we started out through the window after him. Somebody get a light in here!”
There was a sound of ripping wood as Oliver Major tore a shutter down. “Get Dusty onto this, and carry him down to the pump house. Here you, Steve Sessions, play a hand here.” Major climbed stiffly through the window and his lantern filled the room with light.
The first shot, they found, had apparently gone high, and the pull of the trigger had thrown it a little to the right, saving Walk’s life. As it was, he had no worse than a smashed shoulder, but the wound was bleeding fast. Oliver Major snatched up a pillow and tore open a seam with his teeth. He pulled out of it a huge handful of feathers, and with them packed the wound of the unconscious man.
“They got Dusty through the ribs,” he said. “It looks like it might turn out awful bad. Take this pillow and run like hell to the pump house with it. There’s nothing like feathers for a lung wound. Take ’em and run like hell!”
When Bart Holt had seized upon this extraordinary remedy for chest wounds, Clay Hughes went back to the house to lend a hand with Walk Ross. As he joined Major again, the broad shoulders and big shaggy head of Chris Gustafson were
thrust in through the broken bars of the window.
“Somebody’s got Walk Ross and Dusty Rivers,” Major told him shortly. “Looks like we can patch ’em up—though Dusty’s hit awfully bad. Now get back up on that roof and stay there!”
“I guess I seen the feller that shot ’em git out of here,” said Gustafson slowly, in his deliberate heavy way. “At least, I seen a man on a horse go tearing out of here right after the shot, and somebody was shooting at him when he went.”
“And you never threw down on him? Why, you big—”
“Yeah, I took a wham at him,” Gustafson said. “I got his animal as he went past the far corral. The light was awful bad; but I managed to get a fair plain shot, and I killed his horse.”
“Then,” said Hughes, “we can mount up and catch him yet.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Gustafson. “The feller got up and ducked around a shed. I seen him once more, running for the Adobe Wells road, or in that general direction, kind of; and I took two more shots, but didn’t get him. And then I lost sight of him in the dark. I don’t expect we’ll ever pick him up again now, Mr. Major. It’s awful easy for a man on foot to dodge and lose hisself in a gully or somethin’, in the dark.”
“We’ll have a try at it anyway,” said Major. “Now you better get up on the roof again, Chris.”
“What I come down to say,” said Gustafson, “was that I can see lights on the Adobe Wells road.”
Major roared, “Why didn’t you say so before? How close on us are they?”
“They’re hardly more than in sight. I doubt if they’re any closer than twenty-five miles, where the road makes that bend this way. There’s an awful mess of ’em, too; though it’s hard to say how many, the way the lights double in the ground mirage.”
“Well,” said Oliver Major slowly, “that gives us between half an hour and an hour, anyway. I reckon we won’t take time to look for the gun-throwing hombre, though. One more or less isn’t going to make much difference, I guess. I sure would have liked to know who he was, though.”
“Then which of us is missing?” Hughes suggested.
Major considered a moment. “Ain’t all the boys here?” he said.
“Where,” said Hughes, “is Art French?”
Chapter Seventeen
If there were any doubts as to the identity of the man who had fired upon Walk Ross and Dusty Rivers, it fell away when Chris Gustafson had walked out to examine the horse he had shot out from under the fugitive.
“You’re right sure that’s Art French’s saddle?” Major questioned him.
“I’ve ridden alongside that saddle too many times, Mr. Major, in the four, five months he’s been with us, to make any mistake about it now.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” Oliver Major admitted. “I can hardly believe it now. He was a wild, crazy rider, Art was; and not everybody liked him, I know, but I never thought—It was his own horse, I suppose?”
“No, Mr. Major,” said Gustafson, “that was a funny thing. It wasn’t any horse he was startin’ off on at all. It was a mule.”
“A mule?” repeated Hughes.
“It was the mule we always called Henry Milligan.”
“A mule named Henry Milligan,” marveled Hughes. “What are you giving us here?”
“That’s what we always called her,” Major corroborated. “She was the smartest mule in the Buckhorn. We used to use her back in the mountains when the wild horses got pesky, and run some of our stock off. She could take short cuts like a man would be afraid to take on an ordinary horse, and fast, too. But lately I didn’t realize she was around.”
“She come wandering in yesterday morning,” said Chris Gustafson. “I seen her standing by the hay gate, like she used to do, and I hayed her off. I supposed somebody had been using her for a pack; there was a saddle gall on her, just a couple days old.”
“So it was the voice of Henry Milligan,” said Hughes, “I heard the night Hugo Donnan was killed!”
“What makes you think so?”
“Maybe you remember it was something about a mule that was worrying Grasshopper Tanner. Ask yourself why French rode off on Henry Milligan instead of taking his own horse.”
For a moment Bart Holt seemed to forget that he had never been wholly convinced of Hughes’ innocence. “By gosh,” he put in, “I think he’s on the trail of something there. A man on the Milligan mule—especially this wild-riding Art French—could get up onto the rim and down again in a hundred places that no sober man on an ordinary pony would ever think of trying!”
“Is this any time to be making a lot of crazy guesses,” demanded Dick Major, “with the Shaw posse almost on us?”
Old Oliver Major looked him over sadly. “Seems like there isn’t anything more we can do for the boys that’s hurt,” he said. “What else can we do but wait?”
“Wait, hell,” stormed Dick. His voice sounded as if it would crack with nervous strain. Obviously he was trying to be cool and hard, like his father and Bart Holt, but his stormy uncontrolled vitality was making a bad job of it. “We should go to meet ’em,” he declared. “Throw a car across the road where she crosses the Buckhorn! We could lay back and pepper hell out of ’em as they come up. Let them once get in among the adobes here—”
“No, that won’t do,” said Oliver Major wearily. “Don’t think it didn’t come into my head, boy; we could give ’em an awful raking there, right where you say. It would sure be a diminished posse that come on from the bridge. But the ‘Horace hold the bridge’ stuff is out. It’s a hard play we’re making as it is. It would put Governor Replogle where he wouldn’t dast turn and call off the dogs, if we was to ambush the posse and kill a bunch of ’em before they ever opened with a shot.”
Stephen Sessions spoke for the first time in a long time. “You still think Theron Replogle will turn?” he said, an amused weary contempt in his tone.
“By God,” said Oliver Major, a deep stubborn conviction in his voice, “I’m thinking it’ll be the end of him if he don’t! The old cattlemen of this state know plain facts when they see them yet. If Replogle keeps on with the stand he’s made, you think this state can ever hold him, once the facts of this business are known? And known they will be, you can mark me that! The newspapers didn’t amount to much, Steve, in the old days, the days of Black Plains and Tonto Basin; but they amount to something now. Within two days there’ll be headlines all over the southwest—all over the country, Steve!”
“‘Two Killed As Posse Takes Gunman,’ maybe,” said Sessions contemptuously.
“You’ll soon know,” Major told him. “It’ll be put to the test right soon.”
It had been shortly before three o’clock when Gustafson had first reported headlights upon the Adobe Wells road. At 3:18 he brought word that a fresh observation had shown that at least eight or nine cars were on the way. Though the distance made them seem to crawl, their steady approach indicated that they were making good time upon the road. One car, he said, appeared to have drawn some distance ahead of the rest.
The earth curves and the faint indiscernible roll of the valley floor still concealed the headlights from the watchers on the ground at 3:35 when Gustafson reported that the main body of the approach had lost itself to sight at Twelve Mile Corral. Either they had gathered there to wait for daylight; or else they were at that very moment approaching without lights. Ears applied to the ground could detect no purr of engines as yet, however. The lead car, proceeding with full lights, had done a peculiar thing. It had turned off the road at the Twelve Mile bridge, and was swinging out in a wide circle, through the sagebrush.
“By running the old salt pans,” said Bart Holt, “they can swing round us to the east about as far as they want. Maybe they figure to outflank us or something. Though I must say, I don’t see no idee in that.”
It was still dark as the intention of the far flanking car became plain. It had swung wide of the headquarters buildings of the Lazy M, and now its dimming tail light cou
ld be seen twisting its way northward along the horse trail to Gunsight Pass.
“He thought of that too late,” said Major. “He’s putting a bunch there to cut us off from the Gunsight, for fear we’ll sneak out the back way and get across the state line, like we sent the boys with Sally and Mona.”
“We could get out plenty other ways,” said Bart Holt.
“Naturally; but I wouldn’t doubt he’d rather take a chance of running us down after we was busted up and scattered in the rough country, than try to catch us from behind on an open trail.”
Now the cars which had stopped at Twelve Mile Corral once more proceeded with lighted lights. The distant flash of their head lamps could be seen by them all now from the ground; though it still required elevation to count them correctly: there were no less than nine.
Then, as the people of the Lazy M watched the approach of the cars from Adobe Wells, their attention was diverted by the approach of a furiously running horse. They looked at each other.
“Watch what you’re doing now,” Major cautioned, as the hard-ridden animal drew near. “Lord knows who this is; but you fellers keep your guns in their leather. If it comes there’s any shooting to be done, I guess I can take care of one horse-load of enemy, all right.”
A froth-lathered pony burst into the far reaching white light of the gasoline lantern, and was jerked up, open-mouthed, upon its haunches. The rider was Bob Macumber.
“Is she here?” he yelled at them, without concealment of the panic in his voice.
“Who?”
“Sally! Ain’t she here?”
“No, she isn’t here! Where—Have you—”
“She must be here! She’s got to be here!” insisted Macumber crazily.
Oliver Major cried out, “If you’ve lost that girl—”
Hughes, perceiving Macumber’s instant intention, sprang forward just in time. Bob whirled his pony with a savage wrench and struck in the spurs as Hughes seized the reins at the bit, and, with all his weight in the ground grip of his high heels, dragged down the pony’s head.
